Acquisition of the System of Personal Pronouns and Difficulties in Learning and Teaching Croatian as a Foreign Language

Abstract

Person is an omnipresent and central linguistic category. Numerous parts of speech contain the category of person. It occurs directly in personal pronouns, while it is less directly manifested in the following word classes: determiners, verbs, possessive pronouns, and adjectives. Implicitly, the category of person is found in nouns. In different languages, the category of person is expressed in different ways, which in the case of teaching foreign languages can lead to certain difficulties in the initial phase. In European languages, differences in the systems are relatively small (mostly there are languages with a range of six to eight different forms for pronouns), but they can nevertheless cause certain difficulties in teaching and their correct use. The paper discusses the difficulties encountered when teaching Croatian as a foreign language. The focus is on the problems that arise in the initial phase when the student/ course participant encounters for the first time a relatively large system of personal pronouns that exists in the Croatian language (10 forms of personal pronouns). The corpus is composed of numerous instances of incorrect pronoun use collected in language courses held from 2017 to the present. Also, a smaller part of the corpus consists of examples taken from the following textbooks: Dobro došli (Barešić) and Razgovarajte s nama! A1-A2 (Čilaš-Mikulić et al.), which, in some cases, do not take into account the “logical” approach to the category of person, i.e., the perspective of the student/course participant who needs to be placed in a real speech situation: speaker-interlocutor.