Teach Yourself Croatian Book and 2 Audio CDs
Brand New Book and 2CDs
*learn how to speak, understand and write croatian
*progress quickly beyond the basics
*explore the language in depth
Teach Yourself Croatian starts with the basics but moves at a lively pace to give you a good level of understanding, speaking and writing. You will have lots of opportunity to practise the kind of language you will need to be able to communicate with confidence and understand Croatian culture. The book contains a pronunciation guide, a two-way vocabulary and a 'taking it further' section to direct you to further sources of Croatian.
There is plenty of opportunity to practise speaking and listening skills with two hours of accompanying recorded material available on two CDs.
About the Author
David Norris, the author, has taught Serbian and Croatian Studies since 1980. He is currently Senior Lecturer at the University of Nottingham.
About the Croatian Language
Croatian language is a South Slavic language which is used primarily by the inhabitants of Croatia and Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina and parts of the Croatian diaspora. It is one of the standard versions of the Central-South Slavic diasystem.
Croatian is based on the Ijekavian pronunciation of Štokavian dialect (with some influence from Čakavian and Kajkavian) and written with the Croatian alphabet.
The modern Croatian standard language is a continuous outgrowth of more than nine hundred years of literature written in a mixture of Croatian Church Slavonic and the vernacular language. Croatian Church Slavonic was abandoned by the mid-1400s, and Croatian as embodied in a purely vernacular literature Croatian literature has existed for more than five centuries.
Croatian, like most other Slavic languages has a rich system of inflection. Pronouns, nouns, adjectives and some numerals decline (change the word ending to reflect case, i.e. grammatical category and function), while verbs conjugate for person and tense.
Nouns have three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) that correspond to a certain extent with the word ending, so that most nouns ending in -a are feminine, -o and -e neutral and the rest mostly masculine with a small but important class of feminines. Grammatical gender of a noun affects the morphology of other parts of speech (adjectives, pronouns and verbs) attached to it.
Verbs are divided into two broad classes according to their aspect, which can be either perfective (signifying a completed action) or imperfective (action is incomplete or repetitive). There are seven tenses, four of which (present, perfect, future I and II) are used in contemporary standard Croatian, with the other three (aorist, imperfect and plusquamperfect) considered stylistically marked and archaic.
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