What writing system does Croatian use?

Latin script (Gaj’s Latin alphabet: 30 letters, including č, ć, đ, š, ž and the digraphs dž, lj, nj, one letter per sound). Glagolitic was used historically.

Is Stichos suitable for complete beginners with zero prior knowledge (A0)?

Yes. A0 is a primary focus, designed for readers with no prior knowledge. A1 then adds basic everyday vocabulary and simple connected clauses as your foundation grows.

Are Stichos levels the same as CEFR levels?

Not exactly. Stichos levels use the familiar CEFR names, from A0 to B2, and are modelled on the CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference), so a Stichos B1 is meant to feel close to a B1 in your course book. They aren't an official CEFR rating, and different books and exams draw the lines in slightly different places. A0 is Stichos's own addition, just below the framework's first level.

Are the stories written by AI, and how accurate are they?

Yes. Stories are generated by AI and then checked by further automated steps against the grammar and vocabulary rules for your level. That catches most problems, but it isn't a human editor, so an occasional unnatural phrase or slip can get through. Treat Stichos as practice material, and check anything you're unsure of with a teacher or a reference.

Can I read stories with explanations in my native language?

Yes. Stichos allows you to pair any target language with any native support language. You can read a Croatian story with French glosses, or a German story with Spanish explanations.

How does word lookup work while reading?

Tap or click any word for its meaning in that sentence, explained in your own language. In the full version, you can save any word to your Vocab Bank for later review.

Is the preview free, and what happens to my email?

Yes. The preview is free and needs no account. If you join the Reading List, we use your email to send your 3 free sample stories (PDF, after you confirm your address) and to let you know when we fully open. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.

Do stories include audio or narration?

Story narration isn't part of the preview. At launch, the Premium Audio add-on reads every story aloud in a natural-sounding AI voice, in 39 of our 40 languages (Esperanto doesn't have audio support yet).

Read Your First Croatian Story

Explore a free beginner passage generated live and read with confidence.

Stichos lets you try a free A0 or A1 story generated live in Croatian, complete with tap-to-translate words and line-by-line translations.

Odijelo za svadbu

Kristijan ide u centar Zagreba.

Kristijan is going to the center of Zagreb.

Danas je lijep dan.

Today is a beautiful day.

Kristijan ulazi u kemijsku čistionicu.

Kristijan enters the dry cleaner's.

Čistionica je mala.

The dry cleaner's is small.

Ovdje radi jedna ljubazna teta.

A kind lady works here.

Kristijan ima važan račun.

Kristijan has an important receipt.

Traži račun u džepu.

He looks for the receipt in his pocket.

Džep je prazan.

The pocket is empty.

Kristijan se malo brine.

Kristijan worries a little.

Brzo nalazi račun u torbi.

He quickly finds the receipt in his bag.

Daje račun ljubaznoj teti.

He gives the receipt to the kind lady.

Teta uzima papir.

The lady takes the paper.

Ona nosi veliko odijelo.

She carries a big suit.

Odijelo je potpuno čisto.

The suit is completely clean.

Sutra je svadba u obitelji.

Tomorrow is a wedding in the family.

Kristijan je vrlo sretan.

Kristijan is very happy.

Gleda plavo odijelo.

He looks at the blue suit.

Odijelo lijepo miriše.

The suit smells nice.

Kristijan plaća gotovinom.

Kristijan pays with cash.

On daje novac.

He gives the money.

Teta uzima novac.

The lady takes the money.

Kristijan pažljivo uzima odijelo.

Kristijan carefully takes the suit.

Veselo izlazi na ulicu.

He cheerfully goes out onto the street.

Sunce lijepo sja.

The sun shines nicely.

Kristijan brzim korakom ide kući.

Kristijan goes home with a fast step.

Quick facts about Croatian

Speakers

About 5.1 million native speakers (2021–2023) and 1.3 million second-language speakers (2012), according to the figures cited in Wikipedia's Croatian language article.¹

Did you know?

Standard Croatian is ijekavian: the old Slavic vowel yat appears as ije or je, as in mlijeko (milk) and vrijeme (time), where standard Serbian has the ekavian forms mleko and vreme. It is one of the quickest ways to tell which standard a text follows.²

The main challenge

Nouns change their endings across seven cases, and almost every verb belongs to an imperfective–perfective pair, so learners meet two kinds of form-building at once.³

Sources

About the Croatian language

Language family	Indo-European → South Slavic (Shtokavian)¹
Speakers	About 5.1 million native speakers and 1.3 million second-language speakers, according to Ethnologue figures cited by Wikipedia (the second-language figure dates from 2012).¹
Primary script	Latin script (Gaj’s Latin alphabet: 30 letters, including č, ć, đ, š, ž and the digraphs dž, lj, nj, one letter per sound). Glagolitic was used historically.¹^,2
Word order & typology	SVO by default, with flexible order because seven cases mark grammatical roles. Fusional and pro-drop, with unstressed clitics fixed in second position.³^,4
Official status	Official in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and an official language of the European Union since 2013. In official use in Montenegro, with regional official status in Burgenland (Austria) and Vojvodina (Serbia); a recognised minority language in Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary and Italy.¹^,5^,6

Croatian reading proficiency benchmarks (CEFR)

Stichos level	Approximate framework equivalent	Reader profile
A0	Pre-A1	Early Beginner
A1	CEFR A1	Beginner
A2	CEFR A2	Elementary
B1	CEFR B1	Intermediate
B2	CEFR B2	Upper Intermediate

Stichos levels are modelled on the Council of Europe’s CEFR reading descriptors; A0 roughly corresponds to the CEFR’s Pre-A1 band. Croaticum at the University of Zagreb runs Croatian language tests in accordance with the CEFR levels; Stichos does not test or certify.

Reference corpora

Croatian has a national corpus, a large web corpus and a printed frequency dictionary.¹

Croatian National Corpus: The Hrvatski nacionalni korpus has been compiled since 1998 at the Institute of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb; version 3 holds about 217 million tokens.²
hrWaC: Nikola Ljubešić and Filip Klubička’s web corpus of the .hr domain (crawled in 2011 and 2014) holds about 1.4 billion tokens in version 2.1.¹
Frequency dictionary: The Hrvatski čestotni rječnik (Milan Moguš, Maja Bratanić and Marko Tadić, 1999), published by the University of Zagreb’s Institute of Linguistics with Školska knjiga, is a 1,224-page frequency dictionary of Croatian.³
Standard Croatian: Stichos’s rules call for standard Croatian vocabulary and ijekavian spelling: kava, kruh, tjedan, vlak and tko, not kafa, hleb, sedmica, voz or ko; mlijeko, not mleko.

Readability design principles

Croatian has its own adaptations of English readability formulas.¹^,2

Flesch for Croatian: Sanja Brangan (2014) proposed a Croatian version of Flesch Reading Ease from a corpus of English and Croatian texts, as a rough objective indicator of difficulty.¹
SMOG for Croatian: In the Croatian SMOG adjustment applied by Vučemilo and Borovečki (2015), a polysyllabic word has four or more syllables rather than three, because Croatian words tend to be longer.²
Pitch accent: The standard pronunciation has a pitch accent: a stressed syllable is rising or falling, and long or short, giving four accents. Ordinary spelling marks neither the accent nor vowel length; dictionaries do. Many speakers, including educated speakers in Zagreb, do not keep all four apart.³
Stichos: Stichos sets difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits rather than a single score. At A0 a sentence has at most five words.

Script & grammar scaffolding

Cases: A0 teaches the nominative and accusative, plus fixed place phrases with the locative after u or na (u kući, na stolu) and the instrumental after s (s mamom). There is no genitive, dative or vocative at A0. A1 adds the basic genitive, A2 all seven cases in the singular, and B1 the plural.
Tenses and aspect: A0 uses only the present (prezent). A1 adds the past (perfekt), A2 the future (futur I) with basic aspect pairs such as piti / popiti, and B1 the conditional (kondicional I) with a firm perfective–imperfective contrast. Futur II arrives at B2 and verbal adverbs (glagolski prilozi) at C1.
Clitics: Auxiliaries, se and pronoun clitics take the second position in the clause and never open a sentence: Kava je vruća, not Je kava vruća.
Persons and register: A0 uses only the first and third person singular and polite Vi. From A1, friends and family use ti, while strangers, staff and elders get Vi.

Related academic & framework resources

The CEFR Levels (Council of Europe): The Council of Europe’s description of the six common reference levels, A1 to C2.
Croaticum – Croatian Language Tests: Croaticum, the University of Zagreb’s centre for Croatian as a second and foreign language, runs Croatian language tests in accordance with the CEFR levels.
A1.HR (University of Zagreb): An open online A1 course in Croatian from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb: 80 units, taken in English or Spanish.
Croatian web corpus hrWaC 2.1: The CLARIN.SI repository entry for the corpus, with download and licence details.
Quantitative Assessment of Text Difficulty in Croatian Language: Sanja Brangan’s 2014 paper in Rasprave Instituta za hrvatski jezik.
Readability and Content Assessment of Informed Consent Forms for Medical Procedures in Croatia: Vučemilo and Borovečki’s 2015 PLOS ONE study, which applies the Croatian SMOG adjustment.
Croatian language resources (HR4EU): A portal of Croatian language resources, including the Croatian National Corpus.
Leksikografija (Croatian Encyclopaedia): The Croatian Encyclopaedia’s article on lexicography.
Serbo-Croatian phonology (Wikipedia): An overview of the sounds shared by Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian, including the four-way pitch accent.

Frequently asked questions

What writing system does Croatian use?: Latin script (Gaj’s Latin alphabet: 30 letters, including č, ć, đ, š, ž and the digraphs dž, lj, nj, one letter per sound). Glagolitic was used historically.
Is Stichos suitable for complete beginners with zero prior knowledge (A0)?: Yes. A0 is a primary focus, designed for readers with no prior knowledge. A1 then adds basic everyday vocabulary and simple connected clauses as your foundation grows.
Are Stichos levels the same as CEFR levels?: Not exactly. Stichos levels use the familiar CEFR names, from A0 to B2, and are modelled on the CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference), so a Stichos B1 is meant to feel close to a B1 in your course book. They aren't an official CEFR rating, and different books and exams draw the lines in slightly different places. A0 is Stichos's own addition, just below the framework's first level.
Are the stories written by AI, and how accurate are they?: Yes. Stories are generated by AI and then checked by further automated steps against the grammar and vocabulary rules for your level. That catches most problems, but it isn't a human editor, so an occasional unnatural phrase or slip can get through. Treat Stichos as practice material, and check anything you're unsure of with a teacher or a reference.
Can I read stories with explanations in my native language?: Yes. Stichos allows you to pair any target language with any native support language. You can read a Croatian story with French glosses, or a German story with Spanish explanations.
How does word lookup work while reading?: Tap or click any word for its meaning in that sentence, explained in your own language. In the full version, you can save any word to your Vocab Bank for later review.
Is the preview free, and what happens to my email?: Yes. The preview is free and needs no account. If you join the Reading List, we use your email to send your 3 free sample stories (PDF, after you confirm your address) and to let you know when we fully open. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.
Do stories include audio or narration?: Story narration isn't part of the preview. At launch, the Premium Audio add-on reads every story aloud in a natural-sounding AI voice, in 39 of our 40 languages (Esperanto doesn't have audio support yet).

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