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3 months to fluent croatian ??

  Tags: Croatian | Fluency | Video
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Merv
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 Message 9 of 17
04 January 2011 at 4:55pm | IP Logged 
Chung wrote:
WANNABEAFREAK wrote:
Merv wrote:


It's not ridiculously impossible, but people should be aware that these things do exist. It is pointless to try to
memorize each word and its declination and how the pitch accent shifts and changes. It's much better to know
that there are 4 of them and try to develop a feel for which one is present when you hear native speakers
speaking.

Pitch accent is usually not important for distinguishing meaning. One classic example of where it is is the word
grad. With a short falling accent it means hail, with a long rising accent it means city.

If you want to be understood, this doesn't matter. If you want to have native-like pronunciation, of course it
matters.


would this be something similar to tones in chinese?


Vaguely. Pitch-accents can be thought of as forming a subset in linguistic tone (it's sometimes referred to as a
type of restricted tone system).

And I agree with Merv about the relevance of pitch-accent. A good course in BCMS will go over pitch-accent so
as to at least familiarize learners with the concept. I know that the "Teach Yourself..." and "Colloquial..." courses
for Croatian/Serbian/Serbo-Croatian skip over targeted practice or even any mention of pitch-accent and so the
only way you can get a sense for it (if at all) using these courses is to blindly imitate/parrot the recordings.

However it'll take a combination of the accentuation/stress being marked in print (which only happens in some
textbooks or special dictionaries) and lots of exposure/practice for a learner to get the hang of it in a more
efficient way and so sound reasonably close to an educated native speaker.


It seems that a similar situation exists with Japanese. I haven't opened a single book on it, but it sounds like most
programs try to make out that pitch accent is an afterthought that you can just fix after you've learned everything
else. Japanese is hard enough that the learner who is willing to deal with the alien (for an IE speaker) grammar
and writing system would be able to deal with encountering at least the concept of pitch accent early on. Yes,
you can be understood without it (as in SC, Slovene, and I'm guessing Norwegian, Lithuanian, etc.), but there's no
point in deluding learners early on by hiding it from them.
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Chung
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 Message 10 of 17
04 January 2011 at 5:42pm | IP Logged 
Here're discussions on Croatian tones (sic - "pitch-accent" would be the correct term) and BCMS accentuation in general among native-speakers (all done in English)

Without understanding pitch-accent (and by extension mobile stress) in BCMS, a learner likely won't fully grasp among other things the significance of (somewhat contrived) sentences such as "Gore gore gore gore" (the mountains up there are burning worse) or "Kose kose kose" (the bent scythes are mowing).
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tennisfan
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 Message 11 of 17
06 January 2011 at 11:56pm | IP Logged 
Chung wrote:

And I agree with Merv about the relevance of pitch-accent. A good course in BCMS will go over pitch-accent so as to at least familiarize learners with the concept. I know that the "Teach Yourself..." and "Colloquial..." courses for Croatian/Serbian/Serbo-Croatian skip over targeted practice or even any mention of pitch-accent and so the only way you can get a sense for it (if at all) using these courses is to blindly imitate/parrot the recordings.


Which programs would you say do a good job of going over pitch accent for Serbo-Croatian?
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Chung
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 Message 12 of 17
07 January 2011 at 12:16am | IP Logged 
tennisfan wrote:
Chung wrote:

And I agree with Merv about the relevance of pitch-accent. A good course in BCMS will go over pitch-accent so as to at least familiarize learners with the concept. I know that the "Teach Yourself..." and "Colloquial..." courses for Croatian/Serbian/Serbo-Croatian skip over targeted practice or even any mention of pitch-accent and so the only way you can get a sense for it (if at all) using these courses is to blindly imitate/parrot the recordings.


Which programs would you say do a good job of going over pitch accent for Serbo-Croatian?


Off the top of my head, the following courses go over pitch-accent in BCMS/SC with varying amounts of detail and exercises:

FSI Serbo-Croatian Basic Course (look at the section starting on pg. 13 of Vol. 1)
Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a Textbook: with Exercises and Basic Grammar
Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian Language

This last one marks accent placement in words up to the tenth lesson (out of 30), and also in words found in its reference section. It doesn't deal with pitch-accent per se, but at least the course's author bothered to mark stress placement (which is related to pitch-accent) in BCMS/SC words.
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newstylles
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 Message 13 of 17
07 January 2011 at 10:58am | IP Logged 
Thank you Splog for taking what I’ve discussed during the video into consideration before making an initial post here. I most certainly would have to agree with Chung and Merv. Actually my inspiration and enthusiasm for learning SC came from Chung after receiving valuable information about the language in the past. To point a few things out, the word “fluent” was never mentioned, nor would it have been appropriate to do so in the first place given the fact that only three months of effort and dedication was put into learning basic Croatian (just a personal opinion). The books "Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian Language" and "Teach Yourself Croatian" were both recommended by Chung. Since I was waiting for Thomas Magner's course to arrive, I decided to start off with TY Croat- and stuck with it. I used the course in a way of extracting the constructions and keywords throughout the first six units (explained in Moses McCormack's FLR method) and spoke out the dialogues while listening (as mentioned by Chung) “blindly imitate/parrot the recordings”.

Merv, a course in which gives an early introduction to pitch-accents would be Living Language: Spoken World Croatian… and I would assume the same goes for Magner’s course but I haven’t used it yet.

To the OP:
As for the email you’ve sent prior to opening this thread, I hope the “full of sh!t guy” has answered most of your questions and concerns.

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Aineko
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 Message 14 of 17
07 January 2011 at 8:32pm | IP Logged 
Newstylles, your progress is amazing! Honestly, when I opened your video I didn't expect
that you were going to express yourself so clearly, both in terms of pronunciation and
constructions. There are mistakes, of course, but I can now remember only two of them
(that is to say, there were only two mistakes that were actually distracting for a native
speaker :) ). Moses' method works great for you.
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Merv
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414 posts - 749 votes 
Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian*
Studies: Spanish, French

 
 Message 15 of 17
07 January 2011 at 11:31pm | IP Logged 
newstylles wrote:
Thank you Splog for taking what I’ve discussed during the video into consideration before
making an initial post here. I most certainly would have to agree with Chung and Merv. Actually my inspiration
and enthusiasm for learning SC came from Chung after receiving valuable information about the language in the
past. To point a few things out, the word “fluent” was never mentioned, nor would it have been appropriate to
do so in the first place given the fact that only three months of effort and dedication was put into learning basic
Croatian (just a personal opinion). The books "Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian Language" and "Teach
Yourself Croatian" were both recommended by Chung. Since I was waiting for Thomas Magner's course to arrive,
I decided to start off with TY Croat- and stuck with it. I used the course in a way of extracting the constructions
and keywords throughout the first six units (explained in Moses McCormack's FLR method) and spoke out the
dialogues while listening (as mentioned by Chung) “blindly imitate/parrot the recordings”.

Merv, a course in which gives an early introduction to pitch-accents would be Living Language: Spoken World
Croatian… and I would assume the same goes for Magner’s course but I haven’t used it yet.

To the OP:
As for the email you’ve sent prior to opening this thread, I hope the “full of sh!t guy” has answered most of your
questions and concerns.


I concur with Aineko. Considering the brief period of study and the difficulty of the language, you're doing great.
I hope my earlier critiques don't discourage you, nor this whole pitch-accent discussion. I would say the most
important thing is placement, then magnitude (short or long), and only then direction (rising or falling). As I've
seen on other websites, it seems that the far western variant of SC (Croatian) doesn't make a huge distinction
between rising and falling anyway. Except for the southeastern part of Serbia, where the pitch accent doesn't
exist, the eastern variant (Serbian) makes distinctions between the four accents. The strongest distinctions are
apparently in the central dialect (Herzegovinian, and less so Bosnian), in which the accents are almost
exaggerated and the non-accented vowels can have distinctions in length. Interestingly, that's not entirely
surprising given the fact that the four accents originate precisely from this area, and thus, as you might expect,
they become less and less marked as you move away from Herzegovina.

Congratulations and good luck!
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tennisfan
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United States
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Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish
Studies: German

 
 Message 16 of 17
07 January 2011 at 11:50pm | IP Logged 
I remember when I first started getting interested in Serbo-Croatian, I noticed what seemed to be a difference in pitch-accent amongst the so-called infamous leaders of Yugoslavia during the 90s. I could be wrong, but it seems like even to a non-trained ear you can hear the difference between, say, Karadzic and Izetbegovic, in this mp3 for example:

http://www.zshare.net/audio/8490109089bd2e20/


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