Serbian conversation lessons

This is the language where speakers are everywhere and practice is nowhere, which catches out almost everyone who moves here. Serbia is full of people who speak Serbian, but the moment an accent shows in your sentence, the other person switches to English. That is not rudeness, it is the opposite: people want to make it easier for you and are pleased that they can. Families do the same. Your partner, their relatives and your colleagues answer you in English because it is quicker and because they can see you struggling, so after two years in the country you have hundreds of hours of listening and almost no hours of speaking. So this does not resolve itself the way people expect it to. The number of opportunities grows and the number of sentences you have actually said out loud stays where it was. People who have been here five years often follow the news and half the jokes at the table, and still cannot book a doctor's appointment without rehearsing it first, because that was never practised aloud. What you are buying is not corrections but something simpler: this is the one room in the country where nobody will rescue you. The tutor will not switch to English when you stall, will not finish your sentence, and will not pretend to have understood when they did not. They will wait. That is fifteen uncomfortable seconds no friend will ever leave you. For this, an in person lesson has one concrete advantage that has nothing to do with technology. The situations you are afraid of are physical: the counter at the municipal office, the market, the waiting room, the plumber who has turned up at your flat. An hour held at a cafe table is already one of those situations, because there is a waiter at that table who will speak to you, and the tutor is there to see what you did with it. Arrange at least every second session somewhere out in the world. It is worth saying who does not need this. If you have just started and are still assembling sentences out of a few words, an hour of conversation is early and expensive; you need material first. This is for people who understand and stay quiet. In the free first lesson, say straight away that you do not want anyone switching to English, not even when you get stuck. If the tutor switches anyway after five minutes, that is your answer.