How Serbian works, where it came from, and what is worth knowing about it before the first lesson.
Diviti se and восхищаться mean the same thing, and a Russian speaker's instinct is to keep the case that already works. It doesn't transfer here - dative in one language, instrumental in the other - and it is not the only verb where a matching meaning hides a mismatched case.
Neither Serbian nor Russian kept a single inherited future-tense form from Common Slavic - both had to solve the same missing piece some other way. Serbian's solution is one auxiliary that works on every verb regardless of aspect. Russian's solution is not a solution at all in the same sense: it split the job in two and let the aspect system itself do most of the work. A Russian speaker's instinct to let aspect decide the construction is exactly right at home and exactly wrong in Serbian.
A Russian speaker reaching for possession reaches for у меня plus a genitive noun. Serbian's everyday equivalent skips both: the possessor turns into a bare dative clitic - ми, ти and му - clipped straight onto whatever is possessed, with no preposition anywhere in sight. Missing this one habit produces sentences that stay grammatical, get understood, and sound just slightly foreign every single time.
Serbian marks a reflexive verb with a free-standing се instead of a suffix, and most of the time it lines up with Russian's -ся closely enough to stop thinking about it. It is the exceptions - a handful of everyday verbs reflexive in one language and plain in the other - that make a fluent-sounding sentence suddenly wrong.
Serbian and Russian share the same question particle, spelled almost identically and descended from the same Common Slavic word. Russian narrowed its job down, centuries ago, to indirect questions and a handful of fixed phrases. Serbian never narrowed it at all - ли is still the everyday way to ask whether something is true, sitting exactly where second position puts it.
„Ја сам студент.“ carries a verb Russian's equivalent sentence does not: Я студент has none at all. Serbian's present-tense to be has never gone silent; Russian's did, centuries ago. The gap explains why dropping сам is the single most persistent mistake a Russian speaker makes in Serbian - and why the instinct behind it is not a mistake at all in the language it came from.
Old Slavic had four past tenses. Russian's modern past collapsed all of that into one form and leans entirely on aspect to say the rest. Serbian kept the old aorist alive - not as a museum piece, but as a tense you will hear in a folk song, in a novel, and occasionally in an exclamation someone's grandmother makes at dinner.
Russian has an infinitive and uses it constantly. Serbian has one too - and avoids it in exactly the situations where Russian reaches for it, replacing it with a small word, да, and a fully conjugated verb. This is not a quirk of Serbian alone; it is a shared feature of half a dozen unrelated Balkan languages.
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.
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