Mediation & relaying

Lesson opening

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

Mediation and relaying: how to be the bridge between two people

Anyone who has moved abroad uses this skill every week. Your mother asks on the phone what the letter from school says. A friend did not understand the plumber. At the health centre you stand between an English-speaking friend and a Serbian doctor and speak for both. Nobody asks you to speak beautifully; they ask you to get the meaning across. You carry someone else’s words, compressing, explaining and checking them on the way.

You already have the grammar for this. The lesson “Direct & indirect speech” gave you the da clause and the rule “the tense stays, the pronouns shift”; “Indirect questions” showed how to build in someone else’s question; “Expressing opinion” showed how to keep someone else’s view apart from your own. What is left is a couple of dozen linking phrases, the rivets that hold any retelling together.

Relaying someone’s words: Kaže da…, Poručuje da…

A retelling starts with a verb of speaking, and that verb sets the tone: kaže is neutral, traži states a demand or a firm request, moli a gentle one. Just as English “says”, “insists” and “asks” tell different stories, the wrong verb changes the message.

The mechanics come from “Direct & indirect speech”: after da the tense is taken from the original line, while the person and the pointing words (“here”, “today”, “tomorrow”) are recalculated from where you stand. The neighbour said Doći ću sutra “I’ll come tomorrow”: today you report Kaže da će doći sutra, and tomorrow Rekao je da će doći danas. Unlike English “he said he would come”, Serbian keeps the future će; bi došao would make it a mere hypothesis.

The past works the same way: Rekao je da… “he said that…”, Pitao je da li… “he asked whether…”, and a request you pass on is da + the present: Rekla je da dođeš u pet. “She said you should come at five.” Two English habits trip people up here. English can leave out “that”, but Serbian keeps da: Kaže da kasni deset minuta. “He says he’s ten minutes late.” And the “if” of “he’s asking if…” is da li, never ako, the “if” of conditions: Pita da li vam treba pomoć. “He’s asking if you need help.” Both points come from “Indirect questions” and “Direct & indirect speech”.

Condensing to the core: ukratko, suština, poenta

The second move is condensing. Nobody retells a notice word for word: out of ten lines you pull one. Serbian keeps ready-made openers for this, and they are handy for starting a sentence while the rest of it takes shape in your head.

Condensing means choosing: keep who, what, when and what to do now, and drop the polite formulas without regret. A notice in the entrance hall of a block of flats shrinks like this:

Cheat sheet

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

Mediation and relaying

Relay, condense, explain, interpret live, check you understood.

Relaying someone’s words

Condensing to the core

Explaining

Checking understanding

Interpreting live

Simplify or expand