Does anyone here speak Croatian/Serbian?

[Igel]

2. Ucio sam se srbohrvatskomu jeziku na univerzite.

Can't speak hardly any now. It's too similar to Russian, and I had Czech and Polish after doing two years of Serbo.

Can still read a decent chunk of it.

Don't be put off by the number of cases. "Seven" is what you get from grammatical analysis. There's a lot of overlap in forms, and forms is where the difficulty is.

Take English. We have nominative and genitive, accusative and dative. Good luck finding that many case forms. The genitive is a clitic, an 's' that sticks at the end of the phrase for most Americans. The accusative, dative, and nominative look the same everywhere but for pronouns. We really only have one case plus a clitic for genitive, for all but pronouns.

Serbian has some wrinkles, to be sure, but it's quite learnable. Don't let the grammar pile up--learn a little bit and then get the hang of it. In speech some of the rules are often botched; the entire system of intonations is mostly wrong for most speakers.

There are a lot of Serbian and Croatian speakers; fewer Bosnian speakers. (Figure out which you want. They stopped agreeing on having a common language 20 years ago.) Unlike Latino immigrants, though, most are educated and quickly learn English. Those who aren't well educated have no choice because there aren't ethnic enclaves into which they can retreat for linguistic comfort. I run into a SBC speaker about every 2-3 months. Then again, when I hear an accent that sounds E. European I ask.