Customer Reviews

Beginner's Serbian with 2 Audio CDs (Hippocrene Beginner's Series) (Serbian Edition)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I used this text in a class, and found it to be invaluable. Regardless of whether like myself you're just trying to learn enough to get around and maybe read a newspaper, or you're hoping to become fluent, this is the perfect textbook. The material is presented in a clear manner, and chapters are organized in a sensible way. The complexity of the grammar in Bosnia, Croatian, and Serbian can seem daunting, but this text allows you to learn what you need. The story of the characters running through the text is also pretty funny, and very regionally appropriate. Although the Serbian version is of course designed for the Serbian variant, I have found it to be very useful for my travels in Bosnia and Croatia.

I have been trying to learn Serbian for a few years now, and out of all the books I have put my hands on, this one has gotten me the farthest, and I have only gotten through the first 2 chapters so far! Can't wait to go on! Not only does it provide a history of Serbia in the beginning, in the end of the book it provides a key to all the exercises, as well as both a Serbian-English Glossary, and an English-Serbian Glossary. Each chapter is just long enough to teach you lots of new material, yet not overwhelm you. There are exercises at the end of each chapter that help you guide yourself so you know whether to move on to the next chapter or go over the material again before going on. This is THE BEST TOOL for learning Serbian if you aren't living in the country!

This book is a MUST HAVE for any current student of Serbian, anyone interested in learning the language from scratch, and anyone just looking to brush up on and hone their knowledge. This book makes what I had previously thought to be a difficult language easy, accessible, and fun to learn. The book is well organized, easy to read, and has been of immeasurable help to my classmates and I, as well as friends traveling to the Balkans. I found the audio CD's also to be a great help.

This book is fantastic, covers grammar especially well and more thorough than other texts. It has definitely helped with my comprehension, writing, and speaking.

I have no previous experience with Serbian and was interested in familiarizing myself with the language for an upcoming trip. I purchased this book based on the positive reviews here, but as a total beginner I found the pacing was much too fast. It may be an effective book as part of a class, but on its own I felt that the chapters tried to present too much information at a time without enough review or exercises. Also, the dialogues on the CD are quite fast from the very beginning. Ultimately I ended up purchasing "Complete Serbian" from the Teach Yourself series, and found that to be more along the lines of what I was looking for in terms of pacing and style. "Beginner's Serbian" might be useful to come back to if I want to study further, but it just wasn't effective for me as a beginner's book.

Has a nice mix of cyrillic and latin, so that you're prepared for reading in either one.Haven't tried the audio CDs yet, which I probably should. In conjunction with a livemocha account, I'm feeling pretty good about this.

This book is reasonable. It is written in a comprehensive way. As a teaching material, it is good to learn progressively with adequate examples and exercises.

I thought the audio would be english translated to serbian but it's all in serbian. Sometimes the audio speaks serbian too fast when in conversation.

I'm a complete starter with Serbo'croat..not a lot of material to chose from.but I got off the ground with Pimmsleur cassettes..very repetitive but you do get used to the sound of the language;the next stage I'd recommend is teach yourself serbian book with two CDs by Ribnikar and Norris ;Vidan &Niebuhr Beginner's Serbian is very much Curate's egg..the book is excellent and clear..the CDs however have very broad accented Serbian speakers who leave me floundering with the pause and replay buttons..little or no thinking or repetition pause time.My favourite learners' courses are Learn in your Car cassettes..but I think not available for Serbo-croat

The book is very good, however the CD is bad: speakers are much to fast for beginners and swallow half of the syllables...
But as the serbian prononciation is not to complicated for Germans it is okay.