Teach Yourself Croatian Complete Course (Book Only)

This book and accompanying CDs (2) provides an effective entry into Croatian. The dialogues are short, realistic, and contain the sort of vocabulary that is helpful for the new speaker. I have learned Czech before and was prepared for the main issues in Slavic grammar. The book provided enough depth to make be comfortable in generalizing beyond the dialogues presented in the textbook. I found the spoken dialogues helpful and clear. In general, this was a well-packaged and helpful book that provided a good way of starting to speak Croatian. I enjoyed working through the exercises and found the textbook clear, uncluttered, and helpful. One disappointing feature was the meager coverage of Croatian culture and customs. However, all in all a helpful language program. David S-G

I like that this book arms you with more than "tourist" Croatian, if you're seriously interested in learning the basics for conversations beyond ordering in a restaurant. The dialogues and exercises, and grammatical explanations, are generally clear and instructive. The weakness is that pronunciation, especially stress, is not explained fully enough. None of the words in the text are marked to describe where the stress goes, only saying at the beginning that the stress is unpredictable but never on the last syllable. Then, for the accompanying CD, they hire voice actors with heavy Zagrebian accents, which often put the stress at the end of the words! (sapun, racun, Englez, Hrvat, optimist, etc are all examples of words that have stress on the last syllable in Zagreb, but nowhere else). I think if they hired voice actors who speak a more "standard" Croatian (or at least have some variety among the speakers), and somehow use dots or other marks to show where the stress goes (like the Barron's guide, which is a very, very good phrasebook, actually), I would say it deserves 5 stars.