Croatia

Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian are all like Spanish. They have their regional differences, but essentially, you can understand other people going between the other countries. Slovenia is like Portuguese. You know it's a similar language. You can understand them, and there's words that you think you know and understand if you speak Croatian, for instance. But they will mean different things, and they phrase things differently. So it's like Spanish and Portuguese, but it's Serbo-Croatian languages and Slovenian.

The most common greeting and farewell is bok. It's actually derived from the same word as god, which is bog, but they use it as a hello, a goodbye. They'll usually string a lot of farewells together. Bok is a common one, dovijenja, which means see you later, or sometimes they'll shorten that to just jenja, girimo se, which can also be see you later. For greetings, usually they just use bok or dobrodan, which is good day. So you might walk up to someone and say, dobrodan, kakos tevi, which is hello, or good day, how are you. Someone would say, dobro sam i ti, good, how are you. Unless you're leaving, you'd say dovijenja, girimo se, ajde bok.

So the Croatian language, probably one of the most recognizable traits about it is their use of the J or the J sound. They call it Ijekavian because that's, I'm not an expert in it, but that's the form it's called, Ijekavian speaking, and you'll hear a lot of J, J sounds. Also, grammar-wise, they don't do what's called double conjugating, so when they have two verbs, such as I want to run, in English we only conjugate one verb, the want, and then we use the infinitive to run. In Croatian, they do the same thing. They say, so they don't conjugate the second verb, which is similar to English.

The languages over there are under no obligation to immediately make sense in English, so they might say things differently that are just weird. In particular, I know in Croatian they say, I am grateful on something, or they say, somebody will be coming four or five minutes, but what they actually mean is they'll be coming in five minutes, is what you'd say in English. So just remembering that, the best way to pick up the language quickly is to just notice patterns, pick up on them. You may not understand the patterns, but if you just pick up on what other people are saying, what you seem to read, then that's what's really going to help you out. You're going to say, oh, that keeps happening, therefore it must be an important part of the language.