Croatian

[handshakedrugs]

Can anyone recommend me a great book for learning Croatian? Web sites?

Also, on that subject, can anyone tell me specifically if/what difference there is between Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Russian, etc?

Thanks. :)

Comments

[kapitankraut]

I had pretty good success with "Teach Yourself Croatian" last year, although I was only learning it for travel purposes rather than aiming at fluency

[noirplus]

I'm told that the differences between what's spoken in Zagreb and what's spoken in Belgrade can be smaller than the differences between what's spoken at different ends of London, for example.

True.

Btw., it's "lijevo". :)

As a guideline, though, I'd learned from a "Croatian" course, and was complimented on my "Serbian" and "Bosnian" in the relevant countries when I was there.

It never ceases to amaze me how this happens to every single foreigner who visits those countries and speaks C/S/B to the locals. :D

[kapitankraut]

I knew I was going to spell that word wrongly. I think I must've written it 6 or 7 times and each time it didn't look quite right. So clearly I'm a bit rusty.
Embarrassing, though, since I was listening to the song "Ludi Letnji Ples" by Flamingosi just a few hours ago - "Jedan lijevo, desno dva/Jedan naprijed, nazad sad".

[noirplus]

Forgot to mention that I'm not so sure about Croatian borrowing Italian words. Of course there are Croatian dialects that use a lot of them and there are words of Italian origin in standard Croatian, but it's been like this for decades. The last Croatian language reform I can think of is the one from the 90s when linguists wanted to "purify" Croatian so they threw out some words of foreign origin and replaced them with newly-coined ones (which a lot of people don't use). Also, Serbian has an incredibly vast amount of words of Turkish origin, and Bosnian can also be written in Cyrillic.

[kazukorin49]

well, the main difference is that each country has deep-seated issues with each other, so now there are massive efforts, at least on Croatians and Serbians' parts, to distinguish the two languages. I'd recommend getting a tutor because the languages are evolving rapidly.

[madmouth]

I would disagree with this 'recent hair-splitting' notion.
the conceptual distinction between the languages goes back a long way; that's why it was a hyphenated compound language even during the confederation, rather than, say, "Jugoslovenski".

[kazukorin49]

Ah, is that so? I've only heard from my Croatian relatives about this, so maybe when they say "recently", they mean "fifty years ago". Darned relativity confuses everything ^^;;;

[madmouth]

the differences can be deep or shallow, depending on what you're reading/listening to. there are tons of pronounced provincial dialects that show where the speaker comes from like beacon (that may be used in literature for various purposes), whereas the speech of the metropolises is more homologous