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... 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! 👋👋👋
