EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / A9 Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin 543 / 600
Grammar and other differences
Adverbs puno/jako vs. mnogo are characteristic in meaning a lot, very. Of course,
vrlo can be used as well, but it’s not used in speech much. The use of these adverbs
is different in Croatian and Serbian:
Puno hvala! Thanks a lot. (mostly Croatian)
Mnogo hvala! Thanks a lot. (Serbian, sometimes Croatian)
Jako sam umorna. I’m very tired. (mostly Croatian)
Mnogo sam umorna. I’m very tired. (Serbian)
Vrlo sam umorna. I’m very tired. (both languages, more formal)
Observe that mnogo is normally used in both Croatian and Serbian meaning much
before comparatives: mnogo veći much bigger. This is a subtle difference.
There some often-used nicknames for men in Serbia ending in -a: Pera (from Petar),
Vlada (from Vladimir and similar), Brana (from Branislav), etc., all behaving as any
name ending in -a. They are quite rare in Croatia, where forms Pero, Vlado, etc. are
preferred.
A famous difference is preference for da + present instead of infinitives in Serbia.
Using infinitives in Serbia is not ungrammatical, but they are simply rarely used
(especially in speech); these results are from Google, in thousands (try yourself
similar expressions):
form Croatia (.hr) Bosnia (.ba) Serbia (.rs)
Želim da kažem 0.2 54 116
Želim reći 74 51 10
Želim da idem 0 24 45
Želim ići 12 4 0.3
As usual, Bosnia (which includes Ijekavian Serbian in parts of Bosnia) is somewhere
in between.
Montenegrin
Montengrin uses more or less the same vocabulary and spelling conventions as
Serbian, but only the Ijekavian variant. It uses few specific forms, like nijesmo vs.
Croatian/Serbian nismo we aren’t. Words having sequences dj in Croatian often
have đ in Montenegrin: