Attitudes of Macedonian students of Croatian language and problems of acquiring some Croatian features

The purpose of this paper is to exhibit the difficulties with which speakers of Macedonian language as a South Slavic analytic language face while learning Croatian as a South Slavic synthetic language. In the process of L2 learning those two languages may be accounted as languages in confrontation but at concurrently languages in interference. This is notable above all in the different distribution of grammatical categories for gender, number and case in Croatian compared to the like categories in Macedonian. People participating in this research were students of Croatian language at the School of Philology Bla e Koneski (University in Skopje) whose native language was Macedonian. Their attitudes towards different parts of Croatian language, namely: Case, adjective aspect, lexicon, verbal aspect, tenses, word order and number was analysed according to grades on the scale 0-5 from the first part of the survey. Examples of translated sentences from Macedonian into Croatian and Croatian into Macedonian from the second and third part of the survey rendered the difficulties in Croatian acquisition visible. Attention was drawn to difficulties arising in the acquisition of Case forms, as well as the use and formation of aspect of adjectives.