Serbian Writing Challenge Српски
Recently I've been too busy, to actually write something for my blog but I did some language learning nevertheless. Almost three weeks ago, I did a small Serbian writing challenge and after looking a bit into the Serbian grammar and pronunciation, I have to say that it is indeed a very intriguing language. It can be written both with Cyrillic and Roman letters, it has seven cases, it uses different verbs depending on the aspect and it has a pitch accent.
I thought that the accent shouldn't be a problem with my knowledge of Chinese. But diacritics for the accents are only used in linguistic literature and the accents have to be learned individually for every word since there aren't many rules regarding the accents. Also, the diacritics are different to the ones used for Chinese. "è" marks a short rising tone in Serbian, but a high falling tone in Chinese. "ȇ" is a long vowel with falling tone in Serbian, while "ě" is a low falling-rising tone in Chinese. I already have a knot in my head.
I could already read the Cyrillic script and apart from some letters that I tend to mix up (ч, ц, џ, ђ), reading and writing is the easiest part about Serbian.
The Resources
For my writing challenge, I only used three resources: a German-Serbian online dictionary, Wiktionary and a Serbian grammar book for Germans: Grammatik des Serbischen.For getting used to the pronunciation, I recorded myself reading some of the tongue twisters and idioms in the grammar book and send it to a friend for feedback. I also shadowed this recording of tongue twisters: https://soundcloud.com/magdalena-petrovic-1/brzalice-01.
"Crni jarac crnom trnu grize crn vrh. Ne grizi mi, crni jarče, crnom trnu crn vrh!" (A black billy goat is chewing the thorny bush's black top; Don't chew, black billy goat, the thorny bush's black top.)
What do the Serbians have against vowels?
More fun tongue twisters can be found here: http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/sh.htm
After the writing challenge, I continued to write a couple of Serbian sentences daily (apart from my recent holiday in Spain) and found this resource useful for learning how to tell the time in Serbian:
https://tonguetalk.wordpress.com/
The Music
Whenever I write in a foreign language, I listen to music in that language. This is my Serbian playlist with bands, which play very groovy, funky music and also reggae. The Serbians definitely have the grooves!
IrieFM once won the Award for best European Reggae Band.
Ničim izazvan: Glas
Bane Lalic & MVP: Celu noc i celi dan
Zemlja gruva!: Najlepše želje HD verzija
S.A.R.S.: Lud
Здраво, зoвeм ce Мириам и живим у Немачкој. Моја мајка је Јапанка, мој отац је Немац и мој муж долази из Кине. имамо три дѐтета: два сина и једну ћерку. наши синови су у Кини рођени, али наша ћерка је у Немачкој рођена. Радо учим језике. Говорим енглески, јапански и кинески, али учим исто шпански и арапски. Моја српска другарица каже да српски је веома тежак. То не верујем. Подучавај ме српски!
The translation is: Hello, my name is Miriam and I live in Germany. My mother is Japanese, my father is German and my husband is from China. We have three kids: two sons and one daughter. Our sons were born in China but our daughter was born in Germany. I like learning languages. I speak English, Japanese and Chinese but I am also learning Spanish and Arabic. My Serbian friend told me that Serbian is difficult. I don't believe it. Teach me Serbian!
My text was corrected on italki: the corrected version
If you compare it to my Amharic writing challenge, you can see, that Serbian was way easier: http://lingotopia.blogspot.de/2017/04/amharic-challenge.html.
The Result
This is my original text in Serbian:Здраво, зoвeм ce Мириам и живим у Немачкој. Моја мајка је Јапанка, мој отац је Немац и мој муж долази из Кине. имамо три дѐтета: два сина и једну ћерку. наши синови су у Кини рођени, али наша ћерка је у Немачкој рођена. Радо учим језике. Говорим енглески, јапански и кинески, али учим исто шпански и арапски. Моја српска другарица каже да српски је веома тежак. То не верујем. Подучавај ме српски!
The translation is: Hello, my name is Miriam and I live in Germany. My mother is Japanese, my father is German and my husband is from China. We have three kids: two sons and one daughter. Our sons were born in China but our daughter was born in Germany. I like learning languages. I speak English, Japanese and Chinese but I am also learning Spanish and Arabic. My Serbian friend told me that Serbian is difficult. I don't believe it. Teach me Serbian!
My text was corrected on italki: the corrected version
If you compare it to my Amharic writing challenge, you can see, that Serbian was way easier: http://lingotopia.blogspot.de/2017/04/amharic-challenge.html.
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