Reading fluency

Lesson opening

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

Reading signs fluently

You know all thirty letters of the Latin alphabet, the six special ones too: č, ć, š, ž, đ, dž. Letter by letter you can read any word, but slowly: while you are still putting together b-e-o-g-r-a-d, the bus has carried you past the sign. Time to move from single letters to whole words and real street signs, and to read them at speed.

The road is short: letters → words → signs. Ahead are three reading rules, a technique for long words (splitting them into syllables) and one handy property of Serbian spelling: it usually shows a sound change right on the page. Master them, and a walk through the centre of Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, turns into reading practice: every shop window, menu and ticket read out loud.

From letter to word to sign

In the first lessons you sounded words out letter by letter: k-nj-i-ž-a-r-a. That is scaffolding, and you need it only until reading becomes automatic. Fluency begins when the eye stops seeing single letters and takes in the whole word, or big chunks of it, its syllables: knji — ža — ra, and at once you hear knjižara, “bookshop”. That is how you read English: not “m-a-r-k-e-t” but “market”, at a glance.

Serbian makes this quick to learn, because each letter always sounds the same. In English a new word can surprise you: is lead “leed” or “led”? The right reading often has to be memorised word by word. Serbian has no such surprises, so the more words you read out loud, the faster your eye learns to take them in whole.

Rule 1. Read everything you see

Serbian has no silent letters: what is written is said, down to the last letter. The word voda is “vo-da”, all four letters present. Other languages have other habits: English writes know and drops the “k”, writes island and drops the “s”, and in French Paris the final “s” goes unread. Serbian never drops a letter: it pronounces the whole word. Read the table out loud:

Rule 2. Vowels stay full

In English, unstressed vowels shrink to a quick “uh”, the sound called schwa: we write chocolate and say “CHOC-lit”, write camera and say “CAM-ruh”. Serbian vowels never shrink. Each one is full and clear wherever it stands, stressed or far from the stress. Think of Spanish or Italian vowels: pure, steady, never sliding into a second sound. dobro is “do-bro” with two clean o’s, polako (“slowly”) is “po-la-ko”, all three vowels in place, and Beograd is “Be-o-grad”, with not a vowel swallowed.

Cheat sheet

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

Reading signs fluently

A Serbian word is read the way it is written. Fluency is the habit of taking in a word whole, or in syllables, instead of letter by letter.

Three reading rules

Two English habits to drop

Long words: syllable by syllable

Split a word into syllables (most end in a vowel): a-po-te-ka, me-nja-čni-ca. As many vowels, as many syllables.

The city’s signs