Straight answer: you can spend four days in Belgrade and never say a Serbian word. English gets you through the centre fine. But learn a dozen words and the city stops treating you like a tourist and starts treating you like a guest — and that's a better trip.
Published 7 July 2026
I moved to Serbia knowing three words and I'll be honest, for the first month I coasted on English and pointing. It worked. Waiters switched languages before I'd finished apologising. But the day I started using even broken Serbian, something shifted — the market woman who'd been curt threw in an extra handful of paprika, the taxi driver stopped taking the scenic route. None of it was about being fluent. It was about showing up.
So this isn't a grammar lesson. It's the shortlist I'd hand a friend flying into Nikola Tesla airport next week, plus enough about the city to make the words land somewhere real.
If you learn nothing else, learn these. They're phonetic — Serbian is spelled exactly as it sounds — so what you see is what you say.
The trick isn't saying them perfectly. It's saying hvala and dobar dan before you default to English. That two-second gesture does the heavy lifting.
Belgrade's centre — Knez Mihailova, Skadarlija, the fortress at Kalemegdan — runs on English. You won't struggle. Where the words earn their keep is one street over: the green markets (pijaca) like Zeleni Venac, the old-school pekara (bakery) where you'll want a burek at 8am, the kiosk selling bus tickets, the taxi you flag on the street rather than order on an app.
A quick word on taxis, learned the hard way: agree the fare or insist on the meter (taksimetar) before you get in. "Koliko košta do centra?" — how much to the centre? — asked in Serbian signals you're not fresh off the plane, and the price tends to behave.
Belgrade runs on coffee the way London runs on complaining. Ordering jedna kafa (one coffee) and then sitting for two hours is not rude — it's the entire social operating system. Domaća kafa is the strong Turkish-style cup that comes with a glass of water; kafa sa mlekom is with milk. Nobody will rush you. If you want the deeper version of this ritual, we wrote a whole piece on ordering coffee like a local in the Balkans — worth a skim before you go.
Belgrade writes itself in two alphabets at once. A shop sign might be Latin; the bus destination board is Cyrillic; a street plaque could be either. This throws people. It shouldn't — Serbian Cyrillic is perfectly phonetic and you can learn to sound it out over one coffee (see above re: two hours to spare). Being able to read БЕОГРАД on the front of a bus, or find the ПЕКАРА, removes most of the "I feel illiterate" panic that first-timers get. And if you want a proper hello-and-goodbye kit before you land, our guide to Serbian greetings covers the full range from formal to street.
Day one: Kalemegdan fortress at golden hour, then wander down into Skadarlija, the cobbled bohemian street, for dinner and live music. Day two: cross the river to Zemun for the riverside splavovi and a slower pace, then back for a late coffee somewhere with no agenda. Somewhere in there, use your twelve words. You'll fumble. Everyone does. The fumble is the point — it's the difference between watching Belgrade and being briefly, gloriously part of it.
Do people in Belgrade speak English?
In the centre and among anyone under 40, yes, and usually well. Older market sellers, some taxi drivers and neighbourhood bakeries are where a few Serbian words save you.
What's the one phrase to learn first?
Hvala — thank you — said early and often. Pair it with dobar dan and you've handled the majority of daily encounters.
Cyrillic or Latin — which will I see?
Both, constantly, side by side. Learning to sound out Cyrillic takes an afternoon and makes bus stops and official signs stop looking like a wall of code.
Serbian is one of the languages Gora is built for — phonetic sounds first, real sentences, and a patient AI fox to practise your twelve words on before you're standing at the bakery counter with a queue behind you. Montenegrin is live today and shares almost all of its grammar with Serbian, so the method's already proven on the ground.