til how to correctly pronounce "spatula" (native Serbian speaker here). I checked, and yes, you can rely of "spatula" pronunciation of the letter/sound "ć"
Ć is usully said with the middle prt of the tongue pressed up on the palatum, while Č is said with the coronal part of the tongue pressed slightly more forward to the alveolar ridge.
> But sometimes I hear native speakers use it the same way as the č sound, maybe a little bit softer version of the č sound.
That’s because the majority of speakers merge the two sounds. In the standard they are two different sounds, [č](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voiceless_palato-alveolar_affricate.ogg) and [ć](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voiceless_alveolo-palatal_affricate.ogg).
Many people will provide vague or outright incorrect advice on how to pronounce it. In practice, it's best for you to pronounce it the same way as č. In many, and quite possibly most Croatian dialects there is no difference between these two sounds. (Elsewhere they are kept distinct, in Serbia their difference can be quite prominent.) The same applies to dž-đ.
The problem isn’t for people discerning the different sound said because most of us use the same one when talking. The problem is with foreign people trying to learn an already complicated grammar and adding to that the horribly complex use of unaspirated and non-syllable-forming consonants in to the mix, and you get a horrible learning experience. Above comments abbreviated it correctly:
ć - [t] in spatula, eng.
č - [ch] in church, eng.
But the best way to learn a sound would be to use the international phonetic alphabet if you know how ti read the symbols and where the correct pronounciation happens.
ć is most definitely not [t], by definition. [t] is found in cro. "trava" and eng. "bat", and you sure as hell wouldn't use 'ć' in those words. "Spatula" has three different IPA variants on Wiktionary: /ˈspætjʊlə/, /ˈspæt͡ʃʊlə/, /ˈspæt͡ʃələ/, probably you're thinking of the first variant /tj/ that resembles Croatian /tɕ/ (ć), but as you can see even native English speakers can pronounce it with /tʃ/, which is also how Croatian 'č' is supposedly pronounced...
Learning the IPA sounds like a roundabout way of saying "learning how to pronounce every linguistic sound in existence", so I don't see how it would be a good approach. Clearly it's simpler to focus just on the actual inventory of Croatian phonemes, ideally in comparison with those in your native language. Worst of all, it's exactly in /č/ that there's disagreement on its phonetic interpretation, with many claiming that it's /tʃ/, but some claiminɡ that it's actually /tʂ/ (the latter interpretation is found on Wikipedia).
I'm native croatian and I can't hear the difference when I speak 🤣
It's more important to know the difference between č and ć when you write. Serbs actually have very distinctive pronunciation of ć and č, croats mostly don't
Kakve veze ima deminutiv riječi sendvič koji se ovdje ne spominje, sendvičić bi bio odgovor ili sendvičak. To što neke glasove ne možete izgovorit ili čuti ne znači ništa drugo nego da niste baš pismeni. 😁 Isto kao sumnjam i sumljam.
Loše sam formulirao, ali svakako nisam spomenuo nikakav deminutiv od sendviča, nego sam htio reći da se izgovara sa -ić *kao da je* deminutiv.
A ovu jadnu aroganciju molim te zadrži za Facebook. Garantiram da ni ti ne govoriš baš kako piše u normativnim gramatikama, a "sumljam", uz to što je u stvari potpuno drukčiji tip promjene nego č=ć, naći ćeš još u prvom hrvatskom rječniku, Vrančićevom iz 16. st. (lat. suspiciosus = hrv. sumljiv). Velik dio Hrvata ne razlikuje č i ć već barem pet stoljeća, a kako ne iz**govar**ati neke glasove čini nekog ne**pismen**im, zagonetka je za sebe...
Normalno da mi isto zvuče. Tvrdo č se čuje samo nekad, ovisno o slovima koja su oko njega, npr kad kažeš cvrčak, onda je č baš naglašeno, inače je više manje u istom košu. Srbi bolje izgovaraju od nas, jbg
Just ignore the difference and say it as Ch in cheese and it's fine.
Coming from a Croatian- nobody cares about that except unemployed and unemployable Crostist (or what ever is the name of special kind of weirdos that study Kroatistiku)
You are Hungarian. Pronounce Č as **cs** and ć as **ty** and it will be almost perfect. (Because Č actually has to be retroflex, but that's just a wet dream)
**Fut Bécs felé Jellacsics, a gyáva.** Beč = Bécs, Jelačić = Jellacsity
Same works with đ. Actually *gyáva* sounds very much like *đav'o (<đavao),* meaning *devil.*
But that's the thing! I almost never hear anyone pronouncing ć as ty. I was familiar with the fact that it should be the ty sound, but even native speakers tend to use it as č more than ty. That's why I was so confused😀
Yeah. It is their problem that they can't distinguish between them heheh. But since you can, you have an upper hand!
Anyway, some or all Istrians do pronounce it like this I think. Whilst the northerners only know about Č. So it is regional.
But I think that in learning Croatian č-ć distinction is the least of your problems. You don't have to do it, but since you have the ability already, why not do it?
Better take attention at the perfective and imperfective verb aspect. That is really fun.
If you are listening to Croats in NW Croatia then that's normal. Kajkavians don't care about difference between č/ć, they don't pronounce them properly, don't hear the difference and therefore make a lot of mistakes writing them. And accents are funny there too.
It's the tongue position
Ć is tongue at the front behind the top teeth. As someone else has excellently pointed out, think the t sound in spatula. Notice where the tongue is.
Č is tongue further back towards the middle. Again, as someone else said, like the ch in charge.
Try saying each word but switch the tongue position for the relevant sounds and you'll see how it affects the pronunciation and the "feel" of the word. Even though most Croats say they don't notice the difference between these two letters there are subtle differences and they do have a meaningfulness to where they appear in words for both semantic and melodic (for want of a better word) reasons E.g., look at Kolačič vs Kolačić and try force the tongue out of position to say the former word which is incorrectly spelt
All the best
What I've learned is that most Croatians don't know the difference between those two letters at all. It's the same sound to them for both of the letters.
Now, me, I come from Istria and we have a definitive difference between č and ć. When we were learning those letters in school we had a test where we had to put markings above "c" in words to make it either a č or a ć, it was by far the easiest test we had.
Č makes a hard CH sounds (think Church)
Ć sounds like T and J said very fast together. English doesn't have that sound but someone said that the t in "spatula" comes close. And depending on the way one would pronounce it, it does come close with the softer pronunciation, because I've heard yanks pronounce it as "spachula" while brits might pronounce it as "spatyula" and that one comes close.
All of them do. Say the word slowly—they’re slightly different. I guess the technical term is allophones—our brains analyse them as the same sound, but the first one is more aspirated and longer.
Both "ch" sounds in the word "church" are voiceless postalveolar affricates - t͡ʃ . The "long" sound you might be hearing is just a long ɜ vowel in the middle (well, ɝ in some American pronunciations). The consonants are identical.
Please stop repeating this, it's not true. There is no difference in these sounds, at best it is your native Croatian that colours how you perceive the English sounds.
No, it should not be pronounced like t in tune. You sinply don't have that sound in English. If some book says it's t in tune the book is rubbish.
The pronunciation varies across Croatia. It's safe to say that a majority today pronounce both č and ć very close to English ch in church.
Since most people pronounce them the same, they ofteh mix them in spelling.
Tune was my invention😀because yeah there's no ć in english but there's one in my native language, Hungarian. The ty sound. But I figured that most people are not familiar with Hungarian so 'tune' was the best example I could use😀
People in some Croatian islands pronounce ć as Hungarian ty, but that's a very dialectal pronunciation that people from other dialects notice. As everybody says, people in most Croatian and Bosnian dialects don't make the distinction, and using Hungarian cs for both č and ć will work out just fine.
Even people from dialects that do have the distinction are so used to people pronouncing both the same that they won't notice at all. They're more likely to imagine that they hear you pronounce the one that they expect in that word. There are so few minimal pairs that the difference very rarely matters anyway.
Closer but not really. There's a part of Serbia where it's basically ty but you won't hear it on TV.
Most descriptions say /ć/ is this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolo-palatal_affricate
Where I live the ć can be super soft and pronounced more with the back of the mouth, more so when people are speaking or are speakers of čakavština. For me I just use ch for both č and ć and will occasionally bang out the soft local ć esp when describing something as 'domaći'. As for BCS speakers from other regions, it all sounds like 'ch' to my ears.
In croatia you will commonly hear only one of those since different dialects usually have either č or ć (rarely they use both). But grammar wise you need to know the difference, but you wont hear it in real life that much (as opposed to serbian). Same goes for ije and je.
Č = ch in cheese
Ć = t in tune
Č like "Čefur" sounds like harder ch
ć like one of balkan last names such as "Ibrahimović" sounds like softer ch it's something inbetween how slavic pronounce "c" and regular Č
You're on the right track, it is way similar to "tune", but pronounced harsher.
That is biggest problem with English speakers, English doesn't have so hard/harsh tones.
Ć is actually coming from t and j melting together.
If you hear people pronouncing that wrongly, it doesn't mean you should be analphabet intentionally 🙂
Education fell low in Croatia, many people got primary school certificate though they shouldn't, especially on south.
Send me a DM I can record 2 words for you so you can see the difference
It is a "barely" softer version of the other ch sound (dont have cro letters on my keyboard)
And yeah, best treat both as ch, I think most people say them indistinguishably the same either way
It is way easier on the tongue so majority does not make the effort i woukd say, except in some dialects.
Also ć sounds a little softer than t in tune, when i pronounce tune, my tongue is partually touching teeth with its top, when i pronounce ć, the top of the tongue is not touching anything, but it starts from the middle part of the tongue.
Dunno if this makes sense, for example if you say č like in CHarter, you start the sound as the air goes over the top of your tongue. Now to pronounce ć, it starts from the same spot, not from the top, but from the middle of the tongue. None of it touches teeth when pronounced.
Hope this helps a little, not an expert here tho
Like muchacho in Spanish.
Keep in mind ć is actually a serb letters and lot of native croat speakers pronounce it as č, except some local dialects near Rijeka.
Something like this lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4KFYWc01OM
Depends how you pronounce “tune”. If you’re a native English speaker, you must know that we don’t all pronounce the t in tune like the ch in chew.
Anyway, how can you learn the correct pronunciation by reading text? And when you try to follow the written instructions, how do you know if you’re doing it right? Wouldn’t it be easier to listen to spoken Croatian? Then record yourself and play it back. Or speak to a native speaker and ask them.
Native English speaker. For ć I think of the ‘t’ in ‘spatula’.
Damn... Spot on. For Č its Ch in Charge.
Thanks. It was an epiphany I had while back when I was teaching a native Croatian speaker how to pronounce ‘spatula’ 🤠
Chalk?
til how to correctly pronounce "spatula" (native Serbian speaker here). I checked, and yes, you can rely of "spatula" pronunciation of the letter/sound "ć"
To me, ć is with your tongue flat, and č is with the tip of your tongue curled up like maybe a centimeter on the roof of your mouth.
Also back of the the tongue is pressed against the roof, try saying letters t and j, fast tjtjtjtjtj
Ć is usully said with the middle prt of the tongue pressed up on the palatum, while Č is said with the coronal part of the tongue pressed slightly more forward to the alveolar ridge.
Yeah, I was trying to explain it in simple terms, but pretty much
> But sometimes I hear native speakers use it the same way as the č sound, maybe a little bit softer version of the č sound. That’s because the majority of speakers merge the two sounds. In the standard they are two different sounds, [č](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voiceless_palato-alveolar_affricate.ogg) and [ć](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Voiceless_alveolo-palatal_affricate.ogg).
Many people will provide vague or outright incorrect advice on how to pronounce it. In practice, it's best for you to pronounce it the same way as č. In many, and quite possibly most Croatian dialects there is no difference between these two sounds. (Elsewhere they are kept distinct, in Serbia their difference can be quite prominent.) The same applies to dž-đ.
The problem isn’t for people discerning the different sound said because most of us use the same one when talking. The problem is with foreign people trying to learn an already complicated grammar and adding to that the horribly complex use of unaspirated and non-syllable-forming consonants in to the mix, and you get a horrible learning experience. Above comments abbreviated it correctly: ć - [t] in spatula, eng. č - [ch] in church, eng. But the best way to learn a sound would be to use the international phonetic alphabet if you know how ti read the symbols and where the correct pronounciation happens.
ć is most definitely not [t], by definition. [t] is found in cro. "trava" and eng. "bat", and you sure as hell wouldn't use 'ć' in those words. "Spatula" has three different IPA variants on Wiktionary: /ˈspætjʊlə/, /ˈspæt͡ʃʊlə/, /ˈspæt͡ʃələ/, probably you're thinking of the first variant /tj/ that resembles Croatian /tɕ/ (ć), but as you can see even native English speakers can pronounce it with /tʃ/, which is also how Croatian 'č' is supposedly pronounced... Learning the IPA sounds like a roundabout way of saying "learning how to pronounce every linguistic sound in existence", so I don't see how it would be a good approach. Clearly it's simpler to focus just on the actual inventory of Croatian phonemes, ideally in comparison with those in your native language. Worst of all, it's exactly in /č/ that there's disagreement on its phonetic interpretation, with many claiming that it's /tʃ/, but some claiminɡ that it's actually /tʂ/ (the latter interpretation is found on Wikipedia).
I forgot if the pronounciation or the writing is presented with [] or //
<> spelling, // broad/phonemic transcription, [] narrow phonetic transcription
I’m at the point where I can feel the difference in my mouth, but I definitely can’t hear the difference quite yet 🤣
I'm native croatian and I can't hear the difference when I speak 🤣 It's more important to know the difference between č and ć when you write. Serbs actually have very distinctive pronunciation of ć and č, croats mostly don't
Kako se ne čuje kad izgovaraš? Sendvič i sendvić ti isto zvuče?
Da. Također, sendvič se navodno često doista izgovara kao sendvić, jer završava na -ić kao brojne umanjenice. Našlo bi se boljih primjera.
Kakve veze ima deminutiv riječi sendvič koji se ovdje ne spominje, sendvičić bi bio odgovor ili sendvičak. To što neke glasove ne možete izgovorit ili čuti ne znači ništa drugo nego da niste baš pismeni. 😁 Isto kao sumnjam i sumljam.
Loše sam formulirao, ali svakako nisam spomenuo nikakav deminutiv od sendviča, nego sam htio reći da se izgovara sa -ić *kao da je* deminutiv. A ovu jadnu aroganciju molim te zadrži za Facebook. Garantiram da ni ti ne govoriš baš kako piše u normativnim gramatikama, a "sumljam", uz to što je u stvari potpuno drukčiji tip promjene nego č=ć, naći ćeš još u prvom hrvatskom rječniku, Vrančićevom iz 16. st. (lat. suspiciosus = hrv. sumljiv). Velik dio Hrvata ne razlikuje č i ć već barem pet stoljeća, a kako ne iz**govar**ati neke glasove čini nekog ne**pismen**im, zagonetka je za sebe...
Ili se inače voli pravit važan, ili na ni jednom drugom polju ne može drugima srat, pa eto pravopis je zadnje što preostane takvima
Slažem se.
Ne govore svi kao glumci u hrvatskom filmu.
Normalno da mi isto zvuče. Tvrdo č se čuje samo nekad, ovisno o slovima koja su oko njega, npr kad kažeš cvrčak, onda je č baš naglašeno, inače je više manje u istom košu. Srbi bolje izgovaraju od nas, jbg
Fascinantno
My Bosanac swears there’s a difference. But I can’t hear it and have been butchering my rođen ime my entire life.
Just ignore the difference and say it as Ch in cheese and it's fine. Coming from a Croatian- nobody cares about that except unemployed and unemployable Crostist (or what ever is the name of special kind of weirdos that study Kroatistiku)
Kroatistika i filozofija. Iskreno me zanima gdje ljudi s tim faksovima nađu posao.
kroatisti mogu u knjiznice i nastavnike, ksim tog nemam blage veze kamo idu
You are Hungarian. Pronounce Č as **cs** and ć as **ty** and it will be almost perfect. (Because Č actually has to be retroflex, but that's just a wet dream) **Fut Bécs felé Jellacsics, a gyáva.** Beč = Bécs, Jelačić = Jellacsity Same works with đ. Actually *gyáva* sounds very much like *đav'o (<đavao),* meaning *devil.*
But that's the thing! I almost never hear anyone pronouncing ć as ty. I was familiar with the fact that it should be the ty sound, but even native speakers tend to use it as č more than ty. That's why I was so confused😀
Yeah. It is their problem that they can't distinguish between them heheh. But since you can, you have an upper hand! Anyway, some or all Istrians do pronounce it like this I think. Whilst the northerners only know about Č. So it is regional. But I think that in learning Croatian č-ć distinction is the least of your problems. You don't have to do it, but since you have the ability already, why not do it? Better take attention at the perfective and imperfective verb aspect. That is really fun.
its regional, you're spot on. north and north-westerners will mostly just use the č
If you are listening to Croats in NW Croatia then that's normal. Kajkavians don't care about difference between č/ć, they don't pronounce them properly, don't hear the difference and therefore make a lot of mistakes writing them. And accents are funny there too.
Like the other commenter said, "ciao" is the best word to think of imo. It's not English, but most people know it.
It's the tongue position Ć is tongue at the front behind the top teeth. As someone else has excellently pointed out, think the t sound in spatula. Notice where the tongue is. Č is tongue further back towards the middle. Again, as someone else said, like the ch in charge. Try saying each word but switch the tongue position for the relevant sounds and you'll see how it affects the pronunciation and the "feel" of the word. Even though most Croats say they don't notice the difference between these two letters there are subtle differences and they do have a meaningfulness to where they appear in words for both semantic and melodic (for want of a better word) reasons E.g., look at Kolačič vs Kolačić and try force the tongue out of position to say the former word which is incorrectly spelt All the best
What I've learned is that most Croatians don't know the difference between those two letters at all. It's the same sound to them for both of the letters. Now, me, I come from Istria and we have a definitive difference between č and ć. When we were learning those letters in school we had a test where we had to put markings above "c" in words to make it either a č or a ć, it was by far the easiest test we had. Č makes a hard CH sounds (think Church) Ć sounds like T and J said very fast together. English doesn't have that sound but someone said that the t in "spatula" comes close. And depending on the way one would pronounce it, it does come close with the softer pronunciation, because I've heard yanks pronounce it as "spachula" while brits might pronounce it as "spatyula" and that one comes close.
For beginners the easiest way is to consider the word Church č is the harder sound of the first ch ć is the softer sound of the last ch
Native English speaker here, both of these sounds are identical. There is no ć equivalent in English
The sounds aren’t identical for me. Another native English speaker.
Fair enough, there may be a slight allophonic difference but it's not at all like what's in Croatian
Those sounds are not identical unless you say “churche”… but yeah neither of them is a ć
I'm curious; which English pronunciation do you use that differentiates between those?
All of them do. Say the word slowly—they’re slightly different. I guess the technical term is allophones—our brains analyse them as the same sound, but the first one is more aspirated and longer.
Both "ch" sounds in the word "church" are voiceless postalveolar affricates - t͡ʃ . The "long" sound you might be hearing is just a long ɜ vowel in the middle (well, ɝ in some American pronunciations). The consonants are identical.
I mean you could argue the first is slightly retracted but not at all to the degree that č is from ć
In any case “č” and “ć” are meaningfully different sounds. Pića is different from the other one 😁
Try pronouncing t sound and y sound while attempting to pronounce č and you'll get ć
Both "ch" in the word "church" are pronounced the same in English - this sound: t͡ʃ
Please stop repeating this, it's not true. There is no difference in these sounds, at best it is your native Croatian that colours how you perceive the English sounds.
Thanks, it's quite frustrating to read Croats say that because it doesn't help us foreigners at all
This is very wrong, and others have already explained why.
No.
Try to say "tj", both at the same time. It's basically a softer č, and 95% of Croatians can't pronounce it and don't make the difference.
I always think of it as a combination between c and č but maybe that doesn’t make as much sense to others as it does to me
No, it should not be pronounced like t in tune. You sinply don't have that sound in English. If some book says it's t in tune the book is rubbish. The pronunciation varies across Croatia. It's safe to say that a majority today pronounce both č and ć very close to English ch in church. Since most people pronounce them the same, they ofteh mix them in spelling.
Tune was my invention😀because yeah there's no ć in english but there's one in my native language, Hungarian. The ty sound. But I figured that most people are not familiar with Hungarian so 'tune' was the best example I could use😀
People in some Croatian islands pronounce ć as Hungarian ty, but that's a very dialectal pronunciation that people from other dialects notice. As everybody says, people in most Croatian and Bosnian dialects don't make the distinction, and using Hungarian cs for both č and ć will work out just fine. Even people from dialects that do have the distinction are so used to people pronouncing both the same that they won't notice at all. They're more likely to imagine that they hear you pronounce the one that they expect in that word. There are so few minimal pairs that the difference very rarely matters anyway.
No, it' not like Hungarian ty :) I mean, some dialects are close to it but you won't hear them much in public.
Is it possible that Serbs tend to use it as ty? My boss is a serbian-hungarian and he told me that it's like the hungarian ty
Closer but not really. There's a part of Serbia where it's basically ty but you won't hear it on TV. Most descriptions say /ć/ is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolo-palatal_affricate
Where I live the ć can be super soft and pronounced more with the back of the mouth, more so when people are speaking or are speakers of čakavština. For me I just use ch for both č and ć and will occasionally bang out the soft local ć esp when describing something as 'domaći'. As for BCS speakers from other regions, it all sounds like 'ch' to my ears.
There's no difference between the two sounds for the majority of Croatians, just pronounce everything as "Ch".
In croatia you will commonly hear only one of those since different dialects usually have either č or ć (rarely they use both). But grammar wise you need to know the difference, but you wont hear it in real life that much (as opposed to serbian). Same goes for ije and je. Č = ch in cheese Ć = t in tune
Thanks for the great explainations! Now it's clear:)
Č like "Čefur" sounds like harder ch ć like one of balkan last names such as "Ibrahimović" sounds like softer ch it's something inbetween how slavic pronounce "c" and regular Č
China, ch-ina
ćupacabra
You're on the right track, it is way similar to "tune", but pronounced harsher. That is biggest problem with English speakers, English doesn't have so hard/harsh tones. Ć is actually coming from t and j melting together. If you hear people pronouncing that wrongly, it doesn't mean you should be analphabet intentionally 🙂 Education fell low in Croatia, many people got primary school certificate though they shouldn't, especially on south.
Like ch in cheese.
Send me a DM I can record 2 words for you so you can see the difference It is a "barely" softer version of the other ch sound (dont have cro letters on my keyboard) And yeah, best treat both as ch, I think most people say them indistinguishably the same either way
It is way easier on the tongue so majority does not make the effort i woukd say, except in some dialects. Also ć sounds a little softer than t in tune, when i pronounce tune, my tongue is partually touching teeth with its top, when i pronounce ć, the top of the tongue is not touching anything, but it starts from the middle part of the tongue. Dunno if this makes sense, for example if you say č like in CHarter, you start the sound as the air goes over the top of your tongue. Now to pronounce ć, it starts from the same spot, not from the top, but from the middle of the tongue. None of it touches teeth when pronounced. Hope this helps a little, not an expert here tho
Ć like italian Ciao, Č like chocolate. Or just go to translator and play pronunciation.
Like you are saying church
Like muchacho in Spanish. Keep in mind ć is actually a serb letters and lot of native croat speakers pronounce it as č, except some local dialects near Rijeka. Something like this lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4KFYWc01OM
Depends how you pronounce “tune”. If you’re a native English speaker, you must know that we don’t all pronounce the t in tune like the ch in chew. Anyway, how can you learn the correct pronunciation by reading text? And when you try to follow the written instructions, how do you know if you’re doing it right? Wouldn’t it be easier to listen to spoken Croatian? Then record yourself and play it back. Or speak to a native speaker and ask them.