You're always so transparent about when you're doing well and when you're not, and still very objective about it. Thanks for your consistent honesty!

Ne odustaj Steve, možeš ti to! Možda bi trebalo da ideš u less touristy areas :)

It's inspiring to see you admit to failure, and yet, not get too discouraged by it. I wish I was able to handle my failures this well. Thank you for making the video Steve, enjoy your trip. :)

I came to Croatia the first time 2 years ago and learned how to ask for a slice of pizza with mushrooms, although, it was a very bookish, non-colloquial way. I began listening to Easy Croatian on KZfaq and moved back here in September. I am leaving in 3 weeks. I am happy to say that I am conversational, although nowhere near fluent. I have had to go to the ER and dentist alone, and that worked well. Next week, I will share my testimony in Croatian at a small Baptist church. Your idea of reading more and broadening your learning scope is a great idea. I read from Hr.index online. I know a TON of Covid-19 and other medical lingo, now. Ha. Good luck on learning more and speaking better upon your return.

Thanks Steve for sharing your experience. Beautiful opening shot! Always appreciate hearing about your experiences. Peace

I love your honesty , its why i follow and truly listen to your advice , thanks once again for sharing and love the video!

Using the language is so hard in touristic areas, everyone speaks great English and wants to move on. And even if they do not move on, if their English is better than your their language, it just makes sense to communicate in the language that has the biggest overlap of understanding which is usually English. Also, I know that producing the language is important, but understanding it is a success as well.

I hopelessly muddle up Russian and Croatian and so can't speak either of them properly at all! I also find difficulty distinguishing the spoken endings of the words - somehow I just don't hear them, so find it difficult to understand the sense. More listening! More spoken practice - a tutor is a good idea. I have learned to read Croatian which I find very helpful when I'm there.

Thank you for sharing this video. It is really motivating.

VERY interesting Steve! From my experience (studying 7 foreign languages) - some are just harder (or easier) than others to get to the stage when communication comes out - especially if in a setting where those in the country you are visiting speak much better English than your ability to speak their language ... THANKS for this video (with the scenery at the end - :)

Thanks for yet another inspiring video Steve! Hope you had a good time here in Croatia. And if you ever want to learn more Croatian by talking to a native speaker, let me know! :)

Wow!!! Super interesting and realistic perspective...Food for thought!!

A problem you might run into in Croatia is regional dialects. Dalmatia has it's own distinct dialect, which can be confusing. For example, they tend to end verbs, where the case is the person saying they are doing, with N instead of M. So I might say trčim, I am running, but in Dalmatia they might say trčin. It's a subtle difference, but one you might run into as well as other idiomatic peculiarities. I believe the dialect in Dalmatia is so noticeable because they had their own language there for a long time, Dalmatian. Sadly, it went extinct at the end of the 19th century.

Vc faz a diferença! Sucesso mestre

Have a great anniversary!

Compliments, Steve!

enjoy your trip Steve when you come back you'll study hard on it and maybe next year this time you'll have great time with your Croatian there

It's not a failure at all. It's just a language learning reality. It takes time, but eventually, you'll get it.

Beautiful country! I went in 2012.

I found out too that Croatian was easy with a knowledge of Russian (words, grammar...) but, as I was learning Italian and Spanish together for business purposes, I quickly was mixting Croatian and Russian. So I stopped studying Russian. The second point is I asked my Croatian online teacher to not speak English or German if possible and started real dialogs after five lessons in order to have my mind focus on Croatian. (when starting a new language from scratch, I always have 12 lessons at the minimum with a native teacher. The most difficult thing in my case is "stress". As you don't find vocabulary books with the four tones, you have to guess or use your knowledge of Russian or others slavic languages wich leads to think in Russian and start to mix. So with knowledge of the basic rules of stress, I randomly put tunes on words with a short rising on A and long falling on O or U in order to get the drum little music of the language with many mistakes but the spirit of it is there :-) I am creating my own easier grammar sheets too for cases.

I feel you on this one Steve. I’m learning Swedish right now. And apparently every single person in Sweden has perfect English. I think the way to go is to do Skype lessons.

thak you for sharing it. beautiful city❤👍❤

I wouldn't call it a failure, just a reality check. Also, it's really great that you're admitting when something doesn't go as planned or takes longer than expected. So many KZfaq polyglots set unrealistic expectations and pretend that they're achievable when they're clearly not, like becoming fluid within a couple of weeks or months (and trying to prove that with cutout phrases that probably won't get you far in most situations with native speakers who don't speak your native language or just don't have the time and patience to decipher what you're trying to say/ talk slowly and use simple language)

I admire even the attempt to start learning Croatian, it is not an easy language +different dialects make it difficult even for native speakers to understand each other. Hope you continue with it, and enjoy your stay 😊 sretno!

Hi Steve! Beautiful views indeed. Trogir is awesome. I was amazed by the beauty of the heritage of the city and its architecture. I guess the next bigger city you're going to visit is SPLIT, which is close. *Nastavi s učenjem tog prekrasnog jezika i nastoj ga govoriti cijelo vrijeme! Ugodan boravak!*

Rather than focus on people that are working, I have found it more effective to target fellow tourists who speak the target language in a setting where they have the time and inclination. So if you are sitting on the beach and the person next to you is a native German speaker they are more inclined to help you with your German because they have the time. Also a way to test their inclination, is to have the book you are using for learning clearly visible. That way it encourages them to ask you about your language learning and the conversation starts. I did this with Norwegian with a couple who spoke perfect English but were happy to help me practice

Go maybe somewhere east of zagreb, maybe some village in slavonia or go somewhere close by karlovac, there are only locals, little to no tourists and you'll have a great way to practice

The ending is beautiful; it sounds like a scene when you have to say goodbye forever to someone you'll never see again

If you go out of a normal touristic routes,it would be much easier to find a locals willing to speak with you in Croatian.

I was just in Croatia!

I think it may be difficult to speak because they have different variation of accents, the way of pronouncing words differ from region to region. So in Dalmatia they use something we call ikavsko narečje. For example, If you say I want milk, people in Dalmatia would say: "Hoću mlika", but in other parts of the country they use dialect we call jekavsko narečje, so they would say: "Hoću mlijeka." In Serbia we use dialect known as ekavsko narečje so we say: "Hoću mleko." It is challenging, but I have no doubt that you will succeed.

Great ending, gave me goosebumps.

interesting - although I can understand some of the languages, I have problems distinguishing between for example Polish, Russian and Czech when speaking

Our expectations are our worst enemies. Language learning takes time

I had the same problem with Spanish, already knowing Italian. I guess I progressed too quickly from the A2-Level to (passive) B2-level and wasn't at the end able to communicate in typical tourist-smalltalk-situations. Recently, I decided spontanously to travel to Poland and started the 10 days before "binge-learning" 2-3 hours per day. German is my language of origin and I'm fluent in serbocroat, so I bought or borrowed from our library literally all available self-learning courses (Hueber, Langenscheidt, Pons, Lextra), went through them quickly and added some course-material for extra audio-input (Klett, Buske, Witam-the other Hueber). I was successful, even if Polish is a lot more difficult than Spanish, because all the young waiters and shop-assistants, probably fluent in English, answered back in Polish! My brain was quite stressed and always near to a blackout, but I was patient with myself and able to handle my lack of confidence. My advice for your short-term stays: Use parallel a couple of self-teaching materials. You simply have to learn all those numbers, conjugations and tourist-vocabulary, but if you have different material, you wont get bored so easily and start remembering things more quickly. If you have some extra-time, you can still listen to more "luxury" stuff.

Can you share what you learned? As an online teacher of Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian, I agree: nothing is lost. Use the language more often if you get a chance. Govorite hrvatski sa ljudima i uključite se u online grupe. Potražite instruktora. Slušajte vijesti i gledajte hrvatske televizijske programe ili KZfaq video na hrvatskom. Puno sreće vam želim!

Knowing russian and some polish, i was able to speak croatian after waching croatian tv series for a month.. As much as I believe ministories are usefull at same point, but passive comprehensible input is King :)

😍Très belle vue ❤

Handy memory aids: Languagesgulper (com)'s Serbo-Croat page, basic-croatian blogspot (com), the wikitravel Croatian phrasebook, Wikipedia's grammar articles, the Glosbe dictionary, Google Translate. I also recommend making and learning by heart one's own lists of important or crucial "puzzle pieces" (such as the conjunctions) -- certainly of those which consist of more than one word + those that one has a harder time trying to find in many modern materials.

Hope you come back to studying croatian and that u give it a bit more time next time

Zadar... the city with the best sunset 🤗🤗🤗

Hi Steve! If you need someone to talk to and practice Croatian, let me know :) I'm Bosnian but the languages are rather similar, and I can adjust my accent to fit Croatian, and some words too.

Steve, the way some people are able to speak this or that language in two weeks or 24 hours is that they almost completely disregard comprehension. I wouldn't be able to do that without feeling like an impostor, but there is a lot of people who don't mind giving other people false impression of themselves (actors, magicians, con men). Such a person can dominate a discussion by overwhelming their speaker with words and phrases. Judging by videos I've seen on KZfaq, a typical exchange goes like that: Person A (language hacker): hello, my beautiful friend! Are you from China/Kenia/Mongolia/the Moon? Person B *in shock*: OMG, you speek Chinese/Mongolian/Moonish! A: yes I do! B: how long have you been learning? A: Oh, you know. I've started today. B: *unrecognisable gibberish* A (taking it in stride): Right. You know I learn by myself. B: *unrecognisable gibberish* A: Yeah! I know, language learning is not as hard as everybody thinks. By the way, would you like to buy my book? I explain there all my methods. B: *unrecognisable gibberish* A: That's great. Listen, mate. I have to go. See you around! Have fun in our town! Then they smile and wave at each other and feel great about that little exchange and then the language hacker would find some other person to throw the contents of their phrasebook at. Does that make you even a little bit closer to actually learning the language? Not really. But it makes person B feel nice and probably could open some doors for you in a foreign country.

I live in Zadar :-)

That's very true about it being easier when the people you're talking to DON'T speak your native tongue. Good part of why Anglophones in Canada don't speak French.

So you learn Croatian just before your trip, saying you can return to it anytime you want, then you switch back to Arabic, Persian, and Turkish - languages you've been learning for months now instead of continuing with Croatian to speak with people back home, or even trying to learn another language. What is it about those 3 languages that you won't continue learning Croatian longer, or start a new language? There must be a lot of different communities back home and probably encountered at least one member of those communities. Doesn't that motivate you even a little bit to at least try learning a few words from their language. If it doesn't, it kind of means you're partial, giving those 3 special attention, and seems like you don't care about the other ethnic groups or their cultures around you. If I met a Lithuanian or Burmese speaker for example, that would definitely motivate me to put the languages I'm learning now on hold and learn some of their language because I actually care enough to learn instead of remaining steadfast. Perhaps you "failed" in Croatian because you weren't truly motivated and learned it only for the trip; if you were, you'd continue learning it longer despite the failure. In any case, there will come a time when you'll leave the 3 languages in favor of new ones which you can return to anytime so in a way there's pretty much no point in giving them special attention unless you have plenty of chances to use them back home.

Salut Steve ! Il y a quelques années, je m'étais aussi penché sur le serbo-croate. J'avais eu une expérience qui se situerait aux antipodes de ce que t'as vécu en Croatie car j'ai été en Serbie. Etant donné que la Serbie n'est pas aussi touristique que la Croatie, les serveurs dans les restaurants prenaient le temps de discuter avec moi en serbe! J'ai jamais eu un cas où les gens me répondaient en anglais lorsque je leur adressais la parole en serbe. Par contre, à Sarajevo (déjà plus touristique), les gens préféraient communiquer en anglais avec les étrangers. Donc morale de l'histoire, si tu retournes un jour dans les balkans, essaie des villes comme: Visegrad (Bosnie), Palic (Serbie), Novi Sad, Nis, Beograd etc Tu seras surpris de la différence !

So why so much knowledge of English in Croatia? Italian or German maybe I could understand, but English? Following on from that, unless you have some strong personal connection with the place, why learn the language anyway, as opposed to one of the bigger Slavic tongues? Does it have a fascinating literature or riveting poetry or similar?

Croatian on the coast is not the Croatian you learn. Heavy dialect and Italian influence in wording.

I'm a native croatian speaker and i have the same issue with learning german 😂

iz zafrkancije ... it may be the most useful phrase of all in Croatia.

The sad truth is that even in Korea and Japan, English is pervasive now and everyone is trying to learn it. This makes trying to speak in Korean and Japanese that much more difficult and unnecessary. Even 10 years ago it wasn't like this.

2:24 to 2:32 - this is a good summary of my beef with "input only" approaches. It simply does not train the skill of forming meaning in your brain that is immediately broadcast to your mouth, which is what it is to speak a language fluently. ONLY trying to actually form meanings with the language does that.

we have a three very different dialects. you were out of luck to test your croatian in dalmacija :)

60 stories in 10 days? Wpw

Go toŠibenik

It's not the end of the world and what you achieved is better than nothing. Kudos for at least trying but did you honestly expect to be functional in a language like Croatian after only 2 weeks? It's like planning a trip to Iceland, learning Icelandic 2 weeks before going, and underestimating it's difficulty just because you know Swedish and German, it shouldn't be difficult, but you'd be surprised how convoluted it is. Even native speakers think so. You'd probably achieve more in 2 weeks learning a Southeast Asian language (except maybe Tagalog because of what people complain has a different syntax and confusing grammar) before going to those countries. Of course you never tried back then, you'll probably never learn them because many like yourself likely see ASEAN cultures as inferior to the rest of Asia. May kinikilingan ka. I was able to speak Thai and Cambodian to a fair extent after 2 weeks for each only because they're not as grammatically difficult as European languages. Cambodian, Indonesian, and Tagalog aren't tonal languages like the others so you can't say they're impossible to learn to some extent after 2 weeks unless you've tried learning them yourself.

Steve i told You i’d help You with a couple of skypes wouldve gone a long Way.

That's what I love about Japan, most Japanese don't speak English so when I'm in Japan it's sink or swim and I love it! Kakosi dobra and magarats: that's my Yugoslavian.

You can speak Serbian in Croatia as well. Just saying

"Everyone speak english so well" This is why English speaking Canadians can't speak French in Québec: everyone will speak English anyway...

Serbo-Croation*

There is no such thing as Croatia, Bosnian or Montenegrin language. Linguistically they are variant of Serbian language, such as dialects in English or German. All this ethnic groups are aware of same but they can not admitted that, similar to someone who is suffering from entrenched delusion.