Questions regarding Croatian

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kimmitt
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Questions regarding Croatian

Postby kimmitt » Thu Aug 26, 2021 12:18 pm

Hi all

I'd quite like to start working on Croatian soon. My only other language that I've worked on is French which has an abundance of material to work with - Croatian seems a bit more difficult.

What's the consensus on the various course that are out there? I could use Assimil with a French base - I think my French would be strong enough to allow me to do that. I've also got Colloquial Croatian and could use the FSI or DLI courses. For anyone that's used it , is the Croatian taught on Glossika accurate/reliable? On my travels a few years ago, I also picked up a couple of books on Serbian in Belgrade. 'Serbian for Foreigners' and 'Step into Serbian' - a friend told me that Croatian is basically Serbian but with the Roman alphabet, but I've no idea if that is really a fair assessment.

I know there are a couple of people on here who have spent some time with Croatian, so any advice would be gratefully received :)
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kimmitt
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Re: Questions regarding Croatian

Postby kimmitt » Thu Aug 26, 2021 12:37 pm

Also, does anyone know if it's possible to find audiobooks in Croatian? Seems impossible so far :(
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Re: Questions regarding Croatian

Postby rdearman » Thu Aug 26, 2021 2:24 pm

The best person to ask is probably RadioClare

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=16427

You might find something here:
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 19&t=2979/
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Re: Questions regarding Croatian

Postby Radioclare » Thu Aug 26, 2021 7:51 pm

Hi kimmitt, always nice to find someone else who is interested in learning Croatian :)

kimmitt wrote:What's the consensus on the various course that are out there? I could use Assimil with a French base - I think my French would be strong enough to allow me to do that. I've also got Colloquial Croatian and could use the FSI or DLI courses. For anyone that's used it , is the Croatian taught on Glossika accurate/reliable? On my travels a few years ago, I also picked up a couple of books on Serbian in Belgrade. 'Serbian for Foreigners' and 'Step into Serbian' - a friend told me that Croatian is basically Serbian but with the Roman alphabet, but I've no idea if that is really a fair assessment.


My French is rubbish so I've never looked at the Croatian Assimil, but if you like the Assimil method generally then it might be worth giving it a try.

In terms of other textbooks... Colloquial Croatian is ok. Personally I had some frustrations with it, partly because (in the version I had, at least) not all the exercises had answers in the back, and partly because I felt like it introduced quite hard vocabulary too early on. Not sure what your motivations are for learning Croatian, but I felt like Colloquial had a bit more emphasis on what's useful for business travellers vs tourists. Specifically, I remember wanting to cry over a text that introduced the word "poljoprivreda" (agriculture) and feeling like I was never going to master this language :lol:

In my opinion, the simplest textbook for total beginners is Complete Croatian (Teach Yourself Croatian). This one is a gentle introduction and in particular introduces topics like cases in a really simple and accessible way. Personally I am intimidated by textbooks with lots of complex grammatical terms, so this one was the perfect start for me.

If you've got loads of language-learning experience and/or you absolutely love grammar, you might find Complete Croatian too easy. The most comprehensive books I've found in English are these: the BCS textbook and grammar by Ronelle Alexander. If you're serious about learning the language to a high level you should definitely buy these at some point. They are very detailed, particularly the grammar. I think they were originally written to accompany a taught university course, so some of the exercises in the textbook are geared towards being in a classroom situation (but it's not geared towards classroom learning to the extent that you can't use it for self study). Personally, these books would have been too "difficult" for me to jump straight into as a complete beginner but as I said, I'm not really a grammar person!

Also worth considering Beginners Croatian by Hippocrene, which is my personal favourite. There are some grammatical topics I didn't understand for a couple of years until I got my hands on this one. I think it's got a perfect balance between explaining grammar in a way that isn't overly simplified, but still makes sense.

On the web, the best resource without doubt is the Easy Croatian website, which has a wealth of information, including some stuff about stress which you won't find covered in any of the textbooks.

For a web-based course, you could try HR4EU. Personally I find the website a bit clunky, but it's free and it's created by the university in Zagreb, so it's reputable.

I'm afraid I've never used the FSI course. I think I looked at it once and was put off by the fact that it started by a very long introduction to stress and accent, which went over my head as a beginner. I haven't tried Glossika for Croatian either. I do have Glossika Serbian, but this is the old Glossika (where you were buying a bunch of files to download). Personally I found that Serbian course good, but I've never got the hang of the new web-based Glossika so I'm not sure how it compares.

Re Croatian vs Serbian, that's a whole thread in itself :lol: There are obviously people in the countries themselves that feel very strongly about the differences between the languages. But as a vast simplification as a foreigner, I tend to think of Croatian vs Serbian being similar to British English vs American English. A speaker of one variant can communicate with a speaker of the other variant without experiencing (m)any problems in comprehension, but it will be clear to each speaker that the other isn't speaking their variant. Same as how if someone starts speaking to me about a "sidewalk", I know what they mean but at the same time I know it's an American word and not one that's in my personal vocabulary. The differences aren't quite as simple as alphabet (Croatian is always written in the Latin alphabet, but Serbian can be written in either Latin or Cyrillic) - there are also some differences in spelling, vocabulary and grammar - and the differences in how people speak don't always correlate exactly with national boundaries. But if you turned up in Croatia and started speaking Serbian, it's hard to imagine a situation in which you wouldn't be understood. Personally I've spoken Croatian in both Serbia and Montenegro and been complimented on my Serbian in both places :lol: I've never had a negative experience where I've been accused of using the wrong word in the wrong country; people are generally so surprised that you speak any of their language at all that they're pretty tolerant of mistakes.

That said, if you're specifically interested in Croatia/Croatian above Serbia/Serbian then it makes sense to focus on learning Croatian in the first instance. There are certainly enough Croatian-focussed resources to learn Croatian without needing to fall back on Serbian resources. If you want to learn about the differences between the different variants, then it's worth investing in the BCS textbook I mentioned above. That one clearly marks in all the vocabulary lists whether a word is used in all countries or specific to one, and it also gives Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian versions of the key dialogues so you can compare any differences in grammar and vocabulary. It also varies the Serbian texts between the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. Clearly it's not perfect and just because the textbook says a word is 'Serbian', doesn't mean you won't find people happily using it in Croatia, but it's definitely the best attempt I've seen to present these nuances to English learners :)

kimmitt wrote:Also, does anyone know if it's possible to find audiobooks in Croatian? Seems impossible so far :(

I've been looking for almost 10 years and I haven't found a legal audiobook yet :lol: Essentially the answer is "no"; audiobooks really don't seem to be a thing over there. Podcasts are also, unfortunately, not really a thing. There are dark places on the internet where you can find illegal audiobooks in Croatian or Serbian. In my experience those are predominantly pirated copies of recordings from the Zagreb or Belgrade libraries for the blind, i.e. they're not something that you can buy even if you really want to. They're also generally pirated from cassette tapes so the audio quality is variable.
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Re: Questions regarding Croatian

Postby Jean-Luc » Mon Oct 18, 2021 10:01 am

The university of Zagreb has free courses online. Quite serious but a little bit boring... https://a1.ffzg.unizg.hr
I am using Assimil Croatian method but coupled with a live online course for speech (4 tones not marked in books) and comprehension of the (dense) missing grammar. For a discovery, Mango Croatian is good, Funeasylearn for learning words and pronunciation too (I have tried all theses and others). A great site (and teacher) is https://irenascrocafe.com where you can try the free lessons from her Youtube channel.
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Re: Questions regarding Croatian

Postby reineke » Tue Dec 07, 2021 8:00 pm

https://lektire.skole.hr/audio-sadrzaji

You'll need to create a (presumably) free account that's hopefully accessible from abroad. This is required reading for schools.

Book&zvook app on Google Playstore. They accept Paypal. Just found them so not a recommendation.

YouTube

https://youtu.be/-z5tEX4qI7A

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