4 comments about Hippocrene Compact Dictionary Bosnian-English English-Bosnian (Hippocrene Compact Dictionaries).

1. One could argue the need for a Bosnian dictionary - there are quite a few (dialectical?) differences between Bosnian and the manners of speaking in Croatia, Serbian, and Montenegro. But this dictionary is next to useless because it lacks anything beyond word-to-word translations, not taking into consideration the intricacies and double meanings in either English or Bosnian speach, such as homonyms or words with more than one meaning.

   Anyone interested in learning Bosnian is better off buying a decent Serbian, Croatian or Serbo-Croatian dictionary (Bosnian tends to lean towards Serbian vocabulary and Croatian pronunciation) and find a native speaker to guide him or her.




2. This is not very comprehensive Bosnian-English Dictionary but it serves a beginners purpose to start learning the language. It may not be the perfect introduction into Bosnian language (there are better Bosnian-English dictionaries out there) but it is concise and useful tool.



3. As our kind reader from Portland asked, is there really a need for Bosnian dictionary, one may look at him in utter surpise and ask "Why not?" Bosnian is NOT Serbian or Croatian or any of the other languages spoken in Balkans and when spoken in its pre-Communism, pre-Serbian and Croatian nationalism form it can sound completely incomprehensible to these two audiances.
   Morton Benson, that all of a sudden started calling his bestseller "Dictionary of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian standards" auspiciously putting Bosnian in the first place after Bosnians proved that they are nation, does not have great value to anyone interested to learn and/or develop their language skills. Drvodelic, native to former Serbo-Croatian language, may sound too advanced, and too expensive to those who want to have basic knowledge of the language and to add up to it after the initial contact with Bosnians.
   This Bosnian dictionary is not the best that there is there, not at all, paper quality is bad and there are no many words and phrazes that you can find in there. The target audiance of this dictionary is, obviously, foreigners who want to make initial contact with BOSNIAN people and this dictionary does enable them to speak to BOSNIAN people in the way that comes across as friendly and comprehensible to THEM. This dictionary, however, is best from the point that it did break through Bosnianphoebe dictionary publishers and that it did show Bosnian language uniqueness before Croatian and Serbian particularily, it clearly separates Bosnian from these languages because it does give raw Bosnian material.
   If you want to speak to Bosnians, people who always spoke this language, you are teh best off to buy this dictionary since it gives you the language in its spoken form, the form of Bosnian as we speak it today. If you do want to sound knowledgable of religious terms and nationalistic equipage, do buy Morton Benson, and if you want to sound stuck up and have people sneer at your ignorence, do listen to teh advise of our learned reviewer from Portland and keep on questioning "Is there a need for such a thing.
   Nek je s hajrom,
   Besmir



4. The dictionary is just good for a beginner, its a bit thin on vocabulary. Your also better off buying it straight from the publisher, it's cheaper that the used ones being sold!!

No comments about Berlitz Croatian Phrase Book & Dictionary (Berlitz Phrase Book & Dictionary).

2 comments about Croatian-English/English-Croatian: Dictionary and Phrasebook (Dictionary and Phrasebooks).

1. Looking forward to improving my skills in the Croatian language, I was appalled by the large number of glaring errors contained in this guide. There are dozens of mistakes, some truly unbelievable. For instance, the author doesn't seem to know how to conjugate the future tense. You may say "Ja cu citati" or you may say "Ja budem citala" but you certainly would never ever say "Ja budem citati", as he teaches! There are several glaring errors of this nature, and very, very many others not quite so serious, such as inaccurate translations i.e. questions translated as statements; word for word translations from idiomatic English, (making the phrase meaningless in Croatian); outdated vocabulary; and lots of typos. I am sure Mr. Susnjar knows better, perhaps his editing and proofing staff let him down. The organization of the book was good, as is the great number of phrases, if only one could be sure they were actually correct. Learning from this book does increase one's knowledge of the language, but who needs help learning to speak in a kinda-sorta mixed up Croatian. (Too many of us are already really good at that!) Hopefully a corrected edition will soon be forthcoming. Mr. Susnjar, fix up this book, and I will purchase it again - just teach us correctly next time.



2. I bought this as my first dictionary as I was learning the language. When I actually got to Croatia, I showed it to the native speakers (college students), and they pointed out more than 20 mistakes in as many pages.

   Other than that, I did find that the grammer portion (in the front) was helpful, and I do still refer to that quite often.

   Use this book as a rudimentary reference. For a more comprehensive dictionary to English, I suggest Langenschiedt's.

5 comments about Teach Yourself Croatian Complete Course.

1. In this review I'll try to provide a brief overview of
   a. The Croatian Language
   b. Teach Yourself Croatian

   a. The Croatian Language
   15 years ago you wouldn't have found any course in Croatian, only in Serbo-Croat. For almost all of the 20th century the term Serbo-Croat covered the language(s) spoken by Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs and Montenegrins. Today there is no agreement on whether there are one, two, three or four different languages. Most people recognise the existence of Croatian and Serbian and tent to view Bosnian and Montenegrin as Serbian varieties.
   I'm not from the region and I don't have any national feeling involved in this issue. Neither do I have any definite answer, but I can say this:
   - Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Montenegrins can all understand each other. Just as Danes and Swedes or Czechs and Slovaks can understand each other.
   - The difference between the forms is large enough to give away whether you're a Croat, a Serb, a Bosnian or a Montenegrin. The difference is definitely larger than between various English dialects.

   The most obvious difference is between "ekavian" and "ijekavin", two different dialect named after their realisation of "e".
   In Ekavian:
   milk = mleko, river = reka, village = selo
   In Ijekavian:
   milk = mlijeko, river = rijeka, village = selo
   In other words, not all "e"s are "ije" in Ijekavian but you get the picture.
   Now, all Croats, all Bosniaks and all Montenegrins use Ijekavian. So do many Serbs. The majority of the Serbs use Ekavian, though.
   In other words, all Ekavian-speakers are Serbs but not all Serbs are Ekavian-speakers and all Croats are Ijekavian-speakers but not all Ijekavian-speakers are Croats.

   Another difference is the vocabulary. Croats are Catholics, Bosniaks are Moslems and Montenegrins and Serbs are Orthodox. Another big difference is that Serbia and Bosnia first came under the influence of Greece and later were part of the Turkish Empire for hundreds of years. Croatia first came under the influence of Italy and later was part of the Austrian empire for hundreds of years. Naturally this has left its traces. Many religious words in Serbian are Greek, in Bosnian they're Turkish/Arab and in Croatian they're Latin.
   Apart from the religious vocabulary there are some other words that differ. Croatia has one set of words whereas the others have another set. In short, the picture looks like this:

   Croatian: Ijekavian, religious vocabulary based on Latin, Croatian-set.
   Serbian: Ekavian (mostly), religious vocabulary based on Greek, Serbian-set.
   Bosnian: Ijekavian, religious vocabulary based on Turkish, Serbiat-set.
   Montenegrin: Ijekavian, religious vocabulary based on Greek, Serbian-set.

   Just keep in mind that there are differences but that people understand each others. I've learned Croatian but Serbs have expressed delight over how well I speak Serbian...

   b. Teach Yourself Croatian
   The development of courses in Croatian and Serbian is rather interesting. Up to the early 1980s most Serbo-Croatian courses were based on the Serbian variety because that was the language spoken in the capital. Then came the "tourist invasion" and since the tourist areas were almost exclusively in Croatia almost all courses published in 1980-1992 were in the Croatian variety. Now, those courses are often republised under the name of "Croatian". In fact, Teach Yourself Croatian is exactly the same books as the old Teach Yourself Serbo-Croat. This means that Serbian has the upper hand in courses at the moment, because now that there is a need for courses in the language publishers go for completely new courses. I guess that within five years we'll see new courses appearing in Croatian...

   Comparing Teach Yourself Croatin to Teach Yourself Serbian, this one is substantially shorter and does not contain as much information. It is not a bad course but I wonder why they didn't make it as comprehensive as Teach Yourself Serbian. Both courses have the same authors and they were published at the same time, yet this one is only 2/3 of the other. Obviously that means that this course doesn't take the beginner as far as Teach Yourself Serbian does.

   If you've read my other reviews of courses you will know that I consider most Teach Yourself courses too short. Teach Yourself Croatian suffers from the same problem, unlike Teach Yourself Serbian.




2. I like that this book arms you with more than "tourist" Croatian, if you're seriously interested in learning the basics for conversations beyond ordering in a restaurant. The dialogues and exercises, and grammatical explanations, are generally clear and instructive.
   
   The weakness is that pronunciation, especially stress, is not explained fully enough. None of the words in the text are marked to describe where the stress goes, only saying at the beginning that the stress is unpredictable but never on the last syllable. Then, for the accompanying CD, they hire voice actors with heavy Zagrebian accents, which often put the stress at the end of the words! (sapun, racun, Englez, Hrvat, optimist, etc are all examples of words that have stress on the last syllable in Zagreb, but nowhere else).
   
   I think if they hired voice actors who speak a more "standard" Croatian (or at least have some variety among the speakers), and somehow use dots or other marks to show where the stress goes (like the Barron's guide, which is a very, very good phrasebook, actually), I would say it deserves 5 stars.



3. This book and accompanying CDs (2) provides an effective entry into Croatian. The dialogues are short, realistic, and contain the sort of vocabulary that is helpful for the new speaker.
   
   I have learned Czech before and was prepared for the main issues in Slavic grammar. The book provided enough depth to make be comfortable in generalizing beyond the dialogues presented in the textbook. I found the spoken dialogues helpful and clear. In general, this was a well-packaged and helpful book that provided a good way of starting to speak Croatian. I enjoyed working through the exercises and found the textbook clear, uncluttered, and helpful.
   
   One disappointing feature was the meager coverage of Croatian culture and customs.
   
   However, all in all a helpful language program.
   
   David S-G



4. Teach Yourself Croatian is a good start to learning the Croattian language, and is one of the few books out there that you can learn the language. My experience with the book though, based on learning other languages that they really dont make this as easy as they possibly could.
   
   1)Pronunciation: YOU MUST BUY THE CDs! If you dont I guarantee you will be saying words incorrrectly. There is little to no explanation on how to pronounce words correctly
   
   2)That being said, the dialogue on the CD can go very very fast. Too fast for a beginner. Not every dialogue or comprehension that is in the book is on the cd. I have to play the dialogues ad nauseum till i get them down. Thankfully I put them on my iPod so i can stop pause and go back easily.
   
   3)Its not very visual.People are visual learners. Its odd a language book without any pictures at all. I remember spanish books from high school being very very visual, with having pic tures next to all vocabulary words. This has none.
   
   4)Grammar. This book assumes you know a lot about language/linguistics. I made it to a bachelors degree without ever knowing what the genitive/dative/nominative cases are..and they do a poor job and only briefly explain it.
   Like other languages, nouns have gender, but the book only tells you once how to figure the suffixes out, then leaves you on your own to figure it out. A (m), (f), or (n) after every noun in the vocab table would have been much appreciated.
   
   5.Dialogue. This book is rather odd that it throws you into dialogues right away without even going over any basic vocab.Even by chapter 5 you dont know how to say Mother, Father or even bathroom. It also throws you into somewhat complex dialogue situations without building any basic sentence structure or concepts.
   
   Its not a bad book, but there is ample need of improvement



5. This introductory Croatian teach-yourself grammar is nicely laid out, pedagogically quite good, but it is also flawed: other than several minor errors in the exercises, it contains instances of vocabulary that Croatians react strongly to as reflecting rather the Serbian form of the language than the Croatian (e.g. the verb "happen"; some forms of the interrogative). The transition from a Serbo-Croat grammar to a Croatian grammar is not entirely successful. The accompanying CD is a nice start as an audio accompaniment, but only of limited help as the speakers speak FAR too fast, and while the CD tracks are numbered they are not labelled, so one has no easy way to relate them to the paragraphs and exercises in the book. Moreover, in several minor instances, the text being read on the CD does not match the text in the book.

1 comments about The Serbian Dane (Eurocrime).

1. Leif Davidsen is a well-known Danish author of thrillers. Many of his books have been translated into other languages, and "Den Serbiske Dansker" ("The Serbian Dane") has been translated to English, French, German, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian.
   
   The main person in "The Serbian Dane" is Vuk, a young Bosnian Serb who was born and grew up in Denmark but later became a sniper in the turmoil of ex-Yugoslavia. For reasons that I never really understood, Vuk agrees to return to Denmark to assassinate an Iranian author who has been sentenced to death by the Ayatollahs in Iran. (A bounty of four million US dollars is involved, but Vuk claims repeatedly that he doesn't kill for money.)
   
   There are two "good guys", Per Toftlund, a security specialist with the Danish national police (corresponds to the American FBI) and Lise Carlsen, a journalist with one of Denmark's largest newspapers. The two of them fall in love (typical for a Leif Davidsen thriller - there has to be a romance), although I found this to be rather silly. Lise Carlsen, in particular, does not come across as a person that is particularly loveable.
   
   But the most interesting person in the book is Vuk, and he is also the person that most of the pages in the book focus on. Everything that Vuk does and thinks is described in detail, often excruciating detail.
   
   We are told, step by step, about how Vuk travels from Bosnia to Copenhagen via Warsaw and Berlin. Vuk's past is slowly revealed to us as he wanders around Copenhagen, surprised by the changes that occurred during the short number of years that he was away. Vuk contacts one of his childhood friends, and more of his past is revealed, in particular his traumatic experiences in ex-Yugoslavia. We finally begin to understand why Vuk is the way he is.
   
   The story slowly but surely moves towards the climax, too slowly in my opinion, but this is again typical for Leif Davidsen. Will Vuk succeed in killing the Iranian author, or will the police, who are aware of him and his intentions, succeed in capturing him?
   
   This is a very Danish book in some ways, in that many of the things that are discussed are primarily of interest to Danes. It is not as good as most of Leif Davidsen's books, but it still manages to get four stars by my standards, mostly because I like the way Leif Davidsen describes people and social situations so well.
   
   Two minor nit-picking criticisms:
   - The childhood friend is described as a total nerd who has a poster of his hero Bill Gates on his wall. Real nerds don't like Bill Gates.
   - Vuk goes shopping for diving equipment and gets an "oxygen" tank. Should be a compressed air tank.
   
   In summary, not one of Leif Davidsen's best, but still a good thriller, especially for a Danish reader or for those interested in modern Europe.
   
   Rennie Petersen

5 comments about Langenscheidt's Universal Dictionary Croatian.

1. I also was in the region as a earlier poster puts it. With this Croatian or Hrvatski dictionary if you please. Firstly this Croatian dictionary is not favored to Serbian, this is blatantly untrue. As well as the fact that the official script/text for Serbian is Cyrillic. The earlier given example of bread as sensitive, which I checked in this Croatian dictionary, clearly shows the word "Kruh" ,which is the correct Croatian word for bread. In regards to lacking several words and explanation of others, I also suspect this to be untrue, because the earlier poster would be able to provide specific examples and clearly failed to provide evidence of this. I found this Croatian dictionary extremely thorough for its handy pocket size with over 30,000 entries.



2. This is unsurpassed for a pocket dictionary. I have found few English/Croatian dictionaries to be as accurately translated or as in depth. Not perfect, but highly recommended -- and easy to carry around with you.



3. I was in a course to learn Serbian-Croatian and we were given this dictionary. One of my teachers used to say that this was only good for a bullet-stopper. If you are a serious student of Serbian/Croatian/Bosnia I would recommend one of the Morton Benson dictionaries and the Magner introductory course to the languages.



4. This dictionary is of decent quality but is too concise to be of any use other than carrying with you as an emergency aid while in Croatia.



5. This book presents lots of words in a small space, but it is strangely hit-or-miss. For example, it lists 22 compound words beginning with "air-" but not including "airport." If you take a guess and look up "aerodrom" in the Croatian section, there it is, all right, defined as "airfield (meðunarodni) airport." In each half, the explanatory notes are in the language of the word list, as if it never occurred to the editors that an English-speaking person might be in Croatia and need to translate a new word in a hurry. "Meðunarodni" turns out to mean "international," so the reader is left in the dark as to what to call an ordinary regional airport. Such gaps are typical.
   
   Irregular English plural nouns are listed with the singular forms (e.g. "feet" with "foot"), but not irregular Croatian plurals, which are common and unpredictable. No verb forms besides the infinitive are given for either language, in both of which irregular verbs abound.
   
   Where the same word in English has several meanings or can be more than one part of speech, you're not told which Croatian equivalent is which, and often they're not even all there. For instance, after "bow" you get "[bou] luk; masna; [bau] naklon; nakloniti se." Some chasing around in the Croatian section, including looking up "oruzje," which is given as a note for "luk" and turns out to mean "weapon," will enable you to distinguish the bow that goes with arrows from the bow made of ribbon, and to identify the noun and verb for the polite gesture. Too bad if you needed to know what to call the front of a boat.
   
   A really good pocket dictionary, Harrap's Italian (now sadly out of print) for instance, will consistently give you the right word in the right sense at a glance. This book, by comparison, is a clumsy toy. It seems at present, however, to be the best available in that size in the U.S.A.; I'm going to look for a better one when I get to Dubrovnik.

5 comments about Standard English-SerboCroatian, SerboCroatian-English Dictionary: A Dictionary of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian Standards (Dictionary).

1. I wouldn't comment on technical & pedagogical aspects of this book (nouns,declensions,adjectives etc.) other reviewers have amply elaborated on. As a native speaker of Croatian, I can see this book as (at best) an effort to give reader some basic stuff to linguistically get by in what used to be called "Serbian or Croatian diasystem" (funny phrase). I also found this dictionary funny- luckily I didn't have to learn from it.
   But- as some reviewers pointed out, this is a basically Serbian dictionary. I don't intend to nitpick, but a few things have to be addressed:
   -Croatian and Serbian are different standard languages. Bosnian is in the process of standardization, and will certainly achieve the stable norm in near future.
   -there was not, ever, a "Serbo-Croatian" standard language. The same with "Portol" (Portuguese and Spanish), "Hurdu" (Hindi and Urdu), "Czechoslovakian" Czech and Slovak) or "Bulgaronian" (Bulgarian and Macedonian). These are similar languages which crystallized out of basically the same linguistic "prime matter"- as is the case with Swedish and Danish or Finnish and Hungarian. But to describe them as "variants of a language" (British and American English analogy is frequently (ab)used) is sheer nonsense.
   -Croatian and Serbian differ in:
   1. script (Latin and Cyrillic)
   2. grammar and syntax (ca 200 different syntactic rules)
   3. morphology (Croatian is a purist language, Serbian not. Moreover, even "internationalisms" like organize are different: organizirati in Croatian, organizovati in Serbian. Bosnian language tends, in this respect, to overlap with Croatian- but not entirely, since it was subject of forced Serbianization in past 50 years and more).
   4. vocabulary (ca 20-30% of everyday vocabulary is different. The thesaurus of an average high school graduate is ca 40,000 to 50,000 words. Draw the conclusion).

   So, this dictionary will, at best, make you an "expert" in "pidgin South-Slavic". If this is enough- buy it. If you want more-avoid it.




2. Apparently, some of interpreters and translators have been commenting on the usage of Benson and it surprises me that they would say anything positive about this dictionary since, for as long as I remember, this community has been making fun of it. Benson is a bad dictionary maker. Period. If you use dictionary professionaly, and if it is unable to translate the word/phraze or a concept, it's absolutely useless, and Benson is full of such instances. I used to be shocked by some translations and used to wonder who ever let him write a dictionary.

   The other source of misunderstanding between quality of a dictionary and some "I speak dozen languages" state of mind, is the phenomenon of a usage of dictionary itself: when you learn language, you buy a language learning book, dictionary as such is a reference book and it cannot help you if you're learning language, that is what immersion course does. You do not need dictionary if your level of language is beginner's, intermediate or upper intermediate, you have all vocabulary that you need in the book itself, so don't waste your money on dictionaries.

   Since I am obviously not going to get involved with "Jugoostalgicari" who see attacks to this dictionary as an attack to their "nostalgija" I will however point out that one should first decide what language to study between Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian since they are not the same language. Sadly, there is no good Bosnian dictionary and one does have to have good dictionary of "turcisms" if one wants to explore that language, as at certain point communication either stops or becomes unnatural. As far as Croatian is concerned Bujas is absolutely the best dictionary ever (am translator for Bosnian/English/French/Arabic, so trust me on this), and I really wouldn't know what to recommend for Serbian since they are not so keen on advertising this stuff.




3. Benson is a mixed blessing. Yet, better dictionaries will not be written as long as we live in tomato sized (we have no bananas) "states" and believe that Britney Spears equals culture...
   How does the reader below substantiate his claim except by
   ad hominem attacks?
   Benson should have included more Turkicisms, yes...but how are Mesa Selimovic and Musa Cazim-Catic writing a language different from Andric's?
   Well, let's grant our friend a moment of sheer heroism.
   Hereby I declare my full willingness to challenge the reader below or anyone else preaching scientific (sic) objectivity while kneeling at the altar of nationalism.
   I will leave my dictionaries and decorations at home, since reading a language involves time, love and labor; hence, more than professional envy and hatred.
   Oh yes -- may my opponent pick a language and a literature most congenial to him, be it Turkish (including Ottoman), Persian or
   Arabic. Or should it be Romance languages, since he is a Parisien by choice (let me guess...his heart's utmost desire is the EU, nothing more southern than Italy)?
   I'll be generous and exlude Chinese, Latin and Nahuatl (aka Aztec for those of short memory).



4. The number of English-speakers who need to or want to learn Serbo-Croat is much lower than the number of Serbo-Croat speakers who want to learn English. And the market goes where the biggest bucks are to be made. Thus, in this dictionary the first section, from English to Serbo-Croat, runs to 452 pages. The second part, from Serbo-Croat to English, which will be most useful to a foreigner trying to learn to understand the language, is only 344 pages (The Amazon entry is therefore incorrect when it states that this book has 344 pages, when in reality it has 452 + 344 = 796 pages ! ). Moreover, the quality differs in the same way: the first part has phonetic transcriptions of the English lemmata, and grammatical tagging of them into word classes, etc. but there are no such features in the latter part except that it is indicated which word-class (noun, verb etc.) the lemma belongs to. This is a serious deficiency in a Slavic dictionary, where info about such things as the gender of nouns, or the aspect of verb forms, is so important. Several of the earlier reviews, written by native speakers of the language, point out various deficiencies in the translation of lemma, omission of specialized subvocabularies (swear-words, Turkish loanwords) etc. A number of words that appear in Montenegrin folksongs, which I needed to translate, were missing. So it definitely is not a comprehensive work.
   But there are always trade-offs, and for this book the low cost must be mentioned as a definite plus, and it is well-printed on good-quality paper.



5. A "used" book in better shape than I imagined! This had been on a library shelf and had library reinforcement on the spine. It is very "new" in appearance and it is a bargain.

No comments about book2 English - Serbian for beginners: A book in 2 languages.

3 comments about Serbian: An Essential Grammar (Routledge Essential Grammar).

1. There is a lot of good information in this book, but the presentation makes it difficult to find. The index is too general and it's often hard to locate or distinguish between subsections.
   
   It's also written in a very formal, academic style, which makes it difficult for the learner without a strong background in linguistics.



2. This book is a decent selection, considering there are few competent books on Serbian out there. Any person with either a little Serbian knowledge or even a linguistic academic background and some studying motivation can pick it up respectively, otherwise keep looking. Also, the information is dense and cluttered, I've seen better organization. Otherwise it is one of the better books on Serbian language and I recommend having it if you are serious about finding a reference.



3. I was really disappointed. First off, the font used is terrible; it makes distinguishing sections difficult. The discussion on grammar is pretty tedious and it is real easy to lose interest in it as I did. It should have, considering the high price, come with a CD for the student to be able to practice correct pronunciation.
   This book is poor value and one would be better off with the Teach Yourself Serbian series by Norris/Ribnikar.

No comments about Collins Croatian Phrasebook: The Right Word in Your Pocket (Collins Gem).