Is Croatian a difficult language to learn?

Question

I want to learn to speak some Croatian, I'm interested in the culture because two of my grandparents are from there. Also, is the Serbian language the same as Croatian?

My first language is American English.

Answer 1

Serbian and Croatian are mutually intelligible, meaning that they are two dialects of the same language. You might compare them to American English and British English, for example; there are some differences, but users of these languages can pretty much understand each other. However, because of social factors in the former Yugoslavia, Serbian and Croatian speakers want to be different from each other, so they will tell you that they don't speak the same language. Bosnian is also a dialect of this same language.

As far as the difficulty, Croatian is a Slavic language, related to Russian, Czech, and so forth. These languages are related to English because they are part of the Indo-European family. For an English speaker the language will likely be more difficult than Spanish, say, but easier than Japanese. All languages have some easy things to learn and some hard things to learn.

I think it's great that you want to learn Croatian. If your grandparents are willing to speak to you in Croatian, I think it would be great for you to learn just by listening to them as you spend time together and do things together like simple household tasks. Language learning is always beneficial, in my opinion.

Answer 2

It will be difficult, but not insurmountably difficult, for the following reasons (these are things that don't exist in Romance languages or in English): - imperfect/perfect verb forms - neuter gender - declensions of nouns - verbs with fewer vowels make pronunciation somewhat difficult (vrt, vrh, brdo, etc.) - very, very few Latin cognates (even the months are completely different) If you study and practice a lot, I'd say 6 months - 1 year to get conversational, and maybe 2-3 years to become fluent.