Do you want to take on the challenge of learning Croatian and you’re looking for some resources? We’ve got you covered.
Croatian is the official language in Croatia and is also one of the official languages in Bosnia & Herzegovina. It belongs to the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family and is spoken by over 6 million people around the world.
There are many reasons to learn Croatian. Whether for travel, work, a love of art or to get a better understanding of Croatian history and culture, having the right resources that’ll help you achieve your language learning goals is essential.
We’ve tried and tested lots of resources for learning Croatian like apps, courses, tutors, and others to help you find the perfect fit for your preferences and goals. Learning Croatian may seem a bit daunting, but rest assured, we’ll highlight some great resources to get you started. Keep reading!
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Croatian Learning Resources
There are many, many ways to learn Croatian. We’ll start out with some of the more typical resources, such as language courses and apps, and move on to other founts of Croatian language knowledge.
Using a mixture of these resources will keep your interest levels high, as well as give you a more holistic view of the living language.
Croatian Language Courses and Lessons
There are a handful of online Croatian courses available. Some of them are more solid than others. Even though popular language course providers like Duolingo and Rosetta Stone aren’t offering Croatian at this point, there are still several good-quality choices for online lessons.
Some courses will get you started speaking quickly, but not ground you with a thorough understanding of grammar. Other courses might be better suited for someone who likes to delve deeply into the intricacies of grammar and syntax, or who wants more listening practice.
If you’re not sure where to begin, think about your learning goals and learning style. Verbal-linguistic learners, for example, might prefer courses with more speaking practice; auditory learners might find that a focus on listening exercises gets them off to a better start. People who want to use Croatian in a business context will have different learning objectives than those who are learning a few key phrases to prepare for a trip to Zagreb.
Ultimately, it’s best to combine several different resources to benefit from the best of each approach. Other tools, such as flashcards, videos, and books, are great complements to online courses. We’ll take some time to explore those options, as well.
For now, we’ll touch on a few pros and cons of each of these online Croatian courses to help you decide which to try first.
Pimsleur and Glossika
As well-established audio courses, Pimsleur and Glossika are two options for learning Croatian on the go.
Both of these products will get you to speak a lot of Croatian. Both of them provide plenty of material to work on your audio comprehension.
Neither program covers grammar; they mostly focus on phrases and vocabulary. Both do a good job of training your ears to hear and understand Croatian and your mouth to speak it.
Pimsleur only offers a Level 1 course for complete beginners. If you already know some Croatian, Glossika would work better for you.
The more affordable option of a Pimsleur subscription is not available for Croatian at this time, so Glossika would be the more economical choice for an audio course.
Ling
In some ways, Ling App feels a little similar to the super popular, but not available in Croatian, Duolingo. It is game-like with familiar exercises such as matching audio to words, building sentences, and spelling vocabulary words. The lessons start out with a dialogue which helps keep the language realistic and relevant to real life. In no time at all, you’ll find yourself able to say and understand full sentences.
uTalk
If you’re just learning Croatian for a brief sojourn in the Balkans, or perfunctory visits with long-lost relatives, then uTalk might be a nice jumping-off point.
Without taking time for grammar or cultural notes, uTalk will drill you into a set series of Croatian phrases. You won’t find real fluency here — but it can be enough to get you through most travel situations like checking into a hotel, going shopping, getting directions, or eating at restaurants. The huge list of topics makes it easy to find where you want to focus your efforts.
While uTalk is limited in scope and depth, it offers mastery of essential set phrases, along with some listening and speaking practice. If you’re serious about becoming fluent in Croatian, though, you’ll need to supplement it with other resources.
Mango Languages
Get started speaking basic Croatian right away with Mango Languages. You’ll begin by learning simple greetings and introductions, then move on to topics such as money, shopping, hobbies, food, and health.
Mango Languages’ methodology takes you through basic sentence structures, breaking them down and using them as building blocks to help you learn how to build your own sentences in an intuitive way. It can be especially appealing to those with a logical-mathematical learning style, who like to see patterns in the material they’re learning.
As you listen and speak, you’ll see the phrases from each conversation written out, so you can begin to pick up on Croatian spelling. By hovering on the green “speaker” icon at the bottom of each example, you will see the Croatian words written out phonetically.
To switch between how a phrase is understood and what it literally means, use the sliding switch at the top of the example:
In the literal version, color-coding is used to indicate the word-for-word translation.
If you’d like to record yourself speaking Croatian — then compare the soundwave of your voice to the native speaker’s — click on the orange “microphone” button under the example sentence.
Mango Languages always includes some juicy tidbits about grammar and culture, to help you get a more complete understanding of the context of the language and the society that uses it.
Learn 101
Learn 101’s Croatian lessons are not as interactive or repetitious as the Mango Languages approach. One advantage they have, however, is that all of the content is linked and accessible from the “dashboard” on the site’s main Croatian page.
Whereas a course like Mango Languages leads you methodically through a somewhat limited curriculum, the Learn 101 course gives you instant access to any aspect of the course. Using the directory on the left sidebar or the links on the main page, you can skip around to different categories such as grammar, phrases, numbers, plurals, adjectives (including colors), and 500 popular words.
Almost all of the sections — with the notable exception of the “popular words” — are equipped with audio files, so you can master pronunciation as you memorize new vocabulary. There are also links to translation tools and a short, multiple-choice exam to test your Croatian skills.
This course might be a good choice for someone who is not a complete novice, but who is still learning the basics of Croatian … or perhaps someone who studied Croatian a long time ago, and wanted to brush up on certain concepts without taking a plodding journey from point A to point Ž.
Live Lingua Project/U.S. Department of State
Take your beginning Croatian learning offline with these downloadable basic Courses from the U.S. Department of State, which are hosted on Live Lingua Project’s website and presented in PDF form. Use DownThemAll! or a similar browser plugin to download the dozens of audio clips more efficiently.
This course dates back a number of years — the clue to its vintage is in both the photocopied pages and the fact that it’s called “Serbo-Croatian.” Still, it provides a thorough grounding in the fundamentals of the language, with lots of grammar tips and dialogues to practice.
Easy Croatian
This Easy Croatian site is now defunct, but still navigable on the Wayback machine and well worth perusing. Check out the site’s right sidebar to get a lot of great grammar resources all in one place:
- Reference material and appendices covering topics such as:
- Dialects
- Croatian names for countries and nationalities
- Word order
- A modest dictionary that shows you words with their related forms
- Verb conjugation tables (grouped by started letter of the verb)
There are also some downloadable goodies, such as an ebook (in PDF form) called 205 Essential Croatian Verbs & Verb Pairs. Like the site’s verb tables, the ebook version contains a lot of helpful notes explaining verb usage.
The English vs German vs Croatian “Cheat Sheet” is a veritable Rosetta Stone of comparative linguistics, concerning the use of prepositions and syntax (sentence structure) in all three languages.
The “Test Your Knowledge” section will quiz you on adjectives, nouns, gender, cases, and verbs.
Even though the Easy Croatian site is no longer being maintained, you can find it in another incarnation, as a Memrise course called Easy Croatian Vocabulary + Grammar.
Memrise
Rote-learning powerhouse Memrise comes through with several Croatian courses. The Basic Croatian (hrvatski) course starts out with a short video on the Croatian alphabet, then moves on to teaching you fundamental Croatian words. The alphabet video is reassuringly blasé about the pronunciation differences between some of the letters; it seems that the goal with this course is to get you speaking the language right away, even if your accent is less-than-perfect.
If you’re just learning Croatian for a short holiday and don’t mind sounding like a tourist, this approach might work for you. If, on the other hand, your goal is to sound like a native, you might want to spend some time with resources that will refine your accent more.
The rest of the course helps you progress through over 170 basic Croatian vocabulary words, combined into simple phrases. You’ll learn nouns in all three Croatian genders — masculine, feminine, and neuter — and discover how to make adjectives such as zelen (green) match each noun gender.
The Hacking Croatian course on Memrise presents 152 words, bringing in certain essential verbs and question words early on in the Foundation vocab sections.
Best Apps to Learn Croatian: Vocab and Grammar
Learn Croatian with the convenience of apps that travel with you on your mobile devices.
Croatian by Nemo
Nemo Apps LLC has a hands-free Croatian learning app that’s designed to teach the language in bite-sized pieces. It includes flashcards and a recording feature that lets you listen to your own pronunciation attempts and compare them to the provided audio clips of native speakers. You can use it to learn Croatian from scratch or review what you’ve already learned. You can even skip over words you already know (or don’t care to know), if you feel like reviewing them is a waste of time.
Simply Learn Croatian
This app from Simya Solutions targets four particular sets of vocabulary: Beginners, Traveler Basics, Traveler Advanced, and Expat. Each vocabulary category is broken down further into topics. For Beginners, there are Numbers, Time & Date, and Basic Conversation. Travelers looking for the basics will cover directions, greetings, food, shopping, and sightseeing.
There are multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank quizzes to test your knowledge, a flashcard mode for review, and a learning mode with native audio. Spaced repetition of vocabulary aids in retention.
You can easily search for words and related phrases. The app has a feature that lets you save your favorite words.
Simply Learn Croatian is customizable in several different ways. You can set learning reminders, preferred text size, audio speed, and the language for flashcards, apps, and quizzes. Try it on Android or iOS.
Fun Easy Learn Croatian
Fun Easy Learn Croatian is an app that’s abuzz with features. Created by a team of teachers and linguists, it includes learning games, a multitude of audio clips from native speakers, and thousands of illustrations that will get the meaning of words to stick in your memory.
You can set the app to teach you Croatian through one of over sixty languages. The curriculum includes:
● the Croatian alphabet
● ~6,000 vocabulary words
● ~5,000 phrases
The lessons are categorized by topic and can be used in business, travel, or everyday interactions. The app can be set for ten different difficulty levels, so you can challenge yourself and see how you’re progressing.
Clozemaster
We’ll close out our section on vocab and grammar apps with a mention of Clozemaster, an app for Android or iOS that will give you lots of vocabulary practice while teaching you how to use words in a grammatically correct way.
Clozemaster presents sentences with one word missing. Select the correct word from the four options below the sentence or type it in yourself. (If you need a hint, there’s an English translation of the complete sentence in smaller type, written below the Croatian sentence.)
Clozemaster is better for intermediate learners than total beginners since you’re relying on your understanding of the other Croatian words in the sentence to choose the right answer. Since the exercises are similar to an algebraic equation, people with a logical-mathematical learning style might find them particularly appealing.
Croatian Language Exchange Apps
In addition to apps to teach you Croatian through lessons, quizzes, and games, apps such as HelloTalk, Speaky, and Tandem will help you find language exchange partners to chat or have a call with.
Texting in Croatian can make you more fluent, but you have to be careful not to rely too much on the built-in machine translation tools in these apps. Be prepared, some users tend to treat these as if they’re dating apps.
Flashcards for Learning Croatian
Flashcards are a tried-and-true way to practice words and phrases in Croatian. Some of these options are web-based; some are apps for mobile devices.
If you’re more of a kinesthetic or tactile learner — that is, you learn better hands-on — you might consider breaking out the markers and stacks of cardstock to create Croatian flashcards for yourself on old-fashioned index cards.
Web-based Flashcards
The numerous Croatian flashcard sets from Quizlet include complementary language-learning tools. In addition to a flashcard deck that you can shuffle and randomize, each offering comes with a spelling test, writing exercises, and various games. Unfortunately, the Croatian audio sounds less like a native speaker pronouncing the words and more like an American-accented machine voice.
The online flashcards from Improving Media illustrate concepts through photos and drawings, in addition to the English and Croatian labels. However, you can’t really use them to test your mastery of the Croatian words, because there’s no way to see only the English or only the Croatian. These are more like a segmented vocabulary list than a traditional set of flashcards.
Flashcard Apps
Improving Media also has a Croatian flashcard app for iOS and Android, called Croatian Flashcards with Pictures Lite. Unfortunately, they have the same drawback as the website version: you can’t use them to quiz yourself.
Anki is a highly customizable flashcard app that’s available for all major platforms, including Mac OS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. It allows you to create flashcards with embedded multimedia: Attach anything from photos to audio files to video clips to your custom cards.
You can start from scratch and create your own Croatian study decks — or you can download flashcard decks from other users.
Flashcard Books
from Pinhok Languages works like a very basic app that you can use on your Kindle ebook reader. You have the option of reviewing the flashcards in order or randomizing them for more of a challenge. Unlike some of the other electronic flashcard sets, though, there’s no audio — this learning tool is strictly for reviewing the written words.Croatian Language Tutor
If you’re looking for a real, live Croatian tutor, consider using Verbling or italki to find one who can work with your schedule and teach lessons at your preferred price point. With dozens of teachers to choose from, you’ll certainly be able to find a tutor that works well for you.
YouTube Channels
Croatian101 Lesson
This channel presents twenty videos covering fundamental Croatian language categories such as numbers, alphabet, spelling, greetings and introductions, months and seasons, and verbs.
Although the collection of videos is fairly small, the Croatian is presented slowly and clearly. Most of the videos last five minutes or less, so you can watch them quickly and review them whenever you have just a few minutes to spare.
Libby Bradshaw
In preparation for a move to Rijeka, Croatia, this YouTuber created playlists with dozens of children’s nursery rhymes, cartoons, and TV shows. These compilations feature clips of different lengths, on numerous themes. Several of the TV/film clips have been deleted, but there are still many remaining.
Since this channel has mostly children’s content, it’s a nice jumping-off point for beginning to intermediate Croatian learners. There’s some Serbian content, though, so be aware that not all the videos will be strictly in Croatian — although you may understand some of them, anyway.
In addition to the various cartoons, there’s also a playlist about the city of Rijeka, which has four news- and documentary-style videos for grown-ups.
Školica Croatian Language School
This channel made its début in late April 2020. Each video in this growing library of lessons is about ten to fifteen minutes long, with plenty of written content.
This channel would be particularly good for an intermediate learner since the lessons are presented partly in English, and partly in Croatian.
Crochet/Häkeln/Heklanje Tashahandmade Andrić
Subtitled in English, German, and Croatian, this channel explores the joys of crocheting scarves, afghans, sweaters, and more. With audio in Croatian, step-by-step instructions, and lots of close-up videos, handcrafting hobbyists can easily get hooked on Croatian while creating lace and yarn masterpieces.
Matej TataMata
Take music lessons and immerse yourself in Croatian at the same time! The older videos on this channel will teach some Croatian as you learn how to play basic guitar, ukulele, and harmonica. (Newer videos are in English; the Croatian-language videos are mostly circa 2015.)
Glas Istre
The official YouTube channel for the Istrian newspaper of the same name. This channel houses several years’ worth of news videos, from clips that are only a few seconds long to videos that run a half-hour or longer.
Start with the more current videos to get caught up to speed faster, or travel back through the video timeline to get grounded in recent Croatian history.
Croatian Podcasts
Uncle Mike, along with his friends DJ Moe and Tony D, bring you the Let’s Learn Croatian podcast. Since late 2019, these loveable goofballs have been discussing the Croatian language and culture. They teach Croatian through topic-specific lessons and answer listener questions in the “You’ve got pošta!” segment.
Since it’s primarily presented in English, this can be a helpful podcast for anglophones who are beginners in Croatian.
The Let’s Learn Croatian podcast can be accessed on Stitcher or Spotify, or on the Let’s Learn Croatian website’s podcast page. There are new episodes every two weeks, with extra cultural explorations in the Super Slatko Report. The site hosts a small Croatian glossary, called the LLC Translations Page.
Intermediate Croatian learners who want to keep up with the latest in Eastern European music trends will appreciate the Inkubator dobre glazbe podcast on PodBean. With over one hundred episodes to explore, you’ll enjoy many hours of Croatian music and discussion.
The Kroz Sveto pismo podcast, also available through PodBean, includes a large library of episodes that go book-by-book through the Bible in Croatian.
For movie buffs, FRED Film Radio offers dozens of episodes that discuss movies and film festivals in Croatian.