Episoder
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Was the last episode too hard? Good. That means it was working.
This short episode teaches you exactly how to use Ćakula Café to improve your Croatian — even when the vocabulary feels difficult. How to use Spotify subtitles. Which words to look up and which to ignore. Why listening three, four, five times is not failure. It is the method.
Croatian language teacher Tihana Klepač shares the same advice she gives her paying students — for free, right here.
Slower, clearer Croatian for A2 learners. Heritage speakers and diaspora Croatians welcome.
Key vocabulary: ključna riječ, bilježnica, rječnik, titlovi, ponavljanje
Free masterclass: talktimecro.com/free-masterclass
Instagram: @talktimecro
Substack: talktimecroatian.substack.com
Learn Croatian With a Cultural Twist.
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There are things that cannot be described — only felt. For many Croats in the diaspora, football was precisely that language: the one that says what ordinary conversations cannot.
This episode of Ćakula Café starts from Maksimir in 1990, moves through the golden generation of 1998 and Šuker's six goals, to Modrić and half a million Zagrebians on the streets in 2018 — and ends with one word that says it all: indescribable.
Slower Croatian for A2–B1 level. For those who carry Croatia with them far from home.
Note: This is a beautiful podcast description about how football became a symbol of Croatian identity and freedom, especially for diaspora communities. "Ćakula Café" is the name of the podcast series itself.
Vocabulary:
igrač (EE-grach) — player; the one who plays; from igrati, to playvratar (VRAH-tar) — goalkeeper; the one who guards the goal; from vrata, door or gatetrener (TREH-ner) — coach, manager; the one who leads the teamsudac (SOO-dats) — referee; the one who judges; from suditi, to judgegol (gohl) — goal; the moment the ball enters the net; the word Croatians borrowed and made their ownkockasti (KOTS-kas-tee) — the chequered ones; the nickname for Croatia's national team, after the red-and-white squaresajmo (AYE-moh) — let's go, come on; from hajdemo; the word that unites an entire stadiumneopisivo (neh-oh-PEE-see-voh) — indescribable; something felt but beyond languageponos (POH-nos) — pride; the quiet, deep kindmalo nas je, al nas ima — there aren't many of us, but we exist; four words that are also a philosophy -
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Brseč is a small Istrian town where time moves differently, where stone speaks and cats decide what matters. In this episode we walk through narrow lanes, past Glagolitic script on the walls, and arrive at the understanding that some smaller places — and some smaller parts of ourselves — need to be discovered slowly.
Ćakula Café is a slow Croatian podcast for diaspora and heritage speakers at A2–B1 level — for those who want not to learn the language, but to recognise it as something that already belongs to them. Sit down, pour a coffee, and go slowly.
Hosted by Tihana Klepač, Associate Professor at the University of Zagreb and founder of TalkTime Croatian at talktimecro.com. The Saturday Letter from Zagreb lands in your inbox every weekend — essays on language, culture, and belonging in Croatian. talktimecroatian.substack.com.
VOCABULARY LIST
miris (MEE-ris) — smell, scent; the sensory memory of a place before you can name itnema žurbe (NEH-mah ZHOO-beh) — there is no rush; one of the core rhythms of Croatian lifeglagoljica (glah-GOH-lee-tsah) — Glagolitic script, the ancient Croatian alphabet, still written on the walls of Istrian townsšterna (SHTER-nah) — town well or cistern; the gathering place around which village life was builttvrdoglavi (tvr-doh-GLAH-vee) — stubborn, obstinate; used here with affection, of a town that refused to disappearbura (BOO-rah) — the fierce northeasterly wind of the Adriatic coastpromatraj (pro-mah-TRAHJ) — observe, watch; an invitation to slow attentionbiti prisutan / prisutna (BEE-tee prees-TOO-ahn / prees-TOOT-nah) — to be present, attentive; a state rather than a taskkale (KAH-leh) — narrow stone lanes in Istrian towns, from the Venetian calle; the word for the street itself, not just its guttersrazumijevanje (rah-zoo-mee-eh-VAHN-yeh) — understanding, comprehension; deeper than merely knowingfjaka (FYAH-kah) — that particular Adriatic state of unhurried being; coastal melancholy that is also peace -
In a small Zagorje town, a Pauline monk spent his life writing the first Croatian encyclopaedic dictionary, and women in the same streets were making lace by hand — both acts of the same quiet conviction that some things must not be lost.
This episode of Ćakula Café visits Lepoglava to explore what strpljenje — patience as a deliberate act, not passivity — actually looks like when it is passed from hand to hand across five centuries. Along the way, we meet the words for lace-making, for intangible heritage, and for the thread that connects a language to the people who choose to carry it. Slow, clear Croatian for intermediate learners at A2–B1 level.
If this kind of Croatian stays with you, there is more at talktimecro.com.
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My grandmother speaks only Croatian. I speak only English. We sit together and don't know what to say. This episode of Ćakula Café — slow Croatian podcast for diaspora and heritage learners at A2–B1 level — sits with that silence, and with the words that exist on either side of it. You'll hear the regional names for grandparents across Croatia, the diminutives that carry more love than any translation can hold, and the word čežnja — a longing quieter than sadness, and longer-lasting. Hosted by Tihana Klepač, Associate Professor at the University of Zagreb and founder of TalkTime Croatian at talktimecro.com. The Saturday Letter from Zagreb lands in your inbox every weekend — essays on language, culture, and belonging in Croatian. talktimecroatian.substack.com.
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Learn Croatian through smell — the sense that carries memory further than words. This episode of Ćakula Café, a slow Croatian podcast for A2–B1 heritage speakers and diaspora learners, takes you inside the Croatian kitchen: luk na ulju, češnjak, paprika, fresh bread from the pekara before the city wakes, lovor and ružmarin from a garden by the sea. Many diaspora listeners describe smelling Croatia before they see it. This episode is for them — and for anyone who carries a kitchen in their memory without quite having the words for it.
Spoken slowly and clearly in Croatian. No grammar explanations — just the language and the thought, moving together.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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Learn Croatian with this slow Croatian podcast episode for intermediate learners at A2 and B1 level. If you are a heritage speaker, diaspora learner, or anyone reconnecting with the Croatian language and culture, this episode takes you inside the Croatian tržnica — the weekly market. From Zagreb's Dolac to Split's Pazar, we explore essential Croatian vocabulary: svježe, kilogram, koliko košta, prodavačica, pijaca. Slow, clear Croatian narration with no grammar explanations — just the language, the culture, and the smell of fresh earth on a Saturday morning.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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Learn Croatian through the sounds and rhythms of a Croatian summer. This episode of Ćakula Café — a slow Croatian podcast for A2–B1 heritage speakers and diaspora learners — takes you to the Adriatic coast. In slow, clear Croatian we explore the words that carry a whole season: kupanje, bura, fjaka, sunce, plaža. No grammar drills. Just the language, the stone beaches, and the smell of salt in the air. If you grew up with Croatia in your memory, this episode is for you.
Spoken slowly and clearly in Croatian. No grammar explanations — just the language and the thought, moving together.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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Sunday in a Croatian home is not just a day of the week. It is a ritual — the smell of roasting chicken or stuffed peppers, a table set for the whole family, a father who always knew how to make everyone laugh too loudly for a small apartment.
This episode for A2 Croatian learners moves slowly through one Croatian Sunday — the food, the table, the conversation, and the particular unhurried feeling of a day that belongs to no one but the family sitting around it. Vocabulary for the home, the meal, and the kind of belonging that doesn't need to be explained.
Spoken slowly and clearly in Croatian. No grammar explanations — just a Sunday, and everything it carries.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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There is a name every student of Croatian theatre history must know. Stjepan Miletić — intendant, director, writer, reformer. A man who, in just four seasons between 1894 and 1898, transformed the Croatian National Theatre from a struggling institution into one of the leading theatre houses in Europe.
This episode for A2–B1 Croatian learners moves slowly through Miletić's life and legacy — the reforms he introduced, the acting school he founded, the repertoire he built, and the great night of 14 October 1895, when his Slava umjetnosti was performed in the new HNK building before Emperor Franz Joseph I and thousands of Zagrebians.
One hundred and thirty years later, the same institution opened a new stage — its first new stage since that evening in 1895.
They called the opening Slava umjetnosti 2.0.
Some names do not age. Spoken slowly and clearly in Croatian, for heritage speakers and diaspora learners at A2–B1 level.
More about learning Croatian: talktimecro.com
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My son has a birthday. Friends are coming. And somewhere between the tomatoes and the olive oil — which I remember only at the very end, at the far corner of the supermarket, naturally — there is a meal to plan.
This episode for A2–B1 Croatian learners comes to the supermarket. You will hear me think out loud through the aisles: bruschette, stuffed peppers with tuna, little chicken bites, olives, a cream cheese spread that takes no time and disappears first. Finger food for a crowd. And a chocolate cake — because a birthday without a homemade cake is not, in any Croatian household, a real birthday.
The vocabulary is the vocabulary of real life: ingredients, quantities, the small decisions you make when you are feeding people you love. Not a shopping list. A way of thinking in Croatian — slowly, practically, with one eye on the clock and the other on the cheese counter.
Spoken slowly and clearly in Croatian. No grammar explanations — just the supermarket, the birthday, and the olive oil I almost forgot.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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There is a church in Opatija that I have been walking into since I was a little girl. Every Easter morning, before breakfast, before anything. My mother carried a basket — eggs, ham, spring onions — and we waited for the priest to bless the food. That was the rhythm of Easter. That was the rhythm of home.
In this episode I take you on a walk through Opatija — the city where I grew up, the city that gave its name to an entire era of Adriatic elegance. We pass the church of Sveti Jakov, the Šporer Pavilion, the oldest hotel on the Adriatic, and the Lungomare — twelve kilometres of coastline that I have walked my whole life, in every season, in every mood the sea allows.
This is an episode for A2–B1 Croatian learners who want the language through memory rather than through a textbook. The vocabulary arrives the way Opatija itself arrives — gradually, through the particular light of an Easter morning, through the smell of the sea and the sound of church bells carrying across the water.
Spoken slowly and clearly in Croatian. No grammar explanations — just a walk, and everything a walk through a beloved city carries with it.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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I spent a day holding an old photograph. Black and white. My grandmother, standing in a studio, in her best dress. A village woman. She spoke Croatian because it was hers — not the language of law or school or government, but the language of home, of prayer, of love.
For almost nine hundred years, Croatian was not the official language of Croatia. Latin, German, Hungarian, Italian — those were the languages of power. Croatian lived in kitchens. In villages. At the market. In the mouths of women like my grandmother.
In this episode I am thinking about a question the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe asked through one of his characters: who gets to tell the story? And I am thinking about what it means that you — wherever you are, whatever country you grew up in — are here, listening, in Croatian.
The story was waiting. It still is.
Spoken slowly and clearly in Croatian, intended for A2–B1 heritage speakers and diaspora learners. No grammar explanations — just the language, and the long history of the people who kept it alive.
For weekly essays on Croatia, language, and belonging: The Saturday Letter from Zagreb on Substack. More about learning Croatian: talktimecro.com
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There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from living in two languages. Not the tiredness of translation — that is something else — but the subtler exhaustion of never being entirely in one place. Of laughing a second too late at a joke in English. Of reaching for a Croatian word in front of your children and finding it slightly out of reach. Of code-switching so automatically that you stop noticing you are doing it, until one day you do.
This episode for A2–B1 heritage speakers and diaspora learners sits with that experience honestly. It moves through the quiet reality of generational language loss — not as tragedy, but as something more complicated than that. Heritage Croatian does not simply disappear. It changes. It thins in some places and deepens in others. It lives in phone calls and in kitchens and in the particular way your mother still says sunce moje — my sunshine — which is not a translation at all, because nothing in English holds quite that warmth.
Volim te is three words. But what surrounds them — the language, the memory, the specific texture of a Croatian childhood carried into an English-speaking life — is what this episode is really about.
Spoken slowly and clearly in Croatian. No grammar explanations — just the language, and the feeling of coming back to it.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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A Croatian vjenčanje is not an event. It is an endurance. It begins with zaruke — the engagement, the promise, the first round of tears — and it does not end until the kolo has gone around enough times that everyone has forgotten what time it is and nobody quite cares.
This episode for A2–B1 Croatian learners moves slowly through one of the richest cultural occasions in Croatian life. You will hear the language of the church and the language of the reception, the formal and the deeply informal — the difference between udati se, oženiti se, and vjenčati se, three verbs for marriage that each carry a different weight. You will meet the kum and kuma, the godparents who stand beside the couple not just on the day but for life. You will hear Živjeli! — the toast, the cheer, the word that means something closer to may you live than simply cheers — and understand when to say it and how to mean it.
Croatian weddings are loud and long and extraordinarily specific. This episode is a way in — into the vocabulary, the rituals, and the particular warmth of a culture that celebrates with its whole body. Spoken slowly and clearly in Croatian, with no grammar explanations and a great deal of affection for the mother crying in the third row.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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Every Croatian city has a moment that tests you. You know roughly where you are going, you have the address somewhere on your phone, and then someone asks if you need help — and suddenly the language you have been quietly building deserts you entirely.
This episode for A1–A2 Croatian learners walks slowly through a Croatian city, one turn at a time. A mother and son looking for the ljekarna — the pharmacy — navigating through the particular vocabulary of Croatian streets: ravno, straight ahead; lijevo and desno, left and right; raskrižje, the crossroads; semafor, the traffic light; and the very Croatian reassurance that something is tu odmah, just right there, which may or may not turn out to be true.
The dialogue is natural but unhurried, clear enough to follow and real enough to actually sound like the street outside. No grammar explanations — just the city, the language, and two people finding their way through both.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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Ima vremena. There is time. It is one of the most Croatian things you can say — an exhale, a hand on the shoulder, a small insistence that urgency is not the only way to move through the world. And yet, for many of us, there comes a moment when ima vremena stops being reassurance and becomes something closer to a hiding place.
This episode for A2–B1 Croatian learners sits honestly with that moment — with the particular kind of waiting that feels like patience but is quietly something else. With what fear sounds like in Croatian, what hesitation feels like in a language you are still finding your way back to, and what it means to begin before you feel ready.
The vocabulary moves through words for time and doubt, for courage and beginning, for the small Croatian phrases that hold space for imperfection. Because ima vremena — but it is also, gently, now.
Spoken slowly and clearly in Croatian. No grammar explanations — just the language and the thought, moving together.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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Many Croatian parents never said volim te. Not because they didn't feel it — but because love, in their generation, was not a sentence. It was a practice. It was the shift they worked, the meal they made, the fear they carried quietly so their children wouldn't have to carry it too. It was endurance as its own kind of tenderness.
This episode for A2–B1 heritage speakers and diaspora learners moves slowly through the language of family, sacrifice, and the love that doesn't announce itself. The vocabulary here is not difficult — but it is heavy in the way that true things are heavy. Words for work and rest, for silence and gratitude, for the particular kind of strength that immigrant parents carry in their bodies long after the hardest years are behind them.
If you grew up in a Croatian household where emotions lived in actions rather than words, this episode may feel familiar. It is spoken in slow, clear Croatian, with space between sentences — space to listen, and space to feel.
Because of them, we can rest. We can feel joy. We can dream larger than they were permitted to dream. This episode is for them too.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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In Croatia, the fence between two gardens is rarely just a fence. It is where news travels. Where opinions form. Where someone asks to borrow something and stays for forty minutes. The neighbour — susjed or susjeda — is a particular figure in Croatian life: not quite family, not quite a stranger, occupying a category of relationship that English does not have a precise word for.
This episode for A2–B1 Croatian learners listens in on the conversations that happen at that fence — asking for a favour, reading the weather together, the particular ritual of wishing someone well as they head back inside. These are not textbook phrases. They are the sentences that hold real neighbourhoods together, spoken the way Croatians actually speak them: with warmth, with a little complaint, with the assumption that there is always time for one more exchange before the gate closes.
Spoken slowly and clearly in Croatian. No grammar explanations — just the language as it lives, between one garden and another.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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In Croatia, you do not simply go for coffee. You go for kava — and that is an entirely different thing. Kava is not a drink you finish quickly at a counter on your way somewhere else. It is the reason you stop. It is the table you return to. It is the hour — sometimes two — that Croatians protect in the middle of the day as if it were something sacred, which in a quiet way it is.
This episode for A2–B1 Croatian learners moves slowly through the culture and vocabulary of the Croatian café. You will hear the words for ordering, for waiting, for the particular kind of conversation that happens when nobody is in a hurry. Words like kavana — a café, but one with history in its walls — and gemišt, and the phrase every Croatian knows: idemo na kavu. Let's go for coffee. An invitation that almost never means only coffee.
The audio is entirely in slow, clear Croatian. No grammar explanations. Just the language in its natural habitat — warm, unhurried, and entirely at home.
More about learning Croatian with Tihana Klepač: talktimecro.com
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