Hi everyone and welcome to my channel. I'm Liz and
I'm an Australian who accidentally fell in love
with Serbian and the Serbian language and today...
I will share why Serbian is really difficult for us
English speakers
And I'd just like to say if you didn't understand what I just said
I do subtitle all of my videos in English
and Serbian, so you can find that in the bottom right hand corner
Now available in Vietnamese AND French 👍
Alright. Beauty. Let's move on.
First thing. Double Negation!
In English if I use double negation
my mum would say, "No rice for you!"
Ahh... my trauma...
So when I speak Serbian
I need to change my way of thinking
We only have one chance to show
our emotions...
our feelings....
for example:
"I DON'T have anything"
but in Serbian, you have two chances
"Ja NEmam NIšta"
"bre"
We always struggle with words that have "nj" and "lj"
in the same word
"Ljiljana"... "Lji"... "Lji"... "Ljilana"
"Ljilana".. am I doing it right?
and...
about their... um...
"opinions"
"opi... nio... ns"...
"re-flec-tions"...
* breathe *
Now I'm better, but when I was a beginner...
Not possible...
Also we struggle with
Čč and Ćć
Dž
Ž
and
Đ
They are really hard for us...
3rd
In English and in French, you have
you have two different constructions to see
the difference between imperfective and perfective
but in Serbian, you need to know which is which
for example, "to jump" (imp.) and "to jump" (per.)
"Skakati" is imperfective. I am "continuing" to jump
and "Skočiti" is perfective... "done"
the constructions are the same
it is really difficult for us to know which is which
You just have to "know"
to "feel"...
I feel like every time we just have one word in English
Serbian has at least 3
Next: Onda, zatim, sledeće, potom
Another example is Really
Baš, stvarno, zaista...
Also Serbian families... you have many many words for
for everything
Serbian has a word for...
Great, Great, Great, Great, Great...
Grandmother
Parđupana
I can't believe.
In Serbian if you change or add a prefix
The meaning for the word is different
Preface, Contract, Excuse, Agreement, Convincing, Response
Maybe you have more but nothing comes to mind
Maybe you've seen this meme
but I have something better...
In French, the stress is always at the end of the word
But in English and Serbian, it is usually random
Serbian accents are the combination of
Stress and Tone
in English we have the same thing
For example, "object" and "object"
and in Vietnamese we have tones
tao: me, I (impolite way of saying, informal)
táo: apple
tào (lao): nonsense
tạo: create
tảo: algae
It is why Vietnamese sounds like cats
mao, máo, mào, mạo, mảo,
mao, mao, mao
That was a famous song
In Serbian I'm never sure
where the accent is in the word
but it's not a problem because in Serbian
you always have context
Serbians always know what you would like to say
but obviously I still sound like a foreigner
Slowly...
When I was learning French, we would always complain
about genders. Why does everything need to be
male or female? But we always
would say, at least we're not learning
German or a slavic language
Because they have a 3rd gender...
* conspiracy music *
Serbian has three genders: Female,
Male and something in between...
Neutral gender...
We're not used to having genders and
how to change
words, adjectives and nouns with every gender
Cases, are obviously difficult for us
People think that English doesn't have cases
But we do!
We have Nominative, Genitive and Accusative
Old English had Dative
Yes, we have 3 cases, but we only
use them with pronouns
So cases are still really hard for us to learn
In English the meaning is in the order of the words
but in Serbian, because of cases
you can change the order of the words
So when you're listening to Serbian
You can't think word by word, you need to think
sentence by sentence
The hardest thing for me in Serbian to learn was
how to plan my sentences in advance
for example, this sentence...
"Which is my favourite Serbian word?"
5 seconds to say this sentence
If I would like to say this sentence, I need to know in advance
that at the end of this sentence is
"word"
and "word" is female
so I need to change
"Koji", "omiljeni", "moj" and "srpski"
to female gender
I'm not sure how people do this so naturally...
But I know, I need to continue,
to listen, to speak, to practice
and after 10 years, my Serbian will be...
... perfect.
* sigh *
and finally, that is all!
let me know what you think below
Thank so much again and I'll see you soon!
Byeeeeeeeee! 👋👋👋