Foreigners usually know Croatian and Serbian as one language: Serbo-Croatian. This term, however, doesn’t exist formally anymore. That was politic term related to the language spoken in Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija). Still, it’s in use only in the context of learning those languages as a foreigner language. The fact is, they are so similar that foreigners sometimes don’t notice any difference.

However, there are some differences that you can see in more detail in this blog article. Here we’ll mention just the main ones: in Croatia, it’s used Latin script, while in Serbia, there are both Cyrillic and Latin in use. There are some differences in vocabulary: some words are completely different, while most of them are different only for ije/je (Croatia’s language and Bosnia’s language) and e (Serbian language).

Still, Croats and Serbians, as well as people living in Bosnia and Montenegro, understand each other with no need for translation. So, I usually compare these languages with British, American and Australian English. You can check if you can hear the difference by listening to any of the audio stories. Each one includes both the Croatian and Serbian versions.

However, there is only one analysis per story for both versions since, as I said, the languages mainly have the same grammar structure, sentence order and other elements. If there are some differences, I note them and explain.

There is no rule what people will find learning the Croatian language and the Serbian language easy and what people will say that is is hard. Serbian and Croatian are Slavic languages, which are known as more complicated languages than world languages such as English, Spanish, Italian, French, German… That’s because the language logic is different. Slavic languages include grammatical cases, and perfective and imperfective verbs.

Those topics are the hardest to learn for students, but not for all of them, especially not for the students from Slavic countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia, and others, who understand the language rules better than non-Slavic speakers. But Slavs still need to learn Serbo-Croatian grammatical case suffixes because they are not the same as in their languages.

Also, in many cases, there are some words that exist in their languages, but they have a different meaning.

However, this is not a truth that only Slavs will speak Croatian/Serbian fluently, and people of other nations will never be able to. Definitely not true because I had many students, and still I do have classes with some of them who are from the West, started from zero, and today when they talk, they naturally use all the cases, with little mistakes here and there.