Does anyone here speak Croatian/Serbian?
I've been trying to learn it for years (ancestral language on Mom's side, but she didn't speak it)
but it is QUITE difficult...Seven noun cases.
RZM
(8,556 posts)Russian has six. I believe Polish has seven (though I think one of them is rarely used).
whathehell
(29,837 posts)Last edited Mon Apr 2, 2012, 06:07 AM - Edit history (1)
that English and French really HAVE no cases...Truly, the whole concept
of changing "endings" of words to indicate different persons/ relationships, etc.
was very hard for me to grasp at first.
Igel
(36,187 posts)Can't speak hardly any now. It's too similar to Russian, and I had Czech and Polish after doing two years of Serbo.
Can still read a decent chunk of it.
Don't be put off by the number of cases. "Seven" is what you get from grammatical analysis. There's a lot of overlap in forms, and forms is where the difficulty is.
Take English. We have nominative and genitive, accusative and dative. Good luck finding that many case forms. The genitive is a clitic, an 's' that sticks at the end of the phrase for most Americans. The accusative, dative, and nominative look the same everywhere but for pronouns. We really only have one case plus a clitic for genitive, for all but pronouns.
Serbian has some wrinkles, to be sure, but it's quite learnable. Don't let the grammar pile up--learn a little bit and then get the hang of it. In speech some of the rules are often botched; the entire system of intonations is mostly wrong for most speakers.
There are a lot of Serbian and Croatian speakers; fewer Bosnian speakers. (Figure out which you want. They stopped agreeing on having a common language 20 years ago.) Unlike Latino immigrants, though, most are educated and quickly learn English. Those who aren't well educated have no choice because there aren't ethnic enclaves into which they can retreat for linguistic comfort. I run into a SBC speaker about every 2-3 months. Then again, when I hear an accent that sounds E. European I ask.
So you studied the language in the university?...I'm curious, what made you study it?
Moja Baka i moy dyed iz Mali i Veli Losing....but they spoke Italian (!) because they came from
the Dalmatian Coast, an area ruled by the city state of Venice for a few hundred years.
hey both left before WWI when the area was under the Hapsburg Empire
and so they identified as Austrian...As a kid, it was confusing to me, as they all had slavic last names, most
ending in "ich", but they spoke Italian and considered themselves Austrian!...I was thirty years old
before I discovered they were actually Croatian!.
As I'm sure you know, Serbian and Croatian (and even Bosnian, so I'm told) were all pretty much
one language, but they decided to identify as separate languages for poltiical and nationalistic reasons.
I've been there a few times and, because of my ancestry, am eligible for dual citizenship, so I've been
trying to learn the language. To je Tezak Jezik!
Al Arafat
(10 posts)There are a lot of Serbian and Croatian speakers;
I can't speak in Croatian , or Serbian , is it the nearby the Russian language ?
But I really interested to this language. But how did i start .....
Any idea ....
whathehell
(29,837 posts)My teacher told me that the language is CLOSEST to Russian.
Many Berlitz language schools teach it. If that doesn't work,
go online and type in "Learn Croatian" or "Learn Serbian" alongside
the name of the city you are in.
ghjfhgf
(10 posts)Response to ghjfhgf (Reply #7)
whathehell This message was self-deleted by its author.