Hi from Dejan in Australia
Pozdrav sve!
My name is Dejan and I am from Perth, Western Australia. I was born in Beograd but I left with my parents at age 2 and have lived most of my life in Australia, PNG and South Africa. I speak Serbian (although with plenty of errors and with a poor vocabulary outside of everyday things) and I am fascinated by Russian which my late father spoke fluently. I would love to learn Russian. I also and enjoy finding out more about the origins of Slavic languages and I have an interest in linguistics generally.
Elsewhere on this forum someone made the comment that Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian sounded like a parody of Russian, then went on to guess that the same was true in reverse. I laughed out loud, since it was only the other day that I was speaking to an elderly Serb who married a Russian woman he met in a forced labour camp in WW2. When I asked "how did you speak to each other - she didn't speak Serbian and you didn't speak Russian". He said (with a twinkle in his eye) "Everyone knows that Russian is just Serbian spoken funny".
On a different note, I must compliment all the Croats, Serbs and Bosnians who have posted on this site - the posts are informative, non-political and friendly, just the way most Slavs (southern or otherwise) would prefer them to be! There is more that unites us than separates us. It would be wonderful if we could celebrate our similarities in culture and language while learning about the differences.
Dovidjenje/dasvidanya
