SALZBURG, Austria – I thought my college years at BGSU had taught me how to sleep through anything I could ever need to sleep through: noisy neighbors, parties, trains, construction, my alarm, phone calls, television, knocks on the door.

You name it, and I thought I had it covered, especially since I grew up a few miles from an Air Force base that is home to 16 Air Force Reserve C-130 airplanes, which are big enough to carry two to three Humvees.

But I had never considered the fact that there could be really loud parties roughly every other Wednesday night two floors below me.

The reason I had never considered this is because I never thought there would be a bar in my residence hall that is used for parties.

Recently, these parties have been hosted by former Yugoslavians.

I was invited to this week’s party, but I didn’t attend because I wanted to sleep.

But sleep was a problem when it sounded like the party was in my room.

Nevertheless, I prevailed. I’m getting better and better at sleeping through loudness.

I’ll forgive my Serbian and Croatian friends for hosting these parties because my American friends and I have too much fun teaching them unpractical American phrases, like ‘What’s happening, homeslice?’

My Romanian roommate is also fascinated with American sayings.

She speaks pretty decent English, so she’s always asking about sayings we use for things.

The topic of the moment is expressions that are used to describe someone who is not very smart.

She’s been compiling a list and her favorites include ‘the wheel is turning but the hamster is dead,’ ‘a few fries short of a Happy Meal’ and ‘not the sharpest tool in the shed.’

All of these questions I get asked about English really got me thinking about how difficult the language is.

I’ve been learning Czech this semester and I think the language is ridiculously difficult. There are those ‘v’ symbols and accent marks above letters. The letters make sounds I have difficulties pronouncing. But the letters always, without fail, make the same sound.

It’s the same in German, too.

There may be genders and endings to signify cases, which we don’t have in English, but the letters always make the same sound.

In English, that is not the case.

This was discussed in German class on Wednesday.

The example given was the letter ‘A.’

Consider these words: bar, bank, hasty, malign, mall and mare.

The ‘A’ in each of those words makes a different sound.

Learning English only by reading wouldn’t get someone very far because the letters don’t make constant sounds, but with German and with Czech, once you learn the one pronunciation of the letter, it always makes that same sound.

And in addition to our strange pronunciations, there are so many things we say that wouldn’t make any sense to someone who isn’t extremely familiar with our language.

I remember when I was in Salzburg two years ago when my host brother said he could understand everything my friends and I would say in English except for any special phrases we would use.

Our discussion in German class also covered those phrases my host brother was talking about and the ones that so interest my roommate.

The phrases used were ‘I was caught with my pants down,’ ‘He kicks the bucket,’ ‘He gets the wooden spoon’ and ‘He keeps a stiff upper lip.’

We know that if someone kicked the bucket, he or she died, but how would someone who isn’t a native English speaker ever know that?

And even without all of these cliches and proverbs, think of how many words that are in our language or that we use contractions and hyphenate words.

It’s actually pretty impressive, and as we were sitting in German class discussing our native language in German, my friend Sammy made the comment that we can’t even speak our own language properly.

And I guess that goes to show how hard our language really is.