How Serbian works, where it came from, and what is worth knowing about it before the first lesson.
A recent article on this blog mentioned in passing that Бог becomes Боже when you address God directly. The same sound change is quietly running the comparative degree of dozens of adjectives too - and once you can name the pattern, an entire shelf of Serbian's seemingly 'irregular' forms stops looking irregular.
The A1 pronunciation lesson mentions, in one sentence, that standard Serbian technically runs on a pitch-accent system before setting it aside as too advanced for beginners. It is one of the more surprising facts a new learner can hear about the language: Serbian marks not just where a word is stressed, but how - rising or falling, long or short - the same four-way system found in Swedish, Japanese and Ancient Greek, and almost nowhere else in Slavic.
Vuk's reform gave љ, њ, ћ and ђ their final shape, but it didn't put the sounds there - a much older process did, one consonant meeting ј at a time. That collision is not a fossil. It fires today, in full view, every time a Serbian verb turns into its own passive participle.
Some of the commonest nouns in Serbian - blood, square, finger, garden - contain no vowel at all, and each of them is exactly one syllable. The r does the vowel's job. Once you can hear that, a whole family of words a Russian speaker half-recognises falls into place at once.
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