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Recommendation. At this moment, I recommend that you check my other blog, Easy Croatian first. It's simpler, has sound clips, deals with pronunciation from the start, etc., and use this blog as supplemental information only. THIS BLOG IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED. ERRORS WILL NOT BE FIXED. AND THERE ARE ERRORS HERE. |
Introduction
1 Basic Features
Croatian is a Slavic language. It's almost the same as Serbian or Bosnian, and similar to Czech and Russian. Its grammar resembles Old Greek and Latin, so it's quite complex.
Relation to Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin
Basically, you can say that you almost learn 4 languages with one effort: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. Yes, there are some differences, but they are mostly in vocabulary. And you can get by with Croatian in Slovenia and Macedonia as well, so that's all together 6 countries!
2 Spelling
For an alternative explanation, with sound clips, check: Easy Croatian.
Usually, basic language courses give pronunciation rules. I find that somewhat strange — after all, a language is primarily spoken, writing can vary. If fact, over centuries, Croatian writing system did vary, but nowadays it settled to a quite simple one. Roughly, there is a rule: one sound = one letter. However, some "letters" are actually "double". But they are really considered as true letters, and have own entries in dictionaries and like.
3 Basic Phrases
I will here list some basic phrases, and some basic patterns of simple sentences. First, most basic words and politeness:
4 Types of Words
This chapter should prepare you for what lies ahead, to introduce some basic concepts.
For some reasons, English grammar divides words into various "parts of speech". I would rather use a phrase "types of words". In scientific use people prefer "word classes". I would rather use class to sub-divide various types.
I hope you know at least about nouns (e.g. "Sun") and verbs (e.g. "shine"). There are also adjectives (e.g. "yellow"), etc. Croatian has all these types, similar to English.
5 Basic Sentences
• • • Easy Croatian: 02 Simplest Sentences, 03 Objects
In this post I'll describe the structure of simple sentences. I have a serious problem - English is, in a sense, a very peculiar language. Regarding the sentence structure, most languages of the world are not so rigid as English is. In fact, even Mandarin Chinese is (in this aspect) more similar to Croatian. Germanic languages (English included) and French are somewhat different from the bulk!
6 Cases Survival Guide
Introducing Cases
This post will introduce you to grammatical cases. English has 2 cases (the subject case and the object case). However, their forms are different only for pronouns ("we" vs. "us").
Cases are forms of words when used in various places in a sentence (subject, object, indirect object, etc.)