My language biography I do not know what my first words were, but usually child's first word is mummy or mum. As I am an adult now and have my own children and have been watching their language development when they were babies, I can confirm that their first words were nouns for the people and thinks from their environment (e.g. terms for family members, names for toys, food, clothes and kitchen utensils). I remember very vaguely my early childhood and I cannot remember a single person who influenced my language. Interestingly, I remember an interview that was on TV when I was a teenager. It was the interview with a Croatian author whome I did not know at the time. But the ease of speech and the clarity of thoughts, as well as new ideas, attracted my attention. Many years later I started reading her books and she has become my most beloved fictional author. I like the sentences and the flow of words and ideas she produces. I like the way she writes so much that after finishing some of her books I can imediately turn the first page again and start reading the book again. I have a passion for languages. The language I know best (apart from my native language) is English and I have been trying to learn it the best I could. Although many people have told me that I speak very good English, fluently and without many mistakes, I would like to bring it to a new level. For that reason I started to learn it in new ways. Instead of learning it the way people usually learn foreign languages, I decided to try to learn it the way native speakers learn their native language. So, I started reading books for children and elementary school textbooks in order to build up my vocabulary and knowledge of terms from different fields (e.g. maths, science, art) the same way English pupils learn these terms. Do you think this is a good way of learning a language?

The famous Croatian drama The Glembays are the masterpiece of the Croatian drama. Every student in Croatia has to study this drama. When I met the text for the first time at the age of 17, I was not impressed and did not like it much. It was a boring text with lots of German words and sentences that interfered with the reading. Many years later this drama has become my most beloved drama, that I have read at least ten times since. As I was growing older, possibly due to my own maturation, I realised more and more levels of the text. The complex interrelations between the characters (conflicts among spouses, relations with lovers and ex-lovers, parent-child relations) have become more familiar as I was going through my life stages (and for example become a parent). Being a parent, I was able to see the conflict from a different perspective (as a parent, not only as a child). Also, with my medical studies and training in psychiatry, I was able to understand many suicides that appear in the drama from a different standpoint. With every new reading of the play, with me being different (due to the years passing, me having new roles – as a partner, parent, psychiatrist) I had new thoughts and emotions toward the characters of the play. Twenty years later, after reading the same text, the amoral mistress of the old Glembay, the baroness Castelli-Glembay, who had many lovers and even had an affair with her husband's son, was not as deviant when I was 40 and it was possible for me to understand her life struggle from poverty from another perspective, compared to my thoughts when I was 20. This drama was put to the stage many times with different actors during the years, but one film version was the best for me. I like the film version because of the (in my opinion) appropriate stressing of the important words in a sentence, because the actors had the tone of voice and way of pronunciation and body language that was the same to the one I imagined when I was reading the text. Therefore, no other actors can repeat the same, and I was disappointed with every new theatre performance of the play since. Finally, there is even a ballet performance of the Glembays, which I was delighted with. I expect that when I grow even older, and get retired or when I will have grandchildren, I will find new perspectives and ideas in the same drama.

Lautgebarden I have found the word Lautgebarden (with Umlaut, but I do not have it on my keyboard) in a school book. I do not understand what that word means. Can somebody help me?