First post. One word.

 
Day 9. I did one month here, in Prague. Of course it is too soon to talk about what my eyes have been seeing or what I have been thinking about the Czech people or Prague itself. Until now, I swear, I have nothing to complain. And fortunately I can say that I have good friends here. This time Prague is its people and language for me, I can still see the Castle, walk by the old Centre, but now Prague is the Univerzita Karlova with its majesty on the country. But this post is not about myself, it is about my impression from here. And the first thing that took my impression was a word, yes, a word. It was taught by Ivan Klíma in one of his books, it drew my attention how he could explain a word connecting it with the Czech mentality, it meant that I had to change my mind to learn the Czech language - at least. He showed to me a new system, a new mentality. I have been thinking how to learn a new language, living at its natural environment, can be to learn a new way to think. How your mind can change at end. Not too much for a Portuguese speaker (more close to Czech language) than an English one maybe.
 
The word is trpělivost, ‘patience’. This word comes from the verb trpět, ‘to suffer’. In my language or in the English language “patience” and “peace” come hand in hand, it is like to say you cannot have one without the other. But in Czech, it changes. Change the word, and maybe the feeling. Because it becomes more deep. If you have to suffer to get patience, it means that this self-control (another expression for patience) is hard and you have to suffer to get it. And if you think patience like being a virtue, the word (in Czech) can show you exactly what you have to pass over to get it. You can get this virtue suffering a little bit. For many people there are elements of peace, of stillness in patience, but to Czechs it has a element of suffering in it, and this changes the way we understand patience - and not only the word. We can think a word being a symbol that permits us to figure out what it symbolizes, the “thing” always comes first, so you can take trpělivost showing exactly from where or how you get patience. The Czechs have always thought the patience coming from a suffering and they created one word to be a reflection of what they felt before. And it is only one word, imagine the language as a whole, with its system. Probably you Czechs understand this word automatically, in a different way as I have understood it, but every word has its history and its meaning always exist before the word be created. Jsem trpělivý! A ty? (Hned se vrátím…)