Croatian

Another chapter learnt, another chapter input.

Now up to chapter 5.

I don't feel like I've learnt that much but I do already speak a fair bit of a couple of other Slavic languages so everything seems pretty familiar already.

I need to learn some particularly Croatian words before I'll feel that I'm learning much new.

There just doesn't seem to be enough new vocab each chapter.  But perhaps I'm just not noticing it because of what I already know.

Croatian - Assimil

I've given up on the other courses... they weren't necessarily bad but I like the idea of working right through an Assimil course. Plus the Assimil comes with heaps of audio.

This is the brand-new course that's only been released within the last few months.

I'd made a start on the previous Assimil but it seems to me that it was actually Serbian.

I'm up to about chapter 3. So far so good.  The way they deal with imperfective and perfective verbs will be the big test though.

Croatian

I'll start with Croatian as it's something I'm working on intensively at the moment.

One of the biggest problems with Croatian is that for some inexplicable reason, most books don't indicate which syllable takes the stress!

The first book that I had for so-called Serbo-Croat was from about 40 years ago - Teach yourself Serbo-Croatian. But it was probably more Serbian but at least it did indicate the stressed syllable for all words with more than two syllables. I've got the newer Teach Yourself Croatian and Colloquial Croatian and the accents are missing.

Then I came across 'Dobar Dan' from Max Hueber Verlag. The accents are indicated, even the three tones of Croatian, on each word... but I hate the way the verbs are introduced without indicating whether they are imperfective or perfective.

In any case, it's all irrelevant now that the Living Language series has come out with Spoken World Croatian. It looks pretty good so far. And it comes with audio for the dialogues and even the vocab lists and grammar explanations. Superb!