25 Most Common Mistakes Croats Make Speaking English 

My nephew, a six year old Australian born, when visiting Croatia with his parents, would yell after my boys: Čekaj za ja, čekaj za ja, which was his translation of "wait for me"!!!!

My favorite literal translation is: kako da ne - how yes no

I will never forget my English teacher, she was from US and her lessons were always descriptive when it came to common mistakes. Like - juice is concentrated, you are focused 😊

I've been learning Croatian for about 7 years now. They get their own back on us with their grammar!

Thank you very much for your lesson today! I live in Canada for past 55 years and still make many mistakes in English language! Sadly ,never have opportunity to take appropriate lessons and being 88 years old ,I guess I will died without ever spiking perfect English! I love your short lesson in this video ! I will try to memorize correct way to use certain pronunciation! Velika Vam HVALA uz želju da govorite ” MOJ” jezik mnogo bolje nego kako ja govorim vaš!👏🏻👍 Pozdrav I sve najbolje! ,Ana 🇭🇷🇨🇦

Thank you for this feedback. It is mostly helpful.

Više te nikad neću vozit na festival vina :) Učim, hvala puno

Mr Bradbury, could you please delve a little deeper into those "pesky" definite and indefinite articles? You are a great teacher!

Thank you for this video, today I'm 43 years old and I'm making the same mistakes.I was not a good student, and I heard English on TV. today i spoke english, swedish, italian. learned everything on the street with people.I appreciate your effort and honesty. Croatia is my homeland. God bless you Mr.

The adjective/adverb distinction really is a big one. One good meme I found on the topic was when one character said: "I'm doing good." to which the other replies: "No. Superman is doing good, you're doing well." 😆

This was so funny and informative and I learned more stuff in this video than in school. The way how you explained all those mistakes is really fun and memorable so now I will always have a picture of the parrot when thinking about when you use on and in haha Please make more videos like this, I wish I had this entertaining teacher while I was learning English in school because now my grammar would be probably much better :)

A translation I saw in a restaurant in Dubrovnik that sent (and still sends!) me into hysterical laughter was a menu item translation of "jaje na oko" (sunny side up) as "egg on eye" !

That is true, a lot of Croats make these mistakes because they literally translate Croatian to English, so they speak English the Croatian way instead of speaking English the English way :D

As an English teacher in Split, I have noticed the exact same things - use of Past Tenses, articles and phrasal verbs, collocations... we work tirelessly to avoid these... Thanks for posting - I am going to use this in the classroom every single year!👏👏

I often hear for "sitting in the sun(light)" : " I am sitting ON the sun!" A direct translation from Croatian! Of course then I imagine them sitting on top of the sun - hot!

We all fall to same trap,speaking as we used to in our native language.

Thank you! A very useful video! Greetings from Croatia!

Thank you for this video, I have learned something new.

u'r giving 2much credit to Croatian schools, main reason why every1 in Croatia speaks English well is subtitled tv programme. it's to this day my main language learning tool, I can speak English, Spanish, German, now I'm learning Japanese same way. Listening is most important thing is language learning, I believe

The last phrase "a little way" caught me off guard, I've heard of a wee bit, but this is just another level of BrE

These are common mistakes for Romanians, too. Truth be told, I am amazed of how many grammatical mistakes I notice in the language of native speakers, things that our students don't make. For example, "should OF said" instead of "should HAVE" said. Bottom line, Croatia is one of the countries I visited where I had no problem whatsoever in getting to understand people. Everywhere I turned around, people would speak English and that is absolutely great.

Thank you. Even as a certified translator I can vouch that some things said in here are soooo true.

Hvala vam što ste dodali ovaj video. Našao sam se kriv u nekim izrazima. 😅

You know when I learnt the difference between adjectives and adverbs - by learning Esperanto. The difference is so clear to me, that I'm surprised that many native English speakers confuse things like good and well.

Thanks for these tips as a future professor of English language a piece of advice from a native speaker is allways wellcome.

Get on the bus, but once you get on, you're in, correct? "Get on the plane! ... I say f*** you I'm getting in the plane! There seems to be less wind in here" - George Carlin

I'm a Croatian man living in Wales, UK since 2005 and still making some of these mistakes.🙂 Thanks for the great content.

thank you Mr. Bradbury.You have explained some things that were a bit off for years to me and my rusty english.

Oh, I remembered one! My gf always corrects me and says that I'm not "drinking a pill" but "eating a pill" and that it is "drinking a soup" and not "eating a soup". So which is it then? That drives me nuts because every time she says that she drank a soup I get a mental image of her chugging a pint of soup lmao. And every time she says she ate a pill I get a mental image of her chewing on a pill instead of getting it down with a gulp of water.

One that my dad makes all the time is saying "explain me" instead of "explain to me", it's driving me crazy 😂

Thank you so much from Croatian working in UK.

Thank you, pozdrav from Croatia :)

Very interesting. Native English speaker from South Africa living ten years in Zagreb. My wife has a degree in English literature so speaks fluent English. She still however uses funny expressions. I will put the laundry out to dry. Instead of I will hang out or just hang the washing.

First time someone explained the difference between "than"and "then" to me, that was actually very helpful,so thanks for that! Heh

few vs a few was really cool to learn :) I've always felt there was a difference, just didn't bother to dive deeper into it I guess. Thx!

Great video! Thank you Paul! I have heard 'angry at' used quite a lot though - perhaps a regional (or situational) thing in the Antipodes 😊

you're right. It is our litterally translation of Croatian expressions

As usual - great and funny content, Paul! 🙂👍I'd say lack of articles is prolly a main thing. Croatian language has no acrticles so many Croats, even those who speak English so perfectly, tend to forget them. I must confess, I leave them out too. Many times. :p

Tnx mate for the adviceS 🤣🤣🤣....great video 👍

This is better than a comedy show!

Thank you!

Very instructive, thanks!

Much appreciated, thank You.

I learned most English from the internet, music and video games, and some of it were from actual English periods in school. I've consumed said media too much that I basically speak English with an American accent.

Yes this is true. We need more informative videos like this one to improve ourselves. Thank you.

Very common is ”to cook a coffee - skuhati kavu” instead of ”to make a coffee"

I am surprised Paul, that you didn't mention my pet peeve; the insistence of English speaking Croats on pronouncing English vowels, specifically A and U in a weird way, so Rugby becomes Ragby (and is spelled that way!) and Cat becomes Ket. I am told they are taught that way in school and it's how they interpret the American version of English (though there are a huge amount of variables in USA alone.) So you get Croatians speaking perfect English but with a pseudo US style and a Croatian accent. When I had a school English teacher call me "e Fanny Men" I knew I had found a crusade. So, to make it absolutely clear, ´"A" in English is pronounced the same as in Croatian. "U" however is almost the same , but if Croatians pronounce it as they would in Croatian, it sounds like a strong Yorkshire accent, so it needs to be a little softer, like the double o in cool. I think I deserve "e pet on the head" for that!

Thank you !🙂

My top 3 Croatian to English mistakes: "My best player/film/song" - favourite / "I am boring." 🤣 - bored / goodest and baddest - better and worse

You say red wine because you look wine through glass. We say black wine because we look wine through bottle.

In school, we were taugt that the capital of England (and UK) is Landn. To my surprise when I went there I found out they call it London, same as we. We also have an old name for this city, Londra

Thank you

Thank You.

I must admit, you made me laugh as I am native croatian speaker living in Australia for the biggest chunk of my life, I recognize in Croatian community over here ( I mean in Australia ) mistakes like those even people spending decades still unable to master those mistakes. Awesome clip. Goodonya (I had to do that)

Perfect!

Big help 👍🏻

Thank You!

Thanks Paul, for teaching us English grammar...

lol i`ve waited for than and then....I am 41y old and I still remember my first english textbook when i was in 4th grade. but perhaps our best teacher of english language is tv set. we use subtitled not dubbed movies or series. don`t you agree? it does help a lot

I think you could do a special clip on menus

Mr. Paul you are good man!

I stayn with my mistakes and using my short English, learned from country pop rock songs couse I often been around school, even catched two years of study but war for Croatia independent begun and I broke with study. Now bordering with my English but people can understand what I trying to say sometime, and that is inaf for me.

100 mistakes australians make while speaking croatian number 1: pronounciation of every word

These were some really good examples, Paul. My favourite is: 'a shit of paper", which is how most Croats would pronounce 'sheet'. Generally speaking, most Croats have great difficulty mastering their 'own' language for a variety of historical and political reasons. But, that is a different topic, altogether.

I studied German and Italian at school. Learned English through movies 😛 In the end I didn't use German and Italian for 20 years, so in the end I only know English 😑

The last one is the one I have been waiting for.The worst.

This is great, good job! I watched a lot of similar videos because I reached a certain level of english where I can speak fluently and understand 99% of the things BUT I'm completely aware I'm simply making (too) many small mistakes. So besides watching videos like this one I also started to read in English (I'm basically just buying books that I enjoyed reading or wanted to read jn Croatian and now reading in English). Is there anything else you'd recommend (apart from watching movies or taking classes)?

Language related videos are always so interesting and these are good observations and advice's 👍 Yeah, lot of people translate to English directly how something is said in Croatian and in many cases that doesn't make any sense in English. But because of that sometimes we translate Croatian directly to English just for fun :) One thing that I prefer in English is writing every word in the title with first capital letter (except articles), in Croatian it really annoys me that only first word has capital first letter, that just doesn't look nice to me, so sometimes I break that rule and write the title it the English way :) But even though my English is quite good I still haven't mastered fully when to use 'a' and when 'the'

I am a Croatian woman, but don't have a habit of making those kind of mistakes. I am not saying that my English is perfect or that I'm better than everyone else, but these mistakes are common among Croats.I hope you understand that many Croats learn English on the principle: let me learn as much as I need to communicate with others on a basic level. The rest is not interesting to them. I am not talking about all Croats here, but there are quite a few of them. For example, I learned English through series and movies. I never used a book to learn grammar. I learned to speak the language and grammar correctly by ear. I am happy that you love our country.

a=general the=specific and I don't know about an, or should I say I don't know how to explain it and it just kinda comes naturally for me even tho I'm not a native English speaker

when i was in the croatian army we had to write some universal test on english and the resoults give u representation on how good u know english i had 90 % i was proud and i can wreally comunicate grate on english but when i listen to this man afther this video i feel stupid .

Good video, sir! I am guilty for a few of them. ;) (this is probably incorrect, too ha ha)

I am croatian and I only did 3 of these mistakes. I actually make more mistakes in croatian lol. I kinda grew up with both english and coratian. I speak and understand english like its my own language.

You are good man. Thank you Pozdrav iz Zadra

Very beautiful Sattar l am willing to come Croatia

I learned about "indigenous" from this video. I always heard it and thought it meant something like "endemic" and not autochtonous, very interesting how autochtonous is not a common english word.

I made exactly the same errors (as a Croatian). Thank you for the correction, I'll try to keep this in mind. At least I know why my auto correction always mark my words in documents :)

Singular informacija, plural informacije. Singular Savjet, plural Savjeti. We don't really use it but it exists. Informacije is a bit tricky because it can also be referred as a singular, example: Izvor informacije (Lit. The source of information) or just the word Informacije which is a plural on it's own meaning: Informations and the singular is Informacija.

Paul, thank you so much for useful advices. But, how is your Croatian going on? Can you put some video clip with your real croatian speaking? 😊

powerful observations :D all of them pretty correct and few of them I still can't get rid off. especially whit :D

I read English perfectly but I struggle a bit speaking it because I don't really have a chance to speak it a lot

Tx 🌹

Until we stumble on Alanis Morissette's lyrics from Canada: "It always looked GOOD on paper, sounded GOOD in theory!" Feels good. Seems good to me ;) Yes, he can't play "good" but you see what I'm talking about, don't you?

My girlfriend has fantastic fluency in English and despite that has a funny habit of saying "no matter that" when she normally means "even though" lol.

This video is so incredible! xDD Personally I haven't seen anyone making any of those (probably b/c I'm a Croat myself) but if I spoke English with my countrymen more often those would be the exact mistakes that I'd expect. It's so funny XDDD You've really picked the good ones like blue/blond and sit on a coffee hahah XDD

Interesting

People got this habit of forming up sentence in their mind on croatian first, and then they try to translate "that" sentence directly into English instead just speaking English naturally right away. And it comes out so weird at times its actually funny. Like for example, instead of saying "me too" or " i would like the same", they fire out "me same" xD

Ma lajkamo!

"Plava" as in "blond hair" would be "pale" in English - etymology comes via Latin and German :)

We often apply our own language constructions in other languages😅

Blue hair hahaha :''), I never actually heard anyone say that when speaking English but I always wondered why we call the blond hair a blue hair and how that would sound to an English native speaker if we said that. Makes no sense when you think about it XD

great video, but you have to keep in mind that a lot of people, who studied English, didn't study grammar properly either, because they didn't feel like it,...

How yes no

That's excellent content

When I was visiting Canada, a decade ago, people there use to ask me, not: How are you? but: How are you doing? My response: I'm ok, or, I'm good. Even today I don't understand why they put this "doing" in the end.

Than and then is a universal issue with non-native and some native English speakers.

Half-island Peljesac, 'blitva' on menus translated as.... 'manigold' (wtf?), W = V (Varvick Avenue), and 'put book on shelves' (My NW London juniors always laugh at the apparent luck of 'the', or, "say 'lethal' tata"). 'Reversely'....I lived in Djubrovnik where people (mainly) support Hajdzuk Split. And modus operandaj, drinking ekspreso itd. Takes two to tango....innit bruv.

Most of those are simply just because they’re translated word for word how it’s said in Croatian, which might not be the exact phrase in English. And some are also only because there’s only one word in Croatian for both words in English, like your examples of borrow and lend (posuditi), and teach and learn (učiti). And you’d be surprised how many Americans also don’t know the difference between than and then. 😊

Many English-only speakers get 'then vs. than' confused still...let alone Croatians.

The same mistakes doing the Germans too. I know this because i seapk both German and Croatian fluentlly.