My first exchange partner was a Belgrade accountant called Nikola who wanted to sound less stiff in work emails. We met over Skype, hated the first ten minutes, and then talked most weeks for a year. If you want the short version: use Tandem or HelloTalk to find someone, split every session 50/50 with a timer, and treat it as a friendship you're both slightly bad at — not a lesson.
Published 29 April 2026
A language exchange is the cheapest speaking practice on earth: you help someone with your native language, they help you with theirs, nobody pays anyone. For Serbian and Croatian that matters more than usual, because there just aren't many tutors floating around, and the ones there are cost real money by the hour. The catch is that most exchanges quietly die after three or four sessions. Almost always for the same handful of reasons, which is good news — they're all avoidable.
Two apps do most of the work. Tandem and HelloTalk both have a decent pool of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Montenegrins who want to practise English — and crucially, they let you filter by "learning English." That filter is the whole game. A profile that says uči engleski (learning English) is a person with a reason to show up next week. Someone just there to chat isn't.
If you'd rather meet a face, Couchsurfing still runs weekly language meetups in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Zagreb, and most cities with an expat scene have a Facebook group where "anyone want to swap Serbian for English?" gets three replies by morning. I found my second partner that way in about an hour.
Rule of thumb: message ten people, expect three replies, expect one to become a regular. That one is worth all the awkward openers.
Here's the mistake I made for months. We'd start in Serbian, I'd struggle, we'd "just switch to English for a sec to make it easier" — and never switch back. English is the path of least resistance for both of you, so it wins every time unless you fence it off. Set a timer. Thirty minutes only Serbian, thirty minutes only English, and when the timer goes you swap mid-sentence if you have to.
The second fix is to bring something. A blank "so… how was your week?" call runs out of road in four minutes. Come with a photo to describe, a news story you half-understood, five new words you want to try in a real sentence. My best sessions with Nikola were the ones where I'd screenshot a menu from a Kotor restaurant and make him explain what half of it was.
An exchange partner is not a teacher, and it's unfair to make them one. Nobody wants to spend the hour explaining that kafu is the accusative of kafa — they want to talk. So do the grammar somewhere else and bring the results. Learn how the accusative case works on your own time, then use it live and let them tell you when it sounds off. That's the division of labour that keeps a partner happy: you handle the study, they handle the reality check.
This is also where a patient practice tool earns its keep. Before a session I'll run through the vocabulary I'm nervous about with Gora's AI fox, who does not care how many times I fumble hvala, and won't quietly resent me the way a human partner might after the fifth repeat. Warm up with the machine, perform for the person. For the raw hours when you've got nobody at all, there's a whole post on practising speaking on your own.
Do I need to be any good before I start? No — but learn to speak from day one and go in with maybe fifty words and a couple of phrases, so the first session isn't pure silence. Even "sorry, my Serbian is terrible" said in Serbian (izvini, moj srpski je grozan) breaks the ice.
Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian or Montenegrin — does it matter who I match with? Barely. They're close enough that a Croatian partner will happily correct your Serbian and vice versa; you'll pick up a few regional words either way. Match on the person, not the flag.
Message ten people this week. Keep the one who shows up twice. That's genuinely the whole trick — everything above is just how to not scare them off. If you want something to practise against tonight while you wait for a reply, open the app and talk to the fox →