I have been teaching this class 4 or 5 times now. My students are 4 adults, and two among them have been frequenting the weekly course, for over half a decade. Their Albanian-speaking profiles are all different, and the small class (which is quite the opposite of intentional from the point of view of the hosting organization) is in fact a lucky circumstance. Although their levels and interests in the Albanian language are different, when it comes to grammar they all tend to be sucked by the powerful gravitational pull that the clitic exerts in the Albanian language.
The clitic- this dreadful grammatical and syntactical item, ubiquitous in Albanian. When 2 Sundays ago they first asked me to help with pages 56- 57 of Unit 6 in the Colloquial Albanian textbook, I looked at the tables in the book and decided that I would very shortly give some clarifications on the item, and keep focusing on developing the students' oral and written skills.
However, it didn't take long to change my mind. As I would revise different written assignments, I would correct mistakes and be faced with the authors-students' question: Why? Why does this verb, or this noun or this abbreviation take this form in this sentence? The answers all gravitate towards what seems to be the sun in the Albanian language solar system: it is not arbitrary randomness, but a logic of actions, objects of actions, and way in which objects receive or incur actions.
While it was previously invisible to me as a native speaker (what's natural and organic often tends to be transparent), this experience of teaching Albanian to adults is helping me discover this logic, feel it, acknowledge it. A logic of actions that fall directly or indirectly on an object. It seems that for us Albanians the way an object becomes the receiver or target of an action is very important, so important that we have to use linguistic tools to clearly express it. And an essential part of the technology to express it seem to be clitics.
Just like technology in general, clitics can be pretty damn complicated, however it is not worth it to stress oneself simply for their sake. Complicated as they are, their value is only in making possible simple necessities of human communication.
Writing a short message correctly; saying a few sentences without mistakes or without emanating a foreign machinic air: to do these things one can't escape clitics.
So my conclusion is to put some effort into learning them, but be cautious not to overdo it. Because as you spend your evening away on memorizing accusative vs. dative clitics and the combinations among the two, you might be missing the occasion to converse over coffee with some native Albanians (we all know they tend to flock in coffee-shops in evenings like bees around honey), or listen to Albanian music or watch a video in Albanian, and that immersion and exposure is as valuable (I will venture to say even more valuable) than learning it by the book!
Also, if your purpose in learning Albanian is more practical rather than academic, if you want to learn it for interacting with people who speak their language rather than from simple linguistic indulgence, the philosophy of the clitics, could give away something about the nature of Albanians. They are very sensitive about being objects of any action, and they have developed linguistic tools that like sensory devices, capture the ways of objectification! This is my working hypothesis at least....
