I arrived in Serbia in September 2019 and have been living here ever since. Although Belgrade has been my home for the last 5 years, I still don't speak the language... Shame on me!
I have a whole list of reasons to justify my failure: everybody speaks English, I don't know how long I'll stay, Slavic languages are too hard for a Portuguese native speaker, the Cyrillic alphabet is impossible to understand, and the list goes on and on...
Recently I gave myself a reality check and you know what? It's all bollocks! I didn't learn it because I didn't really dedicate myself... Tough truth!
How difficult is the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet? It's not! Although it is completely different from the Latin alphabet, each letter/phoneme of the Serbian Latin alphabet has its equivalent in the Cyrillic alphabet. From the moment you memorize these equivalents, you're good to go! Anyway, everything is written in both alphabets almost everywhere. So I really must tick that off my list...
Slavic languages are phonetic: each letter in Serbian has a specific phoneme that never changes You write exactly the way you speak and vice versa, contrary to Portuguese or any other Latin language, which have a zillion different sounds/phonemes for the same letters, especially the vowels!!
So, as far as learning the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, I have no more excuses: I got myself this super fun graphic alphabet (АБЕЦЕДА) by Ivana Baćković, a very creative Serbian graphic designer, and I have it in my living room. Now I just need to memorise it once and for all, and then learn the language beyond my "survival kit"! But trust me: the alphabet is a piece of cake compared to the language itself. Do you know what declinations are? No? Go and check... Serbian grammar has 7 of those...!
For more on Ivana's work, check https://www.instagram.com/twobirds.design/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRDR7y6sylA (with English subtitles)
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