Bosnian Language

Trying to learn Bosnian for someone like me, who has never encountered a Slavic language before, is a rollercoaster of shocks. Don’t get me wrong- it’s a beautiful languag. And if you learn Bosnian (which is, as I understand it, true Serbo-Croatian), you can also understand and speak Serbian and Croatian.

Although these are technically different languages (wars have been fought, after all), and keeping in mind that I am in no way an expert on anything, they are also… exactly the same. Just with some different words (apparently Croatia even has a yearly contest to replace foreign words with newly invented Croatian ones) and the occasional extra letter thrown in here and there.

Every time I thought I was making progress and starting to get the language, some new grammar concept would pop up.

Okay, I get the words-having-genders thing. Yay!

Oh, cases… Seven of them.

So basically, every word can have 3 genders x 7 cases = 21 forms.

Why????

Okay, I still don’t understand why the cases are there, but at least they are mostly regular and logical to apply or at least recognisable. I’ll never get any of them right, but that’s fine. People don’t get mad when I mess them up; they just stare at me blankly while trying to decode what I’m attempting to say. Eventually, they realise I used the wrong case, and everything is fine – they bravo me for trying and all is well.

A few lessons later: Oh, there are aspects now- svršeni i nesvršeni glagoli. Something to do with whether the action is finished or ongoing…or honestly, this is the part where my brain sort of gave up.

Slavs are geniuses. They somehow calculate the gender of a word they’re going to use ten words later in a sentence, figure out which case it should be in, decide whether the action is finished or not, and then magically apply all that from the beginning, to form a perfectly coherent sentence.

Geniuses!

For some phrases useful at a market, see the markets page. Looking for some swearwords? Click here..

Learning Bosnian