Professional paper
https://doi.org/10.15291/csi.5073
Acquisition of the System of Personal Pronouns and Difficulties in Learning and Teaching Croatian as a Foreign Language
Tomislav Frleta
orcid.org/0009-0009-0267-132X
; University of Zadar, Zadar, Croatia
*
Zrinka Frleta
orcid.org/0009-0009-5522-5956
; University of Zadar, Zadar, Croatia
*
* Corresponding author.
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 direct-
ly 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 cer-
tain 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 difficul-
ties 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 Croa-
tian 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 tak-
en 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” ap-
proach 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.
Keywords
acquisition; Croatian language; language teaching; personal pronouns; system
Hrčak ID:
349350
URI
Publication date:
14.7.2026.
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