False friends and structural traps between Russian and Serbian

Everything you need to stop the closeness of Russian and Serbian from working against you, in one path. Start with the mechanism itself - five lexical false friends that keep an identical form while meaning something different, a preposition that governs a different case in each language, and two structural traps that move the danger from words to sentence order - then learn the vocabulary for naming a false friend, take seven guided lessons that build from each trap's own words to correcting the mistakes a Russian-background learner actually makes, listen to a Serbian friend gently correct her Russian-speaking friend's classic slips, read a first-person account of a newcomer's early mistakes in Belgrade, write about a real or invented moment a false friend tricked you, and finally describe aloud a time the similarity between two languages misled you.