Is it difficult to learn Serbian language ?
Depends. Some areas are easy and some are difficult; just like in many other languages. If you want to learn easy language, learn Esperanto. But, unfortunately, you probably won't find too many people to talk with. It's a shame, Esperanto is a wonderful language. But, let's get back to the Serbian.
What is easy?
1) Words order. It's pretty much liberal in comparison to other languages. Just relax and combine the words.
2) Alphabet. We brag sometimes that we have the perfect alphabet, because we accomplished the ideal - one letter for one sound. That is making the reading easier, naturally.
3) Present tense of regular verbs. There is a grammar formula for this and you may apply it to all regular verbs. To make negative form is equally easy, by adding 'ne' in front of the verb.
What is of the medium difficulty?
1) Gender of changeable words. Many languages have this category. In Serbian it's not too difficult to recognize the gender. Either use simple logic, or pay attention to the last letter.
2) Plural. There are few grammar patterns for making plural.
3) Modal constructions. Modal verb and the following verb are always connected by conjunction DA.
4) DA LI questions. You may easily learn this basic type of asking questions.
What is difficult?
1) Case. Changeable words have different endings depending of the role the word takes in a sentence. For example, the word 'majka' (mother) might be 'majke', 'majci', 'majku', 'majko', majkom', and that is only the declension in singular.
If you are a speaker of some other language which recognizes cases (Slavic languages for example), this will not be difficult for you, because you understand the concept. But if you are not...
How to make the difficult easier?
a) memorize propositions, b) memorize typical declensions for all three genders, c) read the theory about different positions words might have in a sentence, it helps.
2) Pronunciation of some letters, I will write them in Cyrillic: Ђ, Џ, Њ, Љ, Ч, Ћ. Sometimes R (Р in Cyrillic).
How to make this easier, you may read in the article Pronunciation of Serbian Letters .
Are you a learner of Serbian ? Do you agree with my opinion ?
it would be valuable to know,
Serbian Teacher online
Lidija Novaković Lagrini
I'd disagree a bit.
ReplyDelete• Plural of masculine nouns is not trivial.
• The word order is far from easy, that's a part where learners typically make a lot of mistakes - you have to put enclitics in the proper order, dative before accusative, verbs after pronouns, except for "je", that comes before pronouns, etc.
• I don't think I ever heard anyone say Ч /Č/ is hard to pronounce...
Hi Daniel, thanks for your comment.
DeleteNothing is trivial in learning language. I can write an article about plural of masculine nouns. That is not very difficult to explain.
Word order is more free than in Germanic languages when it is about main parts of the sentence - subject, predicate and object.
I had several students who had a problem with Č.
Good luck with your further learning !