How Serbian works, where it came from, and what is worth knowing about it before the first lesson.
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.
Serbian is written in Cyrillic and in Latin, and both are correct. Not two spellings and not two standards - two sets of signs for the same thirty sounds, which is why a Serb switches between them halfway down a street without noticing. Here is how the correspondence works, and the one place it quietly fails.
Knowing Russian buys you thousands of Serbian words for free. It also buys you a small, dangerous set of words that look identical and mean something else entirely - and the reason they betray you is the same reason the rest of them help.
One man spent forty years arguing that a written language should record the one people actually speak. He lost most of those arguments while he was alive - and then Serbian became one of the easiest languages in Europe to read out loud.
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