The question lands in my inbox every few weeks, usually from someone who's just bought a place near Kotor: "Is there anything at all for Montenegrin, or do I have to learn Serbian and hope?" For years my honest answer was the second one. It isn't any more.
Published 16 July 2026
So, the answer up front. Gora teaches Montenegrin as its own course — not Serbian with a sticker on it — and it's live now, along with Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian. Outside of that you're looking at a private tutor (€15–25 an hour on the coast, more in Podgorica), a handful of academic grammars, and a phrasebook that will teach you to say izvinite and then abandon you. That's the whole market. I'm not being dramatic; I've spent years looking for materials to hand my students and mostly ended up making my own.
Montenegro has about 620,000 people. Language publishers do maths, and that maths says no. So the country's learners get treated as a rounding error on the Serbian market — which sort of works, because the four languages share around 90% of their grammar, and sort of doesn't, because the 10% is exactly the part that makes you sound like you live here.
Concretely: Montenegrin is ijekavian. Milk is mlijeko, not mleko. "Where" is gdje, not gde. A child is dijete. If you learn from Belgrade-flavoured material and then move to Budva, you'll be understood perfectly and you'll also sound, gently, like a foreigner who learned somewhere else. Nobody will correct you. They'll just clock it. There's also ś and ź — two extra letters officially in the Montenegrin alphabet, giving you śutra (tomorrow) alongside the sjutra you'll hear just as often. Half the country ignores them in writing. That's the kind of thing a Serbian course will never tell you.
If you want the longer version of that argument, I wrote about whether these are one language or four. Short of it: politically four, practically one with strong regional habits, and the habits matter.
My bias is obvious — I teach this, and I helped build Gora's Montenegrin course. So here's the version that doesn't depend on you believing me: the thing that decides whether you get anywhere isn't the logo on the app. It's whether the material explains the grammar as you meet it.
Montenegrin has seven cases. A phrase-flashing app can teach you Hoću kafu ("I want a coffee") without ever mentioning that kafa turned into kafu because it's now the object of the sentence. You'll memorise the phrase. You will not be able to build the next one. Six weeks later you're still ordering coffee and nothing else, and you've decided you're bad at languages. You're not — you were taught wrong.
The test I give people: does your material tell you why the word changed, on the spot, the first time it changes? If not, put it down.
By that test, most of what's out there fails, including some things with very good reviews. What passes: a decent tutor, a proper grammar you're prepared to grind through, or a course built around explanation. Gora is the third one — one case at a time, in real sentences, with the reason attached, and a fox you can talk to out loud when you'd rather not embarrass yourself in front of an actual human first.
Whatever you use, do it in roughly this sequence. It's how I teach and it's how the course is built:
Skip step one and you'll spend months mispronouncing your own vocabulary. Skip step three and you'll plateau at phrasebook level and blame yourself.
Twenty to thirty focused minutes a day gets an English speaker to comfortable basics in about two to three months, and to conversation you'd actually enjoy having in eight to twelve. Not because Montenegrin is easy — it isn't, and I've never pretended otherwise in the honest write-up — but because a language with no irregular spelling and no articles gives back a lot of what the cases take.
"Can I get by with Serbian?" Yes, entirely. You'll also spend the next five years being asked where you learned it.
"Latin or Cyrillic?" Latin. Both are official; Latin is on every menu and road sign you'll meet. Add Cyrillic later, in an afternoon.
"Will people just switch to English?" In Budva in August, constantly. In a village bakery in November, not at all — and that's where the language actually pays for itself.
If you're going to try it, try it properly: sounds first, then one case at a time, then talk to something that won't laugh at you. That's the whole course, and it's free to start. Sretno — and when someone in Kotor says polako, they mean it.