Customer Reviews

Spoken Serbo-Croatian (Book I) (Serbian Edition)

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I'm quite pleased with this book. Most books on serbo-croatian are more inclined towards croatian because of the tourism spin on them. This book however uses both dialects equally. The book contains twelve chapters (as is usual with SLS books) covering most topics a visitor to the country would need i.e. getting food, going out, booking a room etc... Each chapter has a main dialogue, a review and notes on the sentences of the dialogue, pronunciation practice and conversation practice. The main dialogues at the start of each chapter are given in three columns along the page, one in english, one in cyrillic and one in croatian latin (slightly modified to help with pronunciation) and any variations in dialect are shown in brackets. The best part of this course is the conversation practice at the end of each chapter as it forces the user to think in the target language. So many courses I have seen simply allow you to listen to a dialogue and answer some short silly questions on them. This book (as do others in the series) pressure test your ability not only to listen to the language but to speak it competently. Usually listed as section 'E' this part of the chapter gives a number (usually 5-10) of small conversations which the learner is to act out WITHOUT HESITATION. For me this is one of the most important parts of the book as I have seen many language learners who would consider themselves competent in their target language stop or pause for thought mid conversation to think about what they need to say in their chosen target language because the vocabulary and structures have not been properly mastered. If you are serious about learning the language I strongly suggest using these books (this one and the follow on book two units 13-30). If you are not, go buy a cheap and cheerful phrasebook and don't waste your money because this old style blood sweat and tears method will put you off quickly.