Special letters č ć š ž đ dž

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

The special letters: č ć š ž đ dž

In “The Latin alphabet” you read all thirty letters and learned the main rule: one letter, one sound. More than twenty of them turned out to be old friends. Six need care: č, ć, š, ž, đ and dž. These consonants are missing from the plain a–z alphabet, and they are what gives Serbian writing its look, with little hooks and strokes over the letters and a bar through one of them.

The good news: all six sounds already live somewhere in your mouth. They are close to English ones: the “ch” of church, the “sh” of shoe, the “j” of judge, the “s” of pleasure. Nothing here is a guttural rasp or a click. The hard part is keeping the letters apart in writing, and hearing that Serbian has two kinds of “ch” and two kinds of “j”, a difference an English ear tends to smooth over. By the end of the lesson you will read čaj, voće, đak and džem with confidence, without misplacing a single mark.

How the six letters sound

Read the table out loud. The last column holds ordinary Serbian words; you can already sound almost all of them out letter by letter, even before you know what they mean.

The pair č / ć: two different “ch” sounds

English has one “ch”, the sound of chair and match. Serbian has two, written with different letters. č is the hard one: very like the English “ch”, with the tongue drawn a little further back, a firm sound close to the “tch” of match. ć is softer and lighter, a “front” sound: the front of the tongue presses against the roof of the mouth while the tip stays down behind the lower teeth. The closest English anchor is the t of British tune (“tyoon”). They may sound alike to you at first, the way ship and sheep sound alike to many learners of English, but to a Serb they are two different sounds.

The practical rule: ć is “front” and soft, č is “back” and hard. Compare the columns and say each pair out loud:

Surnames give you one reliable clue. Serbian surnames in -ić always have the soft ć: Petrović, Jovanović, Đoković. English newspapers drop the mark and write Petrovic or Djokovic, but the Serbian spelling has ć.

Cheat sheet

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The special letters: č ć š ž đ dž

Six letters. Four make two pairs, each with a hard and a soft letter: č/ć (two kinds of “ch”) and dž/đ (two kinds of “j”). š and ž are “sh” and “zh”. Saying them is easy; the point is not mixing up the letters in writing.

How they sound

The č–ć–dž–đ square

dj or đ?