17 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3
Merv
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5082 days ago
414 posts - 749 votes 
Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian*
Studies: Spanish, French
| Message 17 of 17 17 May 2011 at 5:04pm | IP Logged |
kyssäkaali wrote:
I started learning Finnish 4 years ago because of that annoying leek girl / ievan polkka song
that I'm sure a ton of people have seen. Peaked my interest, but I never would have thought I'd go this far with a
language that (at first) I was interested in only because of a song.
Really, I think you've got all the motivation in the world to learn Croatian or Serbian, and I hope you go through
with it! No such thing as an embarrassing motive. And really I think if a language has such an effect on you that
just hearing a few lines of it spoken on some random TV show is enough to get you fired up and ready to speak
it, you're more likely to stick with it and succeed than someone who decides to learn for example Chinese
because it's an "important business language" despite having no passion for the way it sounds, the grammar etc.
Kooky motives are the best motives:)
Also I suggest Croatian :D But I have no way of backing that up except for the fact that the language itself has
tickled my fancy for a couple years now. Combined with the fact that the vocabulary is being geared away from
those international words as was pointed out by someone in this thread (the names of the months) which makes
for more of a challenge = more fun!, AND because of the 4-toned pitch accent (which Serbian also has, alas) then
yeahhh, I vote for Croatian!
PS: Serbian uses both the latin and cyrillic alphabet by the way. Dunno if you actually have to learn both variants,
but it's something to keep in mind. |
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Pitch accent exists in practically all variants of the language except for far southern Serbia and in northwestern
Croatia it is reduced. The most vigorous pitch accent is to be found in Herzegovina amongst all three ethnic
groups living there. Standard Serbian, from my impression, makes a stronger distinction between pitch accents
than standard Croatian, and there is also a stronger distinction between č and ć and dž and đ. If you want to
learn Serbian, you need to learn both alphabets, but there is a one-to-one mapping between the alphabets
(unlike some of the Russian and Bulgarian Romanization schemes, this is a standard alphabet of the language),
so it should not be too difficult to master.
One book I've never read but have heard good reviews about is Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by British travel writer
Rebecca West. That might give you a taste of what you'd like to learn and a better sense of the culture(s). Beware:
it's long (over 1100 pages!), but supposedly very, very good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lamb_and_Grey_Falcon
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