You know the moment. Someone at the table in Split or Sydney turns to you and asks what you think, really think, about something that matters, and the sentence is there in your head, whole and clear, and then it reaches your mouth in pieces.
You have the cases. You have read the texts. You understand nearly everything.
What you have never had is enough hours in a room with people who will not slow down for you, talking about something worth disagreeing over.
That is the whole of Colloquium. Not a ladder. A table.
Before anything else
It is
One subject a week, prepared properly, and two live hours of talking about it in Croatian with people at your level. Every subject is real. A market, a song, a wall of stones, a word that has no English twin. I find them in Croatia, I read everything I can about them, and I bring them to you.
When you make a mistake, I tell you quickly why it was a mistake, and we carry on talking. That is the correction you get here, and in my experience it is the one that stays.
It is not
A grammar course. There is no lesson, no recap of the aspect system, no slide with the locative on it. What there is, every week, is a grammar reference written from that week's own text, sentence by sentence. In the first week a woman at the market tells her regular customer Peršin vam ne naplaćujem, I won't charge you for the parsley, and the reference stops to look at that small word vam. Take it out and the sentence is still correct. It is just cold. That is the kind of grammar you will find there, the kind that explains why Croatian sounds the way it does. You read it when you want to. Nobody sits you down for it.
It is not for beginners, and it does not replace the Quadrant™ or the Nexus™.
The first week
At half past six in the morning, before the city has properly woken, the red umbrellas go up over Dolac. They are the umbrellas of the Šestine folk costume, red because the women who brought vegetables down from the villages under Medvednica carried them, and at the top of the steps one of those women still stands, in bronze, a basket on her head. Zagreb named her Barica. Nobody voted on it.
That is where Colloquium begins.
Week by week, the same shape
Before Tuesday
Your materials are waiting in your group on the platform. An essay on the market and the trust it runs on, where a geographer buys his vegetables from the same stall his grandmother did and nobody ever writes any of it down. A story in Croatian at B2, Ivan ide na plac, six scenes of a man doing his Saturday shopping, at the kumica's stall, at the cheese women, at the butcher, at the fish hall where they tell him straight that the squid is frozen and he should wait until Tuesday. A rječnik sorted the way you will actually need it, the market, its people, its weights and measures, the verbs, and the phrases you will hear there and never find in a textbook. A bank of sentences arranged by what you are trying to do, greet, order, ask, pay. And the grammar reference, written from Ivan's own sentences.
Tuesday
We take the subject apart, in Croatian, for sixty minutes. What you read, what surprised you, what you would have said to Štefica if you had been Ivan. You talk a great deal more than I do.
Thursday
We go back in, further this time. The argument you lost on Tuesday. The joke you understood too late. The thing you could not say two days ago and have been turning over since.
All week
The recordings stay in your group until the next subject opens, so an evening you could not make is never an evening lost.
A new subject every week
There is no syllabus that ends and starts again from the top. Every week brings a new subject, and the list does not close. Eleven are already written in full, and I am writing more all the time.
One week we are in a courtyard in Kaštel Kambelovac on a July night, where four men lean against a stone wall and sing for nobody, and the Dalmatians will tell you they can hear the moment a voice stops performing and starts meaning it. Pjeva mu duša, they say. His soul is singing.
Another week we are on the Stari Grad Plain on Hvar, walking between dry stone walls the Greek settlers laid out in the fourth century before Christ, still standing, still marking the same fields, still full of vines.
Another week it is Rijeka in February, where the whole city puts a straw man called Pust on trial for everything that went wrong that year, gives him a judge and a lawyer and a weeping widow, finds him guilty, and burns him on Ash Wednesday.
Another, it is the konoba, the cellar under the family house, which is so much older than the restaurants that borrowed its name that the Croatian word for waiter, konobar, means simply the man who went down to fetch the wine.
Stay a month or stay for years. Croatia is a country made of stories, and I have never once reached the bottom of the well.Tihana Klepač
Two evenings a week
Both sessions are timed for Europe and the Americas. At 19:00 in Zagreb it is early afternoon in New York and Toronto, mid-morning in California.
Come to both if you can. It is the same subject on both evenings, so missing one never leaves you behind the room.
There is no Australia group. If four or more people from Australia or New Zealand join, I will open one, at a Zagreb morning hour that falls in your evening. Until then, Tuesday and Thursday evening in Zagreb are the hours on offer.
Between the evenings, you are in my salon
In Paris, at 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein kept a salon, and the people who sat in her chairs were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Matisse.
Nobody was teaching anybody.
They came to talk about the work and to be argued with. A century earlier Madame de Staël kept one so alive that Napoleon sent her into exile, because a room where people think together is harder to rule than a room where they are told what to think.
Colloquium is a salon.
The two live evenings are the conversation, and the Salon is the house around it, the rooms you wander through between Thursday and the next Tuesday, so that you always come back to the table with something to say. Four rooms.
Masterclasses on learning a language as an adult, recorded for you to watch when you need them. One of them is about the long middle at B1 and B2, the stretch where it feels as though nothing is happening, and after it you will understand why you are not stuck at all. You are exactly where every fluent speaker once stood.
Twenty films of Croatian places and Croatian lives, from the Frankopans to Dragojla Jarnević, from the lace of Lepoglava to the Klis Fortress and the royal town of Nin. People you once met as a line in a schoolbook turn into people you could argue about over dinner.
The Croatian films that Croatians actually quote. Tanhofer's H-8, built around a real crash on the motorway and still one of the finest things Croatian cinema has made. Golik's Tko pjeva zlo ne misli, Zagreb in the 1930s, which every Croatian of a certain age can recite at the table. Brešan's Predstava Hamleta u Mrduši Donjoj, Breza, Čaruga, Lisice, thirty-five films in all, each with my introduction, so you watch knowing what everyone else in the room already knows.
The books Croatia has been reading and fighting about, retold and simplified for you at B2. Kristian Novak's Črna mati zemla, Ivana Šojat's Unterstadt, Tena Štivičić's Tri zime, Maša Kolanović's Sloboština Barbie, Tribuson, Pavličić, Matanović, and older voices too, Matoš, Kamov, Krleža. Twenty-three books, and every one of them was out of your reach until now.
On the side table
For the minutes in between, a practice programme for chunks with its own PDF. Fluency is mostly a store of ready-made pieces you reach for without building them, and a piece you meet only once is gone by the end of the week. Recall & Repeat gives you the pieces and tells you when to bring each one back.
The Salon is open to you for as long as you are enrolled. Your months in Colloquium are your months in the Salon.
Honestly
You know the grammar. All of it. You decline your nouns and adjectives, you conjugate in every tense, you have your adverbs and your numbers, you build a dependent clause without stopping to think. Maybe it came from the Quadrant™ and the Nexus™, maybe from somewhere else, maybe from a family table where Croatian was spoken every day and was never once asked to explain itself to strangers.
What you need now is hours.
Hours of talking, of new words that arrive because you needed them in the middle of an argument, and of someone listening closely enough to tell you not only whether your sentence was correct, but whether it was Croatian. Because there is a way of speaking Croatian that is perfectly grammatical and still sounds like English wearing a borrowed coat, and I will tell you every time I hear it.
If the grammar is still the thing holding you back, this room will make you unhappy, and I would rather you did not come yet. The Quadrant™ and the Nexus™ are where that work is done. The table will be here when you are ready.
The founding rate
€69a month
instead of €89
For everyone who puts their name down before Colloquium opens. That rate stays yours for as long as you stay.
Founding members are taken first
Putting your name down holds the founding rate for you, and that is all it does. No payment, no commitment. You will go on receiving the Saturday Letter, as you do now, and one more note from me when the doors open.
The groups are small on purpose. Places are limited, and founding members are taken first.