EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 01 Alphabet and Pronunciaon 10 / 600
parts of Croatia anyway.
Also, most people in Croatia pronounce today ć the same as č, and dž the same as
đ. This feature includes most cities.
In the Standard pronunciation of č and dž, the tip of tongue is pressed against the
palate (top of the mouth) right above teeth, the teeth are separated, and there’s a
gap between lips and teeth; it’s called apical pronunciation.
There’s a vowel ə (pronounced as e in English the) that’s never spelled; it appears in
the following situations:
1. in seemingly impossible words like čvrst rigid, hard and krv blood: they can be
approximately pronounced with the vowel ə (at least by some Croatian speakers)
as čvərst and kərv. Actually, krv is pronounced a bit like English curve.
2. the same goes for e.g. bicikl bicycle, which is rather pronounced as bi-ci-kəl (three
syllables).
3. when talking about letters, Croatians often talk about the letter "b", and
pronounce its ‘name’ as bə.
Although words should be pronounced as spelled, a great majority of Croatians
pronounce the sequence ije (when not at the end of the word) as just je, for
example:
lijepo beautifully is usually pronounced as lje-po
prije before is pronounced as written (pri-je), since the ije comes at the very end
Some people pronounce lijepo as l-j-e-p-o (that is, l and j are separate sounds; this
is regarded as standard), others as lj-e-p-o. To help you with the pronunciation, I’ve
marked such normally written, but not pronounced i’s like this: lijepo. In the words
like prije, where all vowels are normally pronounced, nothing is marked.
There are very few other situations where something is written but not pronounced
in Croatian, they will be specially emphasized.
Croatian spells the foreign names and places how they are originally spelled, if the
original spelling uses the Latin script (e.g. New York, Chuck Norris), while in
sometimes in Bosnian, and as the rule in Serbian, respelling according to an
approximate pronunciation is used (Njujork, Čak Noris).
Stress (pronouncing one syllable a bit louder, as in English together) has quite
complex rules and varies in colloquial speech in different parts of Croatia. Stress is
never indicated in writing (similar to the practice in English, but unlike Spanish or
Italian), and you are simply supposed to know it.
There are two common ways (or schemes) of stressing words used in speech:
The standard stress is used in the Standard Croatian, and in cities of Split, Osijek,
Dubrovnik, and surrounding countryside; the area extends to Bosnia, and most of