An Italian cellist’s journey into Serbian Language — Lesson 4

Introduction chapter — Practice time

Welcome back!

Every time we complete a chapter, we will go through some of the most relevant exercises found in the book, analysing with special care the mistakes I made and what the thought process should have been in that case.

Audio exercises

In these exercises, one needs to listen to certain words in ekavski and ijekavski. I will simply list the most interesting words to kickstart your dictionary, in Serbian:

Српски	Italiano	English
Девојка	Ragazza	Girl
Пролеће	Primavera	Spring
Песма	Canzone	Song
Дете	Bambino	Child
Београд	Belgrado	Belgrade

We mentioned in an earlier lesson that Serbian has four accents, two short ones and two long ones. Trying from the vowel E, we have the two short accents, è and ȅ, and the two long accents, ȇ and é. To make things overly simple—as they should be at this stage—, short accents produce a narrower sound, and long accents produce a broader sound. While these accents are not written out in ordinary writing, they are crucial to foreigners who need to understand the proper pronunciation. For example, бêло (bianco, white), has a long e, while мȅсто (luogo, place), has a short e.

Listening to the teacher speaking, I tried to associate those accents with something I knew: the ˆ long accent makes the vowel on which it is applied sound 1.5-2x as long as normal, while the ˵ short accent makes the next consonant sound 1.5-2x as long as it would be.

Listen and repeat

The next section was about listening to the teacher reading some texts and then repeating them out loud while reading them written in Cyrillic. Not too bad as the first exercise! Few things learned that anticipate what we’ll learn in future lessons:

• Serbian uses cases like German, Russian, and yes, Latin!
• за + accusative = for something/somebody
• код + genitive = at somebody’s place
• у + locative = state into place
• у + accusative = motion to place
• испод + genitive = under something/somebody
• поред + genitive = next to something/somebody
• од + genitive = from something/somebody
• са + instrumental = with something/somebody
• са + genitive = about something
• на + accusative = on something

Listen and read

The next section contains five children’s rhymes. At this stage, it is not essential to understand their meaning, rather practicing pronunciation and reading Cyrillic. If you want to listen to them, here are their titles and authors:

• Добрица Ерић, Принцеза (Princess – Principessa)
• Симеон Маринковић, Звонце (The Chime – Il campanello)
• Драган Лукић, Фифи (Fifi)
• Љубивоје Ршумовић, Ал’ би било фино (It would’ve been nice… — Sarebbe stato bello…)
• Божидар Тимотијевић, Трчи, трчи, трчуљак (Run, run, little runner – Corri, corri, corridorello)

Listen and write

The final exercises for this introductory (!) unit require us to listen to the track, with the Latin suggestion, and then write them down in Cyrillic. Here are some new words for you:

Српски	Italiano	English
Жена	Donna	Woman
Кућа	Casa	Home
Школа	Scuola	School
Хлеб	Pane	Bread

Bottom Line

That’s it for this short lesson!

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See you (hopefully soon) for another lesson, when we will face the closing exercises for this introductory unit!