When I first came to Kosovo, the language furled around me like a fog in one large mass of unknown sounds and meanings.  It didn’t take long for a few words to become recognizable: Hello, Good bye, Thank you, Please, I’m sorry. They took occasional shape in the fog like a bright flag of color.  After our first week in language, listening to Albanian has changed. I understand more and more words and instead of a fog, it seems more like a large cloud of gray shapes...I can see where they begin and end and now more and more I understand them as they take on color with shape and beauty and meaning. We are following a language course in which we only work on comprehension for the first 100 hours...no production only listening. At first I could only hear the nouns, but now I am noticing the determiners and pronouns and conjunctions. When I think of this phase of language learning I think of it as catching butterflies. Each new word captures color as the fog lifts.