Talk Time Croatian Campus Week™
Wherever you are with your Croatian, come.I will show you a way forward.
Free. No card. Everything happens on my own campus.
In 1993 I was a high school exchange student in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was far from home, living in a language that was not yet entirely mine. That year I read Willa Cather’s My Ántonia.
I cried over it. I cried and cried.
A family from Bohemia arrives on the prairie in Nebraska. They have paid a man from their own country for land, for a hole in the ground to live in, for an old stove. They have paid him too much. They do not know it yet. They have no way of knowing. But the neighbours know. They talk about it in the kitchen.
“If they’re nice people, I hate to think of them spending the winter in that cave of Krajiek’s,” said grandmother. “It’s no better than a badger hole; no proper dugout at all. And I hear he’s made them pay twenty dollars for his old cookstove that ain’t worth ten.”
The father is old. At home he was somebody. He was a weaver by trade; had been a skilled workman on tapestries and upholstery materials. His hands could make cloth fine enough for the walls of a great house. Here he cannot ask the price of a stove.
One afternoon the children are quarrelling in the grass.
I heard a mournful voice calling, “Ántonia, Ántonia!” She sprang up like a hare. “Tatinek! Tatinek!” she shouted, and we ran to meet the old man who was coming toward us. Ántonia reached him first, took his hand and kissed it.
Before I got into the wagon, he took a book out of his pocket, opened it, and showed me a page with two alphabets, one English and the other Bohemian. He placed this book in my grandmother’s hands, looked at her entreatingly, and said, with an earnestness which I shall never forget, “Te-e-ach, te-e-ach my Ántonia!”
He does not ask for himself. He knows it is too late for him. He asks for his daughter, in the only English he has, drawing out each word as though length could make up for everything he cannot say.
Years pass. Ántonia grows up. Jim tells her that one day he will go to her country, to the little town where she lived. He asks if she remembers it.
“Jim,” she said earnestly, “if I was put down there in the middle of the night, I could find my way all over that little town; and along the river to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip you. I ain’t never forgot my own country.”
That is the page I cried over most.
The feet remember. The body keeps what the tongue has lost.
What I see, again and again
I see the same things in the people who come to me. Six of them. You will know at least two.
01
Krajiek could tell them anything he chose. You have your own Krajiek: a cousin at a family lunch, a father who answers the waiter for you. They mean well. The conversation passes over your head like weather, and when it is your turn, someone translates you. You become the one who is spoken about.
02
The weaver’s hands were worth something at home. On the prairie they were worth nothing. You have built a life, a career, a family. In English you are precise, and funny, and quick. In Croatian you are reduced to the present tense and an apology. It is not the grammar that hurts. It is being smaller than you are.
03
Your grandmother said it that way. Nobody told you why. You learned endings the way you learn a song in a language you do not speak: by heart, without the meaning. They slip away as soon as you stop singing.
04
He did not have the words, so he held out a book. An adult who says “teach me” is admitting something. Most put it off. They tell themselves they will start in the spring.
05
Ántonia could find every path in the dark. You may know your Croatian like that: the smell of a kitchen, the music of a voice on the telephone, a word that comes before you can stop it, for bread, for hurry, for darling. The paths are there. Nobody has walked them with you out loud.
06
The Shimerdas had no one to ask. You learn at the kitchen table, after work, with whatever you can find. Then a month goes by. Then a year. It is very hard to keep going alone. That is not a failure of character. It is how people are.
I am a speaker of the Croatian language will be my new affirmation instead of hiding behind my usual, I understand some Croatian, but I don’t speak, that I instantly say to people when they ask me or start talking to me.Jez · United Kingdom · Campus Week 2026
The best gift you can give yourself is the gift of education.
This is where it happens
Campus Week is exactly what its name says. For five evenings I open the doors of my campus, the place where my students learn Croatian, and I walk you through it.
It does not matter where you are with your Croatian. A few words, or a whole childhood of it in the next room, or years of study that never turned into conversation. There is a way forward from where you stand, and I will show you yours.
You will not be asked to buy anything to take part. I will show you why each of the things above happens to you, and what you can do about it yourself, starting the next morning. If at the end you decide to go on alone, you will go on in the right direction. You will need two things: to keep going, and someone or something to hold you to it. If you want that someone to be me, I will tell you how on the last evening.
Learning a language is not only learning words. It changes where you stand. Today you stand at the edge of the conversation, in the doorway of your grandmother’s kitchen. I want you inside, not as a tourist who can order coffee, but as someone who belongs to the language, because part of it was always yours. That is the transformation I offer.
She came last January
It doesn’t matter your level. You will learn something, but you’ll also get an idea of what the programme involves, how it came to be built, who some of your classmates might be, as well as meeting your instructor, and it’s great because it’s almost like auditing a course, but a lot better because it’s exciting... It’s free. There’s no catch. It’s straightforward. It’s realistic.
Katarina · Windsor, Ontario
The week before the week
When you register, you are let in to the Campus Week group on my campus. In the week before we start, I post seven questions there, one a day.
They are not a test. They are the questions I ask every student before I teach them anything. Most adults have never been asked them. Answering them honestly changes what the week does for you.
The five evenings
Every evening is live, with me, for about an hour.
Monday
The first evening is about you, not about Croatian. I name the seven habits that keep adult learners going round in circles. Nobody is to blame for them. Almost everyone has them. You will recognise yourself in more than one, and that is where things begin to move.
Tuesday
You were told to memorise seven cases. I will show you that they are not arbitrary. Each one is a way the language sees the world: where you are going, where you are, what you give and to whom. When you see the picture, the ending stops being something to remember. It becomes something you understand.
Wednesday
Why the word you looked up yesterday is already gone, and why the word your grandmother said forty years ago is still there. Words live in stories and in people, not in lists. I will show you how to keep the ones you need.
Thursday
Croatian has its own music, its own length and melody. This evening is about learning to hear it, and then to make it. It is also about the fear of opening your mouth, which is almost always larger than the difficulty itself.
Friday
A language is not a list. It is a world. On the last evening we go into that world: culture, identity, and the difference between I am learning Croatian and I am a Croatian speaker. Then I tell you about the year that follows, for those who want to go on with me.
Not Facebook. My own campus.
The recordings stay on the campus until 17 January, so you can watch each evening again, or for the first time, whenever your day allows.
On the right is the Campus Week group itself. The daily questions, the recordings, the breakthroughs, and a channel where you can ask me anything. One place. Nothing to chase across the internet, and no Facebook account needed.
The Campus Week group. This is what you are let in to the day you register.
For everyone who finishes the week
Answer every question and share what moved for you after each evening, and at the end of the week I will send you my book, Short Stories in Croatian for Beginners.
Stories, because that is how words stay.
Monday 4 to Friday 8 January 2027
It is free. Recordings stay up until 17 January.
The year that follows
After Campus Week I open enrolment for two year-long programmes. The Croatian Quadrant is for those who are beginning. The Croatian Nexus is for those who have the foundations and want to go further.
I will tell you exactly what each one asks of you, so that you can choose for yourself. Whoever you are when you arrive, there is a next step for you, and on Friday I will show you which one.
They rest on the same convictions.
A language does not settle in six weeks. We meet live, twice a week, through the year, and the same faces come back, week after week.
Around the lessons there is a place to live in. It holds Croatian classics I have retold and read aloud myself, masterclasses on how adults really learn, films of me walking through Croatian towns, and recipes to cook with Croatian in your ears.
I explain why Croatian does what it does. What you understand, you keep.
Everyone starts with my pronunciation course, so that you begin to hear yourself.
Croatian was banned in my father’s house. Just as it was banned in his father’s house... I have family I’ve never met because of that silence, and in a way, this course is giving me back some of that.Katarina · Windsor, Ontario
Campus Week 2026
Everyone below came to Campus Week last January. All but one of them then spent the year with me.
My father said he had to learn English so he’d be able to connect with me while I grew up. Now I can’t wait to connect with him in his native language.Ema · Australia
It took yesterday’s session for me to realize, accept, and move past the idea, that I have to be that same person when I speak Español, or Hrvatski. The goal is to be understood and I am now okay with that. Not being a native speaker doesn’t make me any less Croatian!Anthony · Assistant Professor of Communication
There is nothing wrong with having an Australian accent while speaking Croatian. It brings our story of the culture of our own family and that is nothing to be afraid of but rather to speak more and often.Marija · Australia
I feel like the rote learning (and failing!) of grammar tables is what has contributed to my fear of it.Eve · United Kingdom
Here I truly feel part of a special community.Tanya · United States
About me
I am Tihana Klepač. I am a linguist and an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Zagreb, where I have taught since 2005. Since 2024 I have taught Croatian to adults in Australia and North America who want back the language of their families.
I write a letter from Zagreb every Saturday, to more than a thousand readers. I record a slow Croatian podcast, Ćakula Café, and I make free lessons on my YouTube channel, TALK TIME. Most of what I make, I give away. Campus Week is where I teach.
I know which silences are shame and which are only tiredness.
Before you decide
Yes. There is no card to enter and nothing to cancel. On the last evening I tell you about the year that follows. Whether you join is entirely your decision.
None. Some people come with a handful of words. Some grew up with Croatian in the next room and understand more than they can say. Some studied for years and still freeze when someone speaks to them. Wherever you are, come. I have a way forward for you.
Most people can’t, every evening. The recordings stay on the campus until 17 January, so you can watch when your day allows.
No. Everything happens on my own campus. When you register, you receive an email with your way in.
A computer, tablet or phone and an internet connection. The link to each evening is in the campus group and in your email.
No one is asked to perform. You can listen, write in the chat, or speak if you want to.
Yes. I teach in English, with Croatian woven through every evening.
About an hour each evening, and a few minutes a day to answer the questions in the group.
Of course. Last year some of the most thoughtful people in the group had married into the language, or moved to Croatia and fallen for it.
Answer every question in the group and share what moved for you after each evening. At the end of the week I send it to you.
Five free evenings, 4 to 8 January 2027