About Beseda

Each lesson meets its new words two at a time. You hear each word and see how to say it, then pick its meaning, pick it out by sound, recall it from English, read it in sentences, write it in sentences, and finally write every new word from memory. Anything you miss comes back three questions later and keeps coming back until you get it right. Words you have learned return in your daily review just before you would forget them.

Every Serbian word in every lesson is checked against a dictionary of millions of Serbian word forms, and misspellings, non-Serbian letters, ijekavian forms and Croatian words are rejected before they reach you. If something still looks wrong, tap the flag after answering and tell us.

The guide under each new word spells it the way an English reader would say it, with the stressed syllable in capitals: здраво is ZDRAH-voh. Where the stress falls comes from the accent marks in Wiktionary's dictionary entries; for the few words it has no marks for, the stress was set by hand.

In the guides, r is always pronounced and rolled, even where it is the vowel of a syllable (SUR-bee-yah for Србија), and j is the English j of jam. The Serbian letter ј itself sounds like y (YOO-troh for јутро).

Serbian also has pitch (rising and falling tones) that a respelling cannot show, so always listen to the audio as well.

• Word forms: srLex 1.3 (Ljubešić et al., CLARIN.SI), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. The word-form file this app uses (forms.json) is derived from it and shared under the same licence.
• Stress marks: English Wiktionary, Serbo-Croatian entries, CC BY-SA 4.0 (accents.json).
• Voices: Microsoft neural text to speech (sr-RS Sophie and Nicholas).
• Typeface: Nunito.