Is Croatian considered hardcore? (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

Is Croatian considered hardcore?
Tags: Croatian \| Difficulty
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages

38 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5

Levi
Pentaglot
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United States
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Message 33 of 38

17 June 2010 at 11:40pm | IP Logged

WANNABEAFREAK wrote:

...or is it as easy to learn as Cantonese?

I'm a bit puzzled by this question. Considering its phonology, its orthography, and its lexicon which is completely unrelated to English, I would not characterize Cantonese as an "easy" language by any means.
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michi
Nonaglot
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Austria
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Message 34 of 38

19 June 2010 at 1:46pm | IP Logged

Danac wrote:

I can't agree completely to the part about dialects. The first sentence especially is wrong in several ways. Since the breakup of the second Yugoslavia, there has indeed been a very specific language codification process in each state. You may or may not believe in these projects, but they still exist. The fact remains that there is indeed a seperate Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian standard, and maybe there'll be a Montenegrin one in a few years as well. Besides, these standards transcend belief. Croats and Serbs from Bosnia still speak Bosnian just like the Moslems, even if they state that they don't.

I know that in the meantime codifications of the languages have become more or less settled in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina (and Montenegro). What I wanted to say is that this is only a modern development and in the past it was not possible to classify dialects as Croatian and Serbian. I have read texts with a Croatian nationalists subtone - e.g. the D&K travelguide of Croatia - that suggest that there have always been seperate Croatian and Serbian languages and these were forced into an artificial Serbo-Croatian language. I have also talked to an Austrian journalist who was considered some kind of an expert on former Yugoslavia, who also believed this. Of course he could speak a word of Serbo-Croatian (or Croatian or Serbian).
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Merv
Bilingual Diglot
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Message 35 of 38

20 June 2010 at 12:28am | IP Logged

There are three Croatian languages: Stokavian, Cakavian, Kajkavian. The standard Croatian language is Stokavian
and uses the East Herzegovina dialect. Ironically, this dialect is spoken only by a tiny minority of Croats (those in
Lika, Banija, Kordun, Bosanska Krajina, Slavonia, and Dubrovnik) and is predominantly spoken by Serbs and
Muslims living in those same regions, as well as in Montenegro, western Serbia, and the Drina River valley.

Regarding grammar, it is virtually identical, with the major exception of the da + conjugated verb construction
being eschewed in Croatian vs. Serbian. The reason this construction exists in Serbian is due to the influence of
the Balkan sprachbund, which affects Serbian and Greek mildly, Romanian and Albanian more considerably, and
Macedonian-Bulgarian quite a lot. Thus, Bulgarian does not even have infinitives, i.e. the conjugated form is so
much favored.

As for words, historically there was much more overlap between Croatian and Serbian vocabulary. Recently (i.e.
since the 1990s) there has been a systematic attempt to stamp out "Serbisms" out of Croatian as well as
international origin words. Serbian is far more tolerant of foreign words. Thus, words such as talas (wave), livada
(field), and kutija (chest), all of them Greek origin, are equally used if not preferred as the Slavic versions val,
poljana, and kovceg, which absolutely are preferred in Croatian. Avion is the preferred Serbian term for airplane
(from French) whereas Croatian uses the constructed zrakoplov (literally "air floater").
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bushwick
Tetraglot
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Netherlands
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Speaks: German, Croatian*, English, Dutch
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Message 36 of 38

20 June 2010 at 12:44am | IP Logged

Merv wrote:

poljana, and kovceg, which absolutely are preferred in Croatian. Avion is the preferred Serbian term for airplane
(from French) whereas Croatian uses the constructed zrakoplov (literally "air floater").

it would be polje, not poljana.
actually, avion is still very much and I would say exclusively used, zrakoplov is the lexically preferred form, but rarely in colloquial speech
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Aineko
Triglot
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New Zealand
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Speaks: Serbian*, English^C2, Spanish
Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin

Message 37 of 38

21 June 2010 at 10:39am | IP Logged

Also, it's not that kovceg=kutija=chest. Word kovceg (more proper translation for 'chest'
than kutija) is used a lot in Serbian, together with the turcizam of the same meaning -
sanduk (Arabic speakers will recognize this :) ).
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Kuccinsky
Newbie
Croatia
Joined 4878 days ago
1 posts - 1 votes

Message 38 of 38

18 July 2011 at 6:07am | IP Logged

chucknorrisman wrote:

As for pronunciation, Croatian has ć and č, which seem to be harder to distinguish from each other than Mandarin's q and ch. I think they may be harder to distinguish than, say, the distinction between tense and regular consonants for Korean learners. The pitch accent also seems to be quite challenging.

As for grammar, it doesn't seem to be too difficult compared to most other Slavic languages, as it only has one more case than Russian (vocative).

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