Albanian is the official language of Albania and Kosovo and it is a co-official language in Macedonia. In the Balkan region there are about 6 million speakers of Albanian and about 7.5 million speakers around the world. Albanian is considered a minority language in Croatia, Italy, Serbia, Romania, Montenegro. There are older forms of Albanian spoken in Greece and Italy as well. The opening of Albania in the 1990s to broader trading and diplomatic relations with other nations has created a need for better knowledge and understanding of this beautiful and old language and culture. Albania applied to access the EU in 2009 and accession talks started in 2020.

This free course will go over the first two lessons of the textbook DISCOVERINGALBANIAN1 by Linda Mëniku and Héctor Campos, published by University of Wisconsin Press. These lessons are intended to teach you to communicate in every day situations in Albanian and each unit will introduce a different situational context. In this free sample course you will learn to introduce yourself formally and informally, you will learn how to introduce other people, you will learn the names of some countries and the name of the main language spoken there and you will learn to ask and talk about different nationalities. You will learn the verb JAM´to be´ and the verb FLAS´to speak´. You will also learn how to count from 1 to 1000.

In the full course you will learn to talk about school, work, vacations, travel, health, entertainment, movies, etc. After you´ve completed all the lessons in DISCOVERINGALBANIAN 1, you will have reached level B1 in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The full course will be equivalent to one'year study at the college level.

There is no prerequisite for this course. You just need a desire to learn this beautiful and melodious language.