The five vowels

Lesson opening

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

Five pure vowels

In “The Latin alphabet” you saw that five of the thirty Serbian letters are vowels: a, e, i, o, u. Serbian has twenty-five consonants and just five vowels, and that is good news for a learner: there is little to memorise, and each vowel is always read the same way.

What matters more than the number is how they sound. Every Serbian vowel is full and clear in every syllable, stressed or not. English does not work that way: its unstressed vowels collapse into a quick “uh”, the schwa of “banana” (“buh-NAH-nuh”), and even its full vowels glide (the “o” of “go” is really “oh-oo”). Serbian vowels never weaken and never glide: think of the steady vowels of Spanish or Italian, not of English. In “Reading fluency” you already read vowels in full; now we take the five one by one: how to say each of them, where English habits spoil it, and how to drop those habits. These habits are among the first things that give an English accent away.

Read the examples out loud and listen. In more both vowels are full: “MO-reh”, not “more” as in English and not “muh-ray”. In riba you hear a clean “ee”: “REE-ba”, not “RY-ba”. An unstressed vowel sounds just as clear and full as a stressed one.

Each vowel in turn

None of these sounds has to be learned from scratch: English has something close to each of them. But each has its exact “mouth setting”, and you need to hold it in every syllable, not only in the stressed one.

Vowels never shrink: not a single “uh”

This is the core of the lesson. In English we write full vowels and mumble half of them: “banana” comes out “buh-NAH-nuh”, “photograph” hides one in the middle (“FOH-tuh-graf”), “police” starts with “puh”. The habit is so automatic that we don’t notice it. Serbian has none of it: the letter o is always a full, round “o”, in whatever syllable it stands.

The second English habit is gliding. English rarely lets a vowel stand still: say “no” or “say” slowly and you will hear the tongue move at the end, “noh-oo”, “seh-ee”. A Serbian vowel stays put from start to finish: selo (“village”) is “SEH-lo” with two flat, steady vowels, nedelja (“Sunday”, and also “week”) is “neh-deh-lya”, three clean vowels, sestra (“sister”) is “SEH-stra”. Five vowels, five constant sounds: learn them once and you will read any word correctly, wherever its stress falls.

Cheat sheet

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

Five pure vowels

Exactly five vowels: a, e, i, o, u, all pure: one mouth position, held to the end, no glide. Each sounds the same in every syllable, stressed or not: no vowel shrinks to “uh”. Steady vowels, as in Spanish or Italian.

The five one by one

No schwa, no gliding: vowels never weaken

“i”: always “ee”, never “eye”

i is always a clean front “ee”, never “eye” or the i of bit, and a t before it stays a t: ti is “tee”, never “chee”.

Syllables, two vowels in a row, syllabic “r”