Picture this: You bought a Serbian grammar book, you started learning by yourself, you know how to say "Dobar dan!" and "Volim te", but you are stuck after couple of days and can't seem to understand why does every sentence sound different in Serbian - does this scenario sound familiar?
Well, you are not alone! Serbian language is on of the hardest languages you could choose to learn, especially if you only speak English. Here top five reasons why Serbian language is giving you headaches:
5. Numbers in Serbian language
Let's count to five: jedna rakija, dve rakije, tri rakije, četiri rakije, pet rakija
What!? You must be thinking: "I'm drunk already!" Well, after learning rules with numbers, you will definitely have a headache!
Number one in Serbian behaves as an adjective: it changes gender, grammatical number and grammatical case according to the noun that you are counting.
Masculine and neuter words that you count with numbers two, three and four are in the special form called "paukal". They are not in genitive (as some might think)! After these numbers special rules apply: masculine and neuter words will have extension -a, feminine will be in nominative feminine form with extension -e.
Words that you count wtih numbers from 5 untill 20 will be in form of genitive plural. This applies to numbers as 30, 40, 50, etc. However, numbers like 21, 54 and similar will follow the rules as if you only count with the last number (1 or 4).
4. Grammatical cases in Serbian
Believe it or not, grammatical cases are not the worst thing that can happen to you! Oh no, there are far worse things! However, grammatical cases are the ones that you sooner or later have to learn early on, so they hit you in the face with full force!
Let's take a look at some examples:
Ja idem u Beogradu.
Ja sam u Beograd.
Which one of these two sentences is correct? Answer: neither one!
This is one of the most common mistakes I have with my students. Correct sentences should be:
Ja idem u Beograd.
Ja sam u Beogradu.
The word "Beograd" in the first sentence is in accusative grammatical case. The word "Beogradu" in the second one is in locative case.
Accusative is used with prepositions u and na to indicate movement to some location. Locative is used with same prepositions to indicate location of performing the action. Prepositions are the same, context and extensions are different.
There are many more rules about other grammatical cases to be learned as well!
Why is it:
"Putujem kolima" and not "Putujem sa kolima".
"test iz matematike" and not "matematika test"
3. Enclitics in Serbian language
How would you translate this sentence: "He told her that he gave it to them."
Is it: "On je rekao ona da on je dao ono do oni"?
or "On je njoj rekao da on je dao njega njima"?
or "On joj je rekao da im ih je dao".
The best option is the last one. Why?
First of all, enclitics are words without accents, without stress on a syllable. Because of that, these words run to merge with words that do have an accent. They are written separately, but when speaking Serbian, most of these words sound like a one very long word, even though they can be four separate words. If you also include the speed of someone speaking, you have a disaster! Most of the beginner students can't understand anything said using enclitics.
Common enclitics are short forms of personal pronouns in different grammatical cases. For example: N.sg. on, A.sg. njega (ga). D.sg. njemu (mu) and so on. The short forms of these pronouns (the words in brackets here) are use d more than the long forms, because they are not emphasising, while the long forms are. It would be as if you pronuncec the last word in this sentence a little bit louder every time: "He saw him." We don't want that to happen unless there is a good reason for it.
There are more enclitics: verb enlitics (sam si je; ću, ćeš, će), reflexive enclitic (se) and similar. There are special rules where to put them in a sentence and also a special rule which enclitic among all of these goes first, which comes second and so on. Yikes!
2. Logical subject in Serbian language
Boli me glava! You hear this before while learning Serbian, huh? Well, that is a very good example of logical subject.
There is a difference between grammatical subject (the one performing the action) and logical subject (the one affected by action or a state in some way). This logic does not exist in English, so it's not the problem of grammar as much as it is the problem of conceptualising the logic behind this.
In the previous example, "glava" is the grammatical subject and "boli" is the logical subject in grammatical case of dative. Why dative? Well, logical subject is used to express the person or object that is usually involunterely affected by something. Usually that is an emotion, physical or physiological influence. The subject is not responsible for that influence, so we draw a distance from it by using logical subject. Word "glava" is a grammatical subject since it is the one that hursts the grammatical subject - "me".
There are other examples: "Pije mi se kafa" or "Drago mi je". Sometimes there is no grammatical subject involved, but we have something called "depersonalised sentences" and reflexive forms. It's a mess!
1. Verbal aspects in Serbian language
Here it is! The number one problem for all of us, even the Serbian language teachers! Verbal aspects cause so much problems that they deserve the number one place for being the reason why Serbian language is hard to learn!
You probably noticed the difference between:
Ja sam pio kafu.
Ja sam popio kafu.
What is the difference? It's in the duration of the action! In the first sentence, the action was happening for some time in the pas, while in the second sentence it has finished in the past. You might say: "Oh, well that's simple, it's like a difference between past simple and past continuous tense". Well, not quite. This is not a difference between tenses, these are different types of verbs, like variations of the same verb. They can be used in past, present or future tense. They can also be used with modal verbs.
You can say:
Ja pijem kafu.
Ja hoću da popijem kafu.
Grammatical aspects tells us how some action extends over time. If the action is completed, we call those verbs perfective. If it is still lasting, we call them imperfective. These verbs have the same root of the verbs. You can change the aspect of the verb by adding a prefix at the beginning of the verb. By doing this, you alter the meaning pf the verb and now it can mean totally different thing. The reason why all of this is even more complicated is that there are so many prefixes you can add and they are not the same for all verbs. One prefix does not have the same meaning with all verbs.
Example:
plaćati - to pay (imperfective)
platiti - to pay (perfective)
All of these re perfective as well:
preplatiti - to overpay
naplatiti - to ask for payment
doplatiti - to pay more (to add)
isplatiti - to pay out
otplatiti - to pay out (everything)
pretplatiti - to subscribe
These prefixes are quite productive, you can make a lot of new verbs using them. They are also quite unpredictable and there are not many rules or a strict system to learn them. Many of them carry part of the information with them and then change the meaning of the verb when you peice them with it. It takes some time to get used to all of this, so it's usually learned later on in the courses.
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