ryanv4 wrote:Radioclare,
My mothers side of the family are all croatian, and I've often felt let down because I haven't been able to join in conversation. Growing up as boy on the South Coast of Australia, there was "no need" to spend time teaching me how to speak it. Now that I'm a bit older (22) I can see the benefits to learning another language, and learning one so important in my families history really intrigues me.
What advice would you give to a person wanting to learn Croatian (essentially from scratch - minus the basics 'kako si') etc, who doesn't have the luxury of constantly being surrounded by people speaking it.
Hi Ryan
I guess my general advice would be:
1) Accept that it is going to take time and commitment to learn. I've been learning for five years now and I would say it probably took me three years before I felt like I could communicate in a meaningful way, so it's important to have a strong motivation to keep going. It sounds like you will have a good motivation with your family connections
2) Make the best of the resources you can find. There are nowhere near as many books, courses etc for learning Croatian as there are for bigger languages like French and Spanish and in particular there aren't a lot of courses with audio, so you need to work with whatever you can get hold of and persevere with it. Even if you specifically want to learn 'Croatian', which was also my situation, sometimes it just makes sense to compromise and use resources which are for 'Serbian' (or even older ones, which are for 'Serbo-Croatian'). In the long run it honestly doesn't make much difference; I have spoken 'Croatian' in Serbia and Montenegro and been complimented on how good my 'Serbian' is.
As for practical advice when first starting to learn the language...
- I think 'Teach Yourself Croatian' (Complete Croatian) is the simplest course to start with for total beginners. It introduces the grammar quite gradually and explains it in a way which is easy to understand for English speakers and which doesn't assume that you have prior experience of learning another language. Once I'd finished the book I was able to travel to Croatia and cope with basic tourist situations like buying bus tickets and ordering food in a restaurant.
- I also recommend the Hippocrene course 'Beginners' Croatian'. The audio that comes with this course is particularly good, because each dialogue is read out once at normal speed so that you can just listen to it and then once really slowly, so that there's time to repeat the sentences after the speaker and try to imitate their pronunciation.
- I wouldn't recommend 'Colloquial Croatian' unless it is the only book you can get. The explanations are more confusing and not all the answers to the exercises are at the back of the book, which is a big failing in a language course!
- The most comprehensive textbook in English is 'Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian: A Textbook'. It's a brilliant book but because it is so comprehensive I think it could be quite overwhelming as the first textbook for a beginner learning on their own. I would definitely have struggled with it if I hadn't done the easier TY and Hippocrene courses first.
- If you prefer learning online, I recommend the website HR4EU which is a relatively new but reputable website for learning Croatian. And for an online grammar to consult, I definitely recommend Daniel N's website, Easy Croatian. He also has a good course of practising vocabulary on Memrise.
Re the problem of not being surrounded by people who speak the language, the things which have made the biggest difference to me are listening to Croatian music and watching Croatian TV. There's a surprising amount of really good music (at least, I was surprised that for a 'small' language there is so much music; I've found it easier to find bands I want to listen to than in German, for example). Even if you can't understand most of the words in songs to start with, I think listening to them is useful because subconsciously you start to absorb how the language sounds. Once I got past the absolute beginner stage, I started trying to watch short children's TV shows in Croatian on Youtube and since then I've got a subscription for a Croatian TV channel and developed an addiction to Croatian telenovelas. The more listening I've done, the easier I've found it to speak when I've travelled in the region.
If you want more specific advice about anything, let me know