How Serbian works, where it came from, and what is worth knowing about it before the first lesson.
У меня нет денег and Немам новца match so closely, case for case, that a Russian speaker can be forgiven for assuming the whole pattern transfers. It mostly does - right up to the point where careful Russian keeps extending the genitive to ordinary negated verbs, and Serbian quietly stopped.
If you already think in perfective and imperfective, Serbian aspect is the smoothest part of the whole language for you. Two places still catch Russian speakers out: motion verbs, where Russian keeps a distinction Serbian gave up, and the handful of verbs where both languages use an unrelated word for the other half of the pair.
Russian speakers count eight cases in their own language and brace for the same number in Serbian. Serbian has seven - and the missing one did not disappear so much as merge into a case that already looked almost identical to it. Here is what that means for how much you actually need to memorise.
Russian technically still has a vocative case - it survives in Боже and a handful of other fossils. Serbian never let it fossilize: every name, every mama, every friend called across a room still takes a special ending, and a Russian speaker's safest instinct - reach for the plain nominative - is, for once, exactly the wrong one.
Almost any word in a Serbian sentence can be moved almost anywhere. Then there is a short closed list of unstressed words that may not open a sentence, may not be stressed, and must stand in a fixed order among themselves. Getting those into second position is the single change that makes a learner's Serbian stop sounding translated.
One takes the plain nominative, two three and four take a form of their own, five and everything above it take the genitive plural - and eleven behaves like five, not like one. A Russian speaker already owns this system in outline and will still get it wrong, because Serbian draws two of the lines somewhere else.
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