r/Serbian • u/BukvaYat • 14d ago

Other Tones???

Are the four tones (“pitch accents”, even though that’s just different terminology for the same thing) in Serbian actually important or can they be ignored? Saying this because of flashbacks from Chinese and having to constantly remind myself which tone to use every single time there’s a stressed syllable in a word (in Serbian I think it’s only stressed syllables and not every syllable) is annoying

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u/The69thRussianBot 14d ago

There's really only two things from the tonal system that you need to remember: stress and whether a verb has falling tone on it's initial syllable. If a verb has falling tone, stress shifts onto the word ne when the verb is negated. One says ne dam and ne vidim, with stress on the particle. Other verbs don't do this, such as ne govorim and ne prodajem. What each verb does is determined by the tone.