Learning Serbian /Croatian/Bosnian

Originally Posted by pthalo

thank you. you can listen to the others if you want to (http://pthalogreen.livejournal.com), to see how i was talking in september, august and july if you're curious... I didn't make all that many of them, but now that I have a microphone I'll try to start doing it more

i switched to hungarian a little bit in this one, which i wasn't really meaning to do. "jaj mit is mondjak" means "oh, what should i say" (ja sam stidljivo stvorenje, koji nikad ne zna šta da kaže)

i'm curious whether my accent has improved at all. i still have the problem of not hearing the language very much, just reading and writing.

Definitivno je bolje.Akcenat je sasvim ok,svi bi mislili da si naš gastarbajter(reč za našu emigrante na zapadu).
Oseća se mala nesigurnost,što je više nego normalno,ali napredak ti je impresivan.Koliko shvatam ti si iz Segedina?Onda ne bi trebalo da bude problem da imaš prijem barem nekih naših radio stanica sa severa.To bi ti pomoglo koliko toliko da osetiš taj govorni srpski.U krajnjem slučaju možeš i preko interneta da slušaš radio stanice i gledaš TV programe odavde.
Meni to dosta pomaže sa učenjem španskog.
Nadam se da si razumela sve ovo,ako treba nešto na engleski da se prevede samo kaži

Hvala Da, još uvek sam malo nesigurna kada govorim na srpskom, uistinu i sam nesigurna kada govorim u mikrofon na engleskom. Uzalud sam sama u praznoj sobi, ne mogu da zaboravim da to je audioblog i će me slušati. Vremenom će proći, mislim.

Da, živim u Segedinu. Mogu da slušam jednu radio stanicu iz vojvodine, i naravno, ima i na internetu, na primer na zbrka.com.

Phew! I did not embarrass myself then Thanks very much!
I am reunited with my language book in a few days! Looking forward to diving in.

How would you translate "mrzi mi da ___"? I sort of have a feeling of what it might mean, but I'm not a hundred percent sure.

na primer:

mrzi mi da pišem nešto
mrzi mi da čitam duže tekstove

etc.

Originally Posted by pthalo

How would you translate "mrzi mi da ___"? I sort of have a feeling of what it might mean, but I'm not a hundred percent sure.

na primer:

mrzi mi da pišem nešto
mrzi mi da čitam duže tekstove

etc.

It is "mrzi me da...."

It means something like :

"I don't feel like it" or "I'm too lazy to do it right now" or "I can't be bothered with that right now"....

thanks. that's sort of what i was thinking it meant, but i wasn't sure whether it meant that or whether it meant "ne mogu da..."

and I always mix up "mi" and "me". Even though I know that mi is dative (ona mi je dala knjigu) and me i accusative/genitive (ona me je videla). And I *get* that, but I always use the wrong one, even when I know which one is right. (For this phrase, I didn't)

I'll learn eventually.

http://pthalogreen.livejournal.com/625806.html vježbam hrvatski

Cao everyone,

I live in Holland right now and I go back to Bosnia every year, my family still laughs at me because I don't speak the language. There is noone who wants to teach me either and nog I've had enough so I thought I would look for help and found your Forum. You are doing a great job as I've seen. I'm gonna study all these pages before and if I need any help I hope some of you can help me out.

First Question: How do you say Holland? Is it Hollandski? Or something I have no idea. And does anyone know how to say Surinam?

Soo I do speak Dutch so if anyone needs some help or something just ask (Which I think is rarely because the language sucks)

Lol! Welkom op het forum Nanic
Well... Holland would be Holandija, Surinam is Surinam.

Cao, Maja

Thanks I'll go back studying lol

Originally Posted by Nanic

Thanks I'll go back studying lol

Graag gedaan :P

i noticed there are quite a lot of variations of the word "moj", like mojih, moga and so on can someone explain to me this variations, i cant quite figure them out.

thanks

this depends on a case and how they are used i the sentence, and also the gender of the noun involved.

so:

Ona je moja drugarica = she is my female friend [nominative]
One su moje drugarice = they are my female friends [nominative plural]
vidim moju drugaricu = I see my female friend [accusative]
vidim moje drugarice = I see my female friends [accusative plural]
dajem knjigu mojoj drugarici = I'm giving a book to my female friend [dative]
dajem knjigu mojim drugaricama = I'm giving a book to my female friends [dative plural]
Ovo je knjiga moje drugarice = This is my female friend's book [genitive]
Ona je jedna od mojih najboljih drugarica = She is one of my best friend's [genitive plural]
Idem sa mojom drugaricom = I'm going with my female friend [instrumental]
Idem sa mojim drugaricama = I'm gonig with my female friends [instrumental plural]

locative has the same form as dative i think. vocative doesn't have a form, it's just moj/a/e [masculine, feminine, neutral]

for neutral it's:

Ovo je moje selo. = This is my village
Ova su moja sela. = These are my villages.
Vidim moje selo. I see my village
Vidim moja sela. I see my villages
Ona živi u mom selu. She lives in my village. (locative, same form used for dative)
Oni žive u mojim selima. They live in my villages. (locative plural, dative plural is the same)

I'm getting bored of thinking up sentences. But for genitive it's "mog" and "mojih" for neutral (singular and plural) and instrumental is mojom, mojima

masculine:
nominative: moj, moji
accusative: moj, moje. If it's a person or male animal, you use "mog" instead of "moj"
genitive: mog, mojih
dative/locative: mom, mojim
instrumental: Mojom, mojim

i'm doing this from memory though, so someone might need to fix the mistakes.

a. That clarifies a lot. Specially the "mom" one. Thanks a lot.
Anyways i think the best way to learn this would to listen to a lot of cro stuff until its a matter of logic... because it doen't use any simple rules i see :P

well, the rule is that you memorise which case looks like what. but yeah, it's not like Hungarian, where the cases are pretty obvious.

also, the adjectives are conjugated a lot like "moj" is, so you say "u mom hladnom srcu" (in my cold heart), etc. and that's locative neutral.

Oooh I should have found this thread earlier! it's real helpful (and you guys are great teachers!) I was technically trying to learn Bosnian since over 1 year (using notes I printed out from net) but haven't put enough work on it. I've got a Croatian pocket dictionary though, since I didn't find Bosnian one, but it's still nice.

Now I should go back and start reading this thread from the first page!

Bosnian and Croatian are similar enough that after 10 months of study I still can't reliably tell the difference between them. So your pocket dictionary should be okay

I would recommend reading it from the beginning, there's lots of neat information here

The thing is that Bosnian language doesn't really exist (bez uvrede Bošnjaci ali tako je) so I don't know if you can find something for learning.
But you could learn Croatian either Serbian to speak with people from Bosnia and after you will see the differences...
Good luck!
I dobro došli na forum all new people

Either, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are all separate languages, or they are each different names for the same language. You can't pick and choose that some of them are languages and others aren't. Either they're all separate languages or they're all the same language. You can make valid arguments for either position.

If they're different languages, it looks better on all of our resumés under "how many languages do you speak".

i don't know pthalo. I may know much less (however the name of the language we are talking about) than you but we can agree that the differences between croatian and serbian are way more obvious than the differences between croatian and bosnian, and serbian and montenegrin.