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 lesson "Latinica: the Serbian alphabet" you read all thirty letters and learned the master rule: one letter — one sound. More than twenty of them turned out to be old friends, familiar down to the last stroke. Six remain — the ones we promised to put under the magnifying glass: č, ć, š, ž, đ, dž. These are consonants missing from "plain" Latin script; they are what gives Serbian writing its signature look — the little "birds", slashes and bars above the letters.

The good news: all six sounds already live somewhere in your mouth. They are hushing and "ch"-type consonants — cousins of English ch, sh, j and the "s" of pleasure — not a guttural rasp and not a click. The difficulty is not producing them, but not mixing up the letters in writing and hearing the difference where an English ear tends to smooth it over. Let's take them in order — and by the end of the lesson you will confidently read čaj, voće, đak and džem without misplacing a single stroke.

How the six letters sound

Read the table out loud. The third column holds real Serbian words, not invented examples; you can already sound almost all of them out letter by letter, even before knowing what they mean.

The pair č / ć: two different "ch" sounds

English has essentially one "ch" — the sound of chair and match. Serbian has two such sounds, written with different letters. č is the hard "ch": tongue pulled back, a firm sound, close to the "tch" of match. ć is the soft "ch": the tip of the tongue presses to the palate, and the sound comes out light and "fronted" — like the t+y blend in "got you" said quickly. To an English ear they sound like twins, but a Serb hears them as clearly as you hear the difference between thin and tin — a contrast that puzzles many learners of English.

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

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.

The special letters: č ć š ž đ dž

Six consonants missing from "plain" Latin script. All their sounds have English cousins — the difficulty is not pronunciation but not mixing up the letters in writing. Four form two hard/soft pairs: č/ć and dž/đ; the other two — š and ž — are simply "sh" and "zh".

How they sound

The č–ć–dž–đ square

dj or đ? — the key skill of this lesson