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BCS - FSI Course Worthwhile? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| stelvojoj Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5749 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Esperanto | Message 1 of 9 30 October 2009 at 12:19am | IP Logged |
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I've been wanting to learn a Slavic language for a long time. They're such beautiful languages! I haven't really been able to settle on which one I intend to learn, though. I'm especially intrigued by the South Slavic languages, and have considered Serbian or Croatian, but I don't want to make any kind of "investment" until I really settle on a language.
Until I reach that point, would it be worth my while to look at the freely available "Serbo-Croatian" FSI course? I'm asking less about its quality and more about its linguistic content. I'm not really clear on the extent to which the newly standardized national languages of the former Yugoslavia, diverge from the original standard. More importantly, I'd hate to accidentally speak a variety of BCS that evokes negative sentiments! With that, I suppose the two most important questions I'm trying to address are "Would I be understood?" and "Would I offend someone?" if I spoke the variety offered by a course that professes to teach "Serbo-Croatian." Any and all advice on the matter is quite appreciated! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7364 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 9 30 October 2009 at 5:22am | IP Logged |
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If you learned only with the free FSI SC Basic Course, you'd be understood in Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia, no problem. Depending on where you go, you may even be praised for speaking good "Bosnian" or good "Croatian" or good "Serbian", or even good "Montengerin", even if you had expressed yourself in exactly the same way in all instances.
If you used something that you learned in any "Serbo-Croatian" course, you'll probably offend only some purist or nationalistically-minded speaker. Since the civil war ended over 15 years ago, most of the absurdity and foolishness that surrounded using the "wrong" word or construction has now faded. "FSI Serbo-Croatian Basic Course" teaches something which incorporates elements from both the Croatian and Serbian variants, but arguably leans a little more toward the Serbian variant. As has been noted in an earlier thread on this question about Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian versus Serbo-Croatian, roughly 95% of native speakers from the Serbo-Croatian speech territory will be grateful that you're trying to use something that they understand. As far as they're concerned, you're just using an educated variant of a Western South Slavic dialect (i.e. "Neo-Shtokavian"). If you're really hung up about speaking the correct variant so as to appease purists or language snobs there, then I'd recommend that you look into Ronelle Alexander's course "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian - Textbook with Exercises and Basic Grammar" (+ 6 CDs) since she presents everything as one language with three variants (think of a course for ESL students where the textbook and recordings are divided into three parts: American, Australian and British). You can thus focus on whichever variant you wish, but you'll quickly realize that the overlap between Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian is still very high to the point where if you master one variant, it's virtually pointless to learn the other variants since the mutual intelligibility approaches 100% (it's a bit like having native speakers of Canadian English learn British English from scratch, because of some idea that they won't be understood or acknowledged in Britain when using their native Canadian English). 7 persons have voted this message useful | |
| LatinoBoy84 Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5783 days ago 443 posts - 603 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Portuguese, Latvian | Message 3 of 9 30 October 2009 at 1:59pm | IP Logged |
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The FSI F.A.S.T. Russian course is brilliant, in my opinion. You may want to look at that.
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| stelvojoj Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5749 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Esperanto | Message 4 of 9 30 October 2009 at 8:43pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks, Chung! That's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. I was more or less of the impression that the BCS languages were not that far apart (not to mention, I can't imagine an entire dialect just abruptly going out of use!), but leave it to the one who never asks questions to look the biggest fool, yeah?
@LatinBoy84: I haven't by any stretch ruled out Russian yet, either. So far I've dabbled in Polish, Russian, and a few other Slavic languages, and they're all equally fascinating. I'll keep my eyes open for that F.A.S.T. course (though my luck with finding FSI's Russian materials has been near-nil)! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7364 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 9 30 October 2009 at 9:00pm | IP Logged |
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The text for FSI Russian FAST is being hosted at http://fsi-language-courses.org.
3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| stelvojoj Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5749 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Esperanto | Message 6 of 9 30 October 2009 at 9:10pm | IP Logged |
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Wowzer, when did that pop up? I'd swear I just checked there a few days ago and all that was there was the first student text! :-P
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7364 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 7 of 9 04 November 2009 at 3:49am | IP Logged |
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...and now the audio for FSI Russian FAST is being hosted at http://fsi-language-courses.org
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| LatinoBoy84 Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5783 days ago 443 posts - 603 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Portuguese, Latvian | Message 8 of 9 04 November 2009 at 4:43am | IP Logged |
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Your welcome :P haha, awesome great to see it finally posted up there.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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