Common Croatian words

The five hundred most commonly used words in spoken Croatian divided into groups of 10, in order of frequency. Each word also has an associated sentence so to help learn the word in context. The additional words are high frequency but not necessarily within the first 500 spoken.

As you can see, this list is a work in progress!

Common Croatian words: Order of frequency

The list and word order of the 500 most frequently spoken Croatian words is approximate. See common word lists for the generic reasons.

I am learning Croatian, and bit by bit have been constructing this list based on a frequency list on the wiki and based on subtitles.

As the original frequency table is based on film subtitles it is itself skewed to the type of language used in films. I am also taking certain liberties with it to make it more useful for my purposes.

Firstly, I intend to ignore anything which is too obviously related to films, and not relevant to me as a B1 level of learner.

Secondly, I haven't worried to much about the order of the first twenty words or so. These occur so frequently that they will appear again and again in the example sentences.

Thirdly and most importantly the order of the original frequency table is itself misleading. This is easiest to illustrate by example. A word like je 'he/she/it is' might well be used on its own. E.g. Ljeto je 'it is summer' but it might also be used as part of a verb. E.g. Bilo je super 'it was super'.

A more sophisticated method of counting instances would consider Bilo je 'was' as separate from je 'is'. This would be reflected in the frequency table.

Personally, I don't think that this matters in the slightest.

The Croatian Sentences

I'm including sentences in the list, as it's very difficult to learn Croatian words in isolation. It is also useful to learn or at least recognise some Croatian grammar to make the most of learning the sentences (if you do). Otherwise, it can be very difficult to understand how they fit together and how and why the various endings of nouns, adjectives and verbs change as they do.

The top 500 words in other languages

French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish.