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What is it like to study Serbo-Croatian? | ||
Tags: Serbo-Croatian | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| malakhim Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4798 days ago 23 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, SpanishB2 Studies: Turkish | Message 1 of 9 16 March 2011 at 1:54am | IP Logged | ||
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I have never before studied a Slavic language. I am more into typically altaicesque SOV agglutinative languages. Slavic languages just seem so hard and even intimidating. At least I think so.
Russian, Polish, Czech, etc just look incredibly difficult. But the other day I was in the library when I encountered a textbook for Serbian. It included both latin and cyrilic script. Out of curiosity I took a look through the book at things like basic verb conjugations, nominal declension, basic vocabulary, etc... I found it quite interesting. In particular I loved the visual beauty of the language. With latin script, the language seems "clean" and neat compared to the harsh cyrilic script or Polish with many consonant clusters and alien orthography. Latin script Serbo-Croatian looks neater and in a way purer, more like something reader friendly like Spanish or Italian, but of course in Slavic form. It least that is my subjective impression on the languages visual beauty. Also it seems phonetically easier compared to its brothers Russian and Polish. Its verb conjugation also looks attractive, in a way similar to something like Spanish, but more exotic. Even some forms look briefly similar. For example if I remember correctly dosnt the 1st person plural (we) conjugation end in "mo" which looks like the Spanish 1st person plural "mos"? Just exploring a textbook for a while resulted in the language capturing my heart. What is it like to study Serbo-Croatian? Slavic language noun cases look really hard! I hate grammatical grammatical gender! But overall, just how difficult would I find this language? By the way my language experience up to now is Spanish, Japanese and Turkish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5069 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 2 of 9 16 March 2011 at 2:40am | IP Logged | ||
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I agree that SC somehow seems to "breathe" more openly than Russian, Polish, or Czech. Maybe the consonant
clusters are less dense. Cursive Cyrillic is not so harsh, but I agree that the printed form is pretty ugly:  Serbian_Cyrillic_cursive2.png">
The language is substantially harder than Spanish and substantially easier than Japanese. I don't know about Turkish. I'll break it down in terms of several categories: 1.) Orthography: piece of cake, just like Spanish. Much easier than English or French or Russian or Japanese. Almost completely phonetic, the Latin alphabet is not "hairy" with diacritics, and the Cyrillic is also easy to learn. 2.) Pronunciation: generally easy but later on the subtleties are what's hard to grasp, notably distinguishing "hard" and "soft" ch and dj sounds and the pitch accent system, which has some resemblance to the pitch accents of Japanese and Lithuanian. 3.) Verbs: much less complex than Spanish in terms of tenses. However, verbal aspect is conceptually difficult, as in the other Slavic languages. 4.) Nouns: cases are rough in all Slavic languages except Bulgarian, which lacks them. 5.) Vocabulary: Serbian, especially (in contrast to Croatian), has a lot of internationalisms, i.e. words from French, German, English, Italian, Latin, and Greek that will be a bit familiar to you already. The core vocabulary is Slavic, however, so that will be alien to you, as will be loanwords from Hungarian (but not Turkish! because you already know it). 6.) Sound: I think it sounds pretty average, neither a stunningly beautiful language nor a very ugly one. Here are three of my favorite folk songs, for you to get a sense of the sound: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf6x9cSxwIU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ibzqGNO2zo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0El-5rFNKQ Edited by Merv on 16 March 2011 at 2:47am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6952 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 9 16 March 2011 at 3:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Knowing Japanese or Turkish won't provide much in the way of specific tricks to accelerate the learning of a Slavonic language but you shouldn't feel that learning a Slavonic language to fluency is impossible.
Yes, the ending in the 1st person plural in present tense is "-mo" and if memory serves me properly, there is a link between this ending in BCMS (Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian) and the '-mos' ending in Spanish. dođemo = "we'll come"; jedemo = "we're eating" Well, if you can negotiate grammatical gender in Spanish it's not that much of a stretch to take on grammatical gender in a Slavonic language. If anything, grammatical gender in Slavonic languages is much easier to determine than it is in Romance or Germanic languages. The rules of thumb in Slavonic languages are: ...if the word ends with a consonant in nominative singular, then it is likely masculine ...if the word ends with '-a' in nominative singular, then it is likely feminine ...if the word ends with '-e' or '-o' in nominative singular, then it is likely neuter. However when you combine grammatical gender with 6 or 7 cases, it does take some time to get used to as none of the languages that you know or study inflect nouns in quite this way. I will also add a post that I made about a couple of weeks ago.
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| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5148 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 4 of 9 16 March 2011 at 8:52am | IP Logged | ||
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I have been wanting to take up Serbo-Croatian again as of late, as there is such a large population of Bosnian refugees in my area, and I just find that area of the world to be fascinating. Although I do not know any Slavic languages, this one is much dearer to my heart than Russian, for instance, since it is much more relevant to my area (I have only met two Russian speakers, yet have met countless people from the BCMS area)
In November I jumped into the middle of a course that a Croatian friend was teaching, and this language kicked my butt. The countless number of cases and tricky grammar really through me for a whirl, though jumping into the course at the very end did not help anything either. Regarding the true difficulty, I think that if it is one's first Slavic language, one should work through the grammar slowly, one case at a time until he or she gets familiar with it and comfortable. I did this with German and had few problems (the kind of mistakes that all non-native speakers make from time to time), whereas when I tried memorizing charts and tables full of noun declensions for Latin back in high school, I may have learned the endings (some of which I still remember) yet I would have never been able to "speak" something in Latin. So yeah, I think the cases can be scary, but I believe that if worked through in a proper manner, they will not be too difficult. Regarding the similarities of verbs with Spanish, I noticed that too. In fact, I see that so much with many of the languages I have examined. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| malakhim Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4798 days ago 23 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, SpanishB2 Studies: Turkish | Message 5 of 9 16 March 2011 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you for the detailed responses.
In what kind of time period do you think I could get reasonable fluency in this language (European framework C1 level)? Bear in mind that I probably wont have an opportunity to live in the country in the near future. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5148 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 6 of 9 16 March 2011 at 6:25pm | IP Logged | ||
IMO, this is always such a loaded question since in reality, achieving a reasonable fluency in any language depends partially on the student, as well as non-controllable factors such as the number of speakers in the area, with whom you can practice, how easy it is to obtain study materials, etc. I do believe though that Serbo-Croatian is one of the better Slavic languages to learn for one who is living in the USA, in terms of native speakers and materials. In Pennsylvania, one can pay extra for television (2 channels) in Serbo-Croatian, which is actually being recorded and broadcasted from St. Louis, home of "Little Bosnia". I also know of many restaurants and stores from that area, which would provide many opportunities to befriend the owners and find a language partner/helper/tutor. I guess what I am getting at is that it will be much easier to find people with whom you can practice, for Serbo-Croatian, due to the war and mass exodus. This makes it much easier to learn quickly, than self-teaching Ukrainian or Sorbian, Slovak or something, and getting a really high reading/writing level, but being unable to hold a decent conversation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Marko Markovic Newbie YugoslaviaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4660 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Serbian* | Message 7 of 9 03 August 2011 at 12:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello.I know this topic is a little bit old,but here is an opinion from first hand.I am a guy from Serbia,so serbian is my native language.For all those who want to learn it my advice is to skip grammar in the begining and to focus on learning usefull phrases and to watch movies and listen to songs in serbian.After let`s say 6 months you can learn some basic grammar.By then you should be able to reach the fluency needed for some everyday tasks as well as for listening the news in serbian.Serbian is considered a very difficult language,even for Serbians.There are a lot of Serbs(even those who have a degree in serbian) who always make grammar mistakes,but despite that we all understand each other.I know many foreigners(French,Czech,Japanese,Spanish,etc) who mastered serbian and they say they like the language very much.
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| Saim Pentaglot Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4879 days ago 124 posts - 215 votes Speaks: Serbo-Croatian, English*, Catalan, Spanish, Polish Studies: Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Occitan, Punjabi, Urdu, Arabic (Maghribi), French, Modern Hebrew, Ukrainian, Slovenian | Message 8 of 9 03 August 2011 at 8:24am | IP Logged | ||
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I wouldn't say "wait 6 months to learn grammar". But yes, I would only consciously learn grammar after actually using the language. In other words, try and figure out the cases from context rather than learning them and then actually using the language.
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