Addressing people: letters and politeness

Everything you need to address someone correctly in Serbian, in one path. Start with the vocative - the case with no toehold in English at all, one new ending per noun class, and a plural that's always the same as the nominative - then learn thirty-four words for letters and polite address in the sentences they actually appear in. A run of guided lessons carries the case the rest of the way: masculine and neuter endings, feminine endings, three sentences that grow from a short hard-consonant call to a full sentence with a palatalized noun, two traps that turn a correct address into a wrong one, and a brother and sister deciding how formal to be in a birthday letter to their grandmother. Read about one student writing two very differently pitched letters on the same afternoon, write your own letter to someone and finally say a sentence out loud about who you write to.