Learning Croatian: From Family Chats to Holiday Connections

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From the sidelines to the conversation

Sandra first encountered Croatian – or rather, Serbian – in an unexpected way: her husband would leave the room to take phone calls with his mother. “He said he found it strange,” she recalls. But Sandra’s reaction was entirely different. She was fascinated by the sound of the language, impressed that her husband could simply switch between two languages so effortlessly. What he took for granted, she saw as a gift.

The real motivation came at the dinner table, where her husband and his Serbian mother would slip into their native language during conversations. “I just wanted to understand a bit more when they’re chatting,” Sandra explains. “So I’m not always excluded at the lunch table.” Her mother-in-law has lived in Austria for 60 years but still finds it easier to speak Serbian. For Sandra, learning the language became about belonging – about being part of the full conversation rather than waiting for translations.

A daughter’s gift changes everything

When Sandra’s daughter arrived three and a half years ago, her motivation intensified. “With my daughter, it really became more intense,” she says. “I thought, okay, I’d like to try this again properly.” Her husband speaks the language but never learnt it formally in school, making grammatical errors along the way. Sandra, who has always found grammar easy and studied French at school, realised she could become the family’s linguistic bridge.

Her vision extends beyond simple comprehension. She imagines helping her daughter learn the language if she develops an interest, being able to support her grammatically in a way her husband feels he cannot. “Words are so important,” Sandra agrees with her husband’s concern about precision in raising their daughter bilingually. For now, the grandmother speaks some Serbian with the little girl, and Sandra is building her skills to contribute more. The three-and-a-half-year-old is already showing signs of being just like her mother – full of energy, always talking, always on the move.

The cave explorer’s mindset

Sandra’s previous attempts at learning Croatian had been frustrating. She’d taken local courses, but they always fell apart – not enough people for the next level, interest waning after a round or two. “The courses always stopped, which was really disappointing,” she remembers. When her husband casually mentioned that Serbian was “so easy, nothing like German,” she had news for him after her first proper lesson. “I said, ‘Are you aware that we have seven cases in Croatian? Seven, not four like in German. You have seven.’ He was like, ‘What? Really?’”

But Sandra has developed her own philosophy about language learning. “Generally, language is a bit like cave exploration,” she explains. “At first you’re somehow in the dark and you think, oh my God, you see things with your torch, individual things, none of it makes any sense. You only recognise some unknown signs on the cave walls and think, oh my God, and here and there are these stumbling blocks, you could say, grammar and such things. But at some point it just clicks. You need courage, you need a bit of curiosity and a willingness to learn something new. But eventually it becomes light and then you think, oh wow, this is cool.” Those click moments come in small increments during lessons – suddenly recognising a dative ending in a normal sentence seven hours after learning it, feeling the pieces fall into place. “These are the small, joyful moments where you have these click moments,” Sandra says. “Where you feel, oh, okay, yes, I understood it, really cool.”

More than marketing and motherhood

When Sandra isn’t working her 50% position in marketing or travelling with her energetic daughter, she has an unusual hobby: pole dancing. “You need quite a lot of strength when you’re training with your own body weight,” she explains, “and you need a bit of pain tolerance too.” She practised for three years before the pandemic forced a pause when everything closed, but she’s been back at it for a year now. Her job has evolved from ten years of event management – organising the company’s biggest international trade fairs, a showroom opening with a thousand people from around the world – to a more focused role that better fits her life as a mother.

Her love of travel remains constant. This past summer, during three months off work, she and her daughter went to Kos, spent ten days in Rovinj, Croatia, and Sandra even made it to Las Vegas. “We’re always on the move,” she says. Whether it’s visiting great-grandmother, trips to the playground, or indoor swimming when the weather turns, her daughter requires what Sandra knows well: “Action, action, action, lots of entertainment.” Her husband, she jokes, is the calm one. “He says, now I have two of you, oh my god.”

The joy of ordering in Croatian

The one-on-one lessons have made all the difference for Sandra, despite some challenging moments with teacher changes due to pregnancies. “When there are six people, whoever knows the answer says it. The other five think, thank God they said it,” she observes. “In one-on-one lessons, you have to concentrate for 45 minutes, you’re the only one there. And I think you work on your own mistakes.” The best moment came when her teacher simply stopped correcting her pronunciation as frequently. “I was still quite unsure, asking ‘Am I saying this right?’ And she’d say ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ That was a real high, I have to say.”

The rewards appear most clearly during the family’s annual trips to Rovinj. “Sitting in a restaurant and ordering in the local language, exchanging a few words with the waiter that I can manage – I’m no longer dependent on my husband,” Sandra says. “That’s very uplifting.” At home, she now understands conversations between her husband and mother-in-law, even catching mistakes when her husband confuses Tuesday and Monday for babysitting arrangements. Her advice for new learners is simple: “Enjoy the journey. Because you’re not just learning a new language. You meet great people. You have a good time and learn something whilst doing it. You shouldn’t see it as work, but really as a hobby. At the end of the day, it’s a bit of a hobby. I really enjoy doing this. I don’t have to do this. I want to.”