Croatia Holiday & Vacation travel information

Dalmatian Coast Holidays - A beginner’s guide to speaking Croatian for your vacation.

A few holiday faq
in brief
1. No visa is required for entry into Croatia.
2. No special vaccination is required.
3. Croatia boasts, with reason, the best drinking water in Europe.
4. Croatia has on average 3000 sunny hours a year! That is out of a possible 4380 daylight hours in a year!
5. On the coast winters are very mild, rarely falling below 10ºC. One can see lemons on the trees in February!
6. In summer it's hot but not too hot, the average July temperature being 29ºC.
7. Croatian is a Slavic language which uses Latin script, with a few unfamiliar accents on some vowels and consonants.
8. Happily, for most Western Europeans, the Croatians are very adept at speaking other languages. Most speak very good German, English and Italian.

Learn to speak Croatian

Croatian is not an easy language to learn, as Croatians themselves will tell you. It is a Slavic language with very few borrowings from either Latin or English so it will appear very unfamiliar to western Europeans. It has several genders, a complicated grammar and inflections on the nouns as well as the verbs when changing tenses. However, mercifully for western Europeans, the written language does use Latin script and the words are written phonetically, so once you familiarises yourself with the sound of the letters, you should be able to read and pronounce the words, even if, at first, you won’t know what they mean.

It is not our goal here to teach you the Croatian language, as there are books and CDs on the market which can do it far better. We would simply like to introduce the language to you. Happily, most Croatians can speak several languages very well, including English, German & Italian, but there is nothing more impolite, we think, than being a visitor to a country and not being able to speak any words of their language at all, and one should at least be able to say ‘thank you’ and ‘please.’ Firstly, we’ll give you the Croatian alphabet, with their pronunciations, and then we’ll give you the bare minimum of words that we think are essential to learn. Please note that there are no silent letters in Croatian, so all the letters in a word are pronounced, including any vowels at the end.

The Croatian Alphabet

Alphabet	Pronunciation	Sounds like (letters in bold type)
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V Z	a b ts d eh f g h ee y k l m n o p r s t oo v z	car big fits do ever father good happy (with the roof of the mouth, almost a ‘k’) bee you kite love mother no snow puff right (rolled. When between 2 consonants it is ‘ur’) son table zoo vault zero


Accented Consonants	Pronunciation	Sounds like (letters in bold type)
	ch chu dy dzh sh zh	tulip church duty jumbo shed television

The accented vowels have such subtle differences to the non-accented ones and are so rarely used we have excluded them, so as not to confuse you. Please note that browsers will not show accented letters properly without having Croatian fonts installed, which will be the case for the majority of non-Croatians. For clarity, all accented letters in Croatian place names mentioned on this website appear as just the root letter, without an accent.

SOME USEFUL WORDS & SHORT PHRASES

English word or phrase	Croatian
Hi! How are you? Good morning Good day Good evening Good night Good-bye! Welcome! Please Thank you Excuse me Yes No I You We What? Where? When? How? How far? Here There Good! Bad! I want I like it I don’t like it Danger! Help! Do you speak English? Bread Meat Fish Salad Wine Beer Hotel Room Apartment House	Halo! or Bok! Kako si? Dobro jutro! Dobar dan Dobra vecer Laku noc Do videnja! Dobro dosao!(m) dosla!(f) Molim Hvala Oprostite mi Da Ne Ja Ti Mi Sto? Gdje? Kad? Kako? Kako daleko? Tu Tamo Dobro! Lose! Ja hocu Ja to volim Ja to ne volim Opasnost! Pomoc Da li govorite Engleski? Kruh Meso Riba Salata Vino Pivo Hotel Soba Stan Kuca

We hope these few words will help you out a little. Good luck!

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