The Reasons why to learn Croatian

Croatia Girls (Source: http://paradiseintheworld.com/croatia/)

1. Croatia is a country, which is extremely attractive for tourists. Especially attractive are various Croatian cities, such as Zagreb, Split, Rijeka, Dubrovnik, Poreč, Rovinj, or such natural places of interest as Plitvice Lakes National Park (Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera). If you want to save costs, it would be better to rent an apartment instead of staying in a hotel. However, Croatian landlords are hardly proficient in English and other West-European languages. Some of them can speak Italian (especially in Istria), but not everybody. Therefore, it is very important to be able to communicate with them in Croatian. 

My mother tongue is Ukrainian and I used to communicate with the Croats in my mother tongue. In spite of the similarity of Ukrainian and Croatian, there is no assurance that the mutual understanding between the interlocutors will be complete and adequate, at least because of a great number of so-called false friends. Therefore, in order to avoid various kinds of misunderstanding, it is worth while mastering Croatian at least in the volume necessary for the everyday communication.

2. Croatian has three twin-languages: Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. In the period of Yugoslavia, all these four languages used to be considered as the same Serbo-Croatian language. Actually, the difference between these four languages consists only in their vocabulary; their grammar is almost identical. That’s why, if you master at least one of these four languages, you will be able to understand all these languages.