Why teach

You might want to learn Serbian one day because Serbia is the largest exporter of raspberries in the world. But it is much more likely that you will be inspired to learn this language by your interest in the culture of the Balkans. Balkan music, colorful films of Kusturica without dubbing, attractive South Slavic men (and women), real estate in Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia, as well as the opportunity to proudly say: “I read Pavic in the original” are good reasons to take up learning the language.

A little about the language

Serbian is a Slavic language, due to minor differences, often combined with Montenegrin and Croatian into one Serbo-Croatian language. Serbo-Croatian is spoken by about 20 million people, which allows it to be 39th in the ranking of languages based on the number of speakers.

In the Serbian language, two thirty-letter interchangeable alphabets coexist: Vukovica, based on the Cyrillic alphabet, and Gajevica, based on the Latin alphabet. The official alphabet in Serbia is still considered to be Vukovica, the symbols of which almost completely coincide with the Russian ones, but instead of Ёё, Ий, Шшч, Ъъ, ыы, ьь, Ее, Yuyu, Yaya six other letters are used: Јј, Ћћ, Ђђ, Њњ, Љљ and Џџ.

Some facts

1. The main rule of the Serbian language would be liked by many Russian schoolchildren and all those for whom spelling norms are difficult: “Write as you speak and read as it is written” (write as you speak and read as it is written).

2. There are four types of stress in the Serbian language: a long descending stress, indicated by a cap (“љŷdi” - “people”), an ascending stress, indicated by a stroke (“počétak” - “beginning”), a short descending stress, indicated by two strokes (“nebo” " - "sky"), a short rising accent, indicated by a back stroke ("kaput" - "coat"). Therefore, the phrase “woe, woe, woe, woe” in the Serbian language, when pronounced correctly, has the meaning: “The forest above burns badly.”

3. In Serbian, there are words where there are no vowels at all: “vrh” (“up”), “pr̂st” (“earth, dust”), “trk” (“square”), “smrt” (“death”). So, it is quite possible that popular demotivators with “zbs” have Serbian roots.

4. The favorite letter of the Serbs is Ch. In Russian it is always soft, but in Serbian it exists in two versions - soft (Ћћ) and hard (Чч). The familiar name “Katya” is pronounced “Kacha” in Serbian.

5. Serbian has a lot of “false friends of the translator” - words that sound like Russian, but in fact mean completely different objects and concepts:
"cookie" = "baked pig",
"belly" = "life"
"art" = "experience"
“obscene language” = “native language”,
and the word “right” means “directly,” which pretty much confuses all Russian tourists asking local residents for directions.

6. For the Russian ear, many Serbian words, phonetically (but not semantically) similar to Russian ones, sound funny: football in Serbian is “nogomet”, kiss is “polyubats”, and the famous book by M. Mitchell “Gone with the Wind” - “Prokhuilo sa” tuft."

7. When meeting, Serbs ask each other: “Hello, where are you?” This does not mean that for some reason they do not notice the interlocutor - the phrase is an analogue of the English “Hi, how are you?” or Russian “Hello, how are you?”

8. The poem “Silentium!” Tyutchev translated into Serbian sounds like this:

Be silent, secret and hide everything,
Feelings like dreams,
May you in your soul, at the bottom
And they sprout silently, and die
Whoever brings down the star sprinkles:
Oh, surrender to them and be silent!
Because what can the heart say?
How is another to understand that?
That, in which life is dear.
A thought, told, is a lie.
It doesn't burn, it doesn't stir hot
Get drunk already and — shut up.
To live in yourself know —
You have a magical world in your soul,
A tangle of secret thoughts,
And the outside noise is the end of them
And the light of day omens:
Listen to her song and keep quiet!..

BG thanks Petar Peric for his help in preparing the material.

5 places where you can learn Serbian