This is the first five minutes in Komiža: the waterfront, the konoba, a neighbour's doorway. You will learn the greetings that actually exist there (and discover that the one you were about to use does not), how to say fola instead of hvala, iśkuźojte instead of oprostite, how to agree with jeśon instead of da, and how to leave with Bog! or moća. With it comes the first sound rule, the one you hear in nearly every sentence: komiški endings finish in -n, never in -m.

Before anything else, you learn to ask. This unit gives you the words that open every conversation in Komiža — ca, ku, di, kal, źoc, oli — and the syntax that carries them: a question is made by putting the verb first, and there is no li anywhere. Negation comes with it, because half the answers you will hear begin with ni or nimo.

If you learn one thing about komiški, make it this one. Long a moves to o, long o moves to u, and old jat comes out as i — so glova, brud and vrime stop being foreign words and turn back into glava, brod and vrijeme. It is the one part of the dialect that hands you hundreds of words at a stroke instead of one at a time.

Komiški runs on fewer consonants than standard Croatian. The standard's s and š collapse into a single soft sound, ś, and its z and ž into ź. Once that clicks, half of what you hear on the waterfront turns transparent — beśida, śardela, źmul, doź — and you stop hearing 'a funny s' and start hearing the dialect itself.

If you have heard kal, śal, olma or pul Komiźe around Komiža and assumed people were swallowing letters, listen again. It is a rule — the most recognisable rule in the dialect: when d or t lands in front of another consonant, it comes out as l. This unit gives you the rule, its limits, the one large exception that proves it is a rule and not a mannerism, and the ol + genitive construction that rides on it.

The verb is where komiški gives itself away fastest. Infinitives drop their final -i, the first person singular ends in -n instead of -m, and the third person plural often picks up an extra -du. Six lessons cover the whole working system — bit, govorin, gredu, bil śon, puj! and ću — enough to follow a conversation on the waterfront and step into it without stalling.

This unit is about counting, telling the time and laying out the calendar the Komiža way. Along the way you meet the two endings that mark the dialect out more sharply than any single word: the instrumental in -un (rukun, glovun, iś otun bracerun) and the genitive plural in -ih (deśet urih, pet judih). Get those two right and you stop sounding like a fureśt, even with a small vocabulary.

This is the vocabulary Komiža uses for people: your own famija, the neighbours', and the question of whose family somebody belongs to. You will learn to call any older man burba and any older woman teta with no kinship implied at all — these are words of respect. With them come three things you hear constantly in this domain: dica behaving as a feminine singular, the instrumental in -un, and the lj → j rule that turns standard ljubav into jubov.

This is the vocabulary of the house you actually get invited into: rooms, shutters, stairs, the cellar, the hearth, the cistern and the yard. Most of those objects carry Venetian names — katrida, tavaja, škafetin, štramac — so along the way you learn how an Italian word enters komiški and what happens to it. With it come three patterns you cannot talk about a house without: u + accusative for location, ol + genitive for 'the X of the Y', and u + genitive for 'at someone's place'.

In Komiža the weather is not small talk. It decides whether anyone goes out that day, so it is discussed every morning, in detail, by people who are usually right. This is the liveliest corner of the whole dialect: sixteen named winds, a dozen names for the state of the sea, and a body of signs read off the western sky. By the end of this unit you will follow the answer when you ask someone on the quay what the weather is going to do — and be able to give one yourself.

In Komiža someone will offer you food and drink before you have learned how to say hello. This unit teaches you to order, to accept, to refuse politely, to praise whoever cooked, and to understand what has been put in front of you — from the mid-morning marenda to the Christmas fritters. It also holds the densest layer of Romance loanwords in the whole course, so it pays to learn the pattern rather than word by word.

This is the single most useful unit in the course if you are in Komiža this week. You will learn to ask for things in the shop, ask what something costs, get by on the waterfront and in the tavern, accept the glass you are offered and turn down the third one politely. Along the way comes one small syntactic fact that unlocks everything: komiški builds questions without li.

When something hurts in Komiža, nobody asks you about it in standard Croatian. They ask "A je voś co boli?" — and what you answer decides whether you get tea or a doctor. This unit gives you the parts of the body, the words for tired, hungry, thirsty and ill, the trip to the doctor and the pharmacy, and the vocabulary for describing a person: a moustache, a beard, a bald head, the lines on a face. It also carries the grammar that this domain teaches best: the 1st person singular in -n (jimon, źnon, vidin), the dative of the person a state belongs to (źima mi je, ca mu je), and the accusative of the person that pain or fear takes hold of (boli me, ćapol jih śtroh).

This unit is for someone who will actually be on the water this summer: swimming, taking a boat out, tying it up, reading the sea before you go. Everything here — banjuda, śidro, jidro, rota — is still said in Komiža today, on the quay and in the boat. Grammatically, the sea is also where you hear best one komiški ending that standard Croatian simply does not have: the instrumental in -un and -on.

Komiža was never a herding town, but animals were everywhere: cats on the steps and aboard the boats, donkeys and mules on the steep paths up to Bargujac and Borovik, goats out on the Barjaci islets, gulls over the fish being cleaned at the end of the mole. These six lessons give you the names of those animals as Komiža says them, and with them twelve sound and grammar rules that let you recognise komiški the moment you hear it. Animal words are perfect for the job, because almost the whole system shows up in them.

Fishing is what Komiža is famous for, and it is why the local speech is richer here than anywhere else on the Adriatic — but this is not a museum tour. These are the words you need if you go out on a boat today, buy fish on the riva, or eat what was landed this morning: the names of the fish, the verbs of catching, the parts of the boat, the people in a crew and the haggling on the quay. The grammar rides along with them: the genitive plural, the infinitive without -i, the instrumental in -un, and the storyteller's bi.

This unit teaches you to move around Komiža the way locals do: from the riva upwards, from one side of town to the other, from cove to cove, island to island. You will learn the names for the parts of the town and the coast, how to ask for and give directions, and what Komižans call their neighbours — starting with the fact that they never call the town of Vis "Vis" at all, but Luka.

The Komiža year runs on feasts, not on dates: from Advent and Christmas Eve through Epiphany and Candlemas to the summer parties and St Nicholas in December. This unit gives you the words you will actually hear on the island — the greetings, the church vocabulary, the words for dancing, singing and klapa, and what people say when someone dies. None of this is museum language: Komiža still goes carolling, the bells still ring, the procession still takes the same streets, and people still swear by the same saints.

Komiža is a fishing town, but nearly every household also has a vineyard, a garden, or at least a heap of cleared stones where vines once stood. This unit gives you the verbs of work that fit any job — lavurat, fatigat, guvernat, poprovjat — and then the whole cycle of the vineyard and the cellar: pruning, grafting, sulphuring, the grape harvest, the must, the barrel. Most of it is not museum vocabulary. People on Vis still do this work, and still call it by these names.

Fishing words you can learn from a book. What gives a newcomer away is the small change of speech: how you say quickly, barely, backwards, even, oh dear. This unit is exactly that layer — the adverbs, the exclamations and the nouns for noise, worry and trouble. Without them a sentence sounds translated rather than spoken. By the end you will follow not just what someone says to you, but the tone they say it in.

This unit takes the second big helping of everyday words: the ones you tell a story with and answer with, the ones for grabbing, turning and breaking something, and the ones that name what grows above Komiža. A great many of them came across the sea and have settled so thoroughly that nobody hears them as foreign any more. By the end you will follow both the man telling a facenda and the man explaining what he was cutting up in the woods.

Komiški has an unusually rich vocabulary for the things people do with their mouths: chatting, grumbling, joking, making things up, cursing and quarrelling. This unit teaches that vocabulary together with the two endings that hold it together — -onje for the activity and -un, -unt, -adur for the person who does it. Colours, money and a handful of small everyday verbs come with them. Get these and a good deal of what is said outside the konoba stops being noise.

This unit gathers the words Komiža uses to compare, measure, agree and prove a point — and then the words for when none of that works: deźgracijun, falinga, deśfon. With them come the two affixes that give away the Mediterranean half of the vocabulary: deś- at the front of a word and -cijun at the back. You will also find out why it is glośan but glaśnoća — not carelessness, but vowel length.

This unit hands you the words Komiža uses to pass judgement: what is disgusting, what is stupid, what is a real pleasure and what is a waste of a good day. With them comes the machinery that builds them — the dialect turns almost any verb into a noun in -onje, so every habit that gets on your nerves has a name of its own. By the end you will follow both the compliment and the complaint, and be able to answer back.

This unit is about the words that do not translate but point: tuje 'further', otuje 'a bit further that way', nutrije 'further in', uśuda 'everywhere'. With them come the komiški pronouns (śega jutra 'this morning', u nje, njun), the prefix pri- that covers standard pre- as well, and a whole run of nouns for mess, shame and hurry. All of it turns up in every second sentence on the waterfront, and none of it is in a Croatian dictionary.

This unit takes the A and B of Božanić's dictionary and shows that these words are not decoration but daily currency. You will learn five or six endings that mark a word as having arrived from the other side of the Adriatic, plus a run of home-grown verbs in źa-. Most of this vocabulary is about what somebody is like and how they behave — which in Komiža is a subject people work on every day.

This unit is the long tail of the dictionary: words recorded once each, but nearly all built the same way — a prefix plus a stem. Half of them are a native prefix on a borrowed stem, half the other way round. Learn six prefixes and you can take apart words you have never heard. The last two lessons step away from grammar: one is about a blow and a swindle, the other about ink, chalk and what grows on the hillside.

Besides fish and vines, Komiža has always worked hard material too: stone, wood, iron and plaster. This unit gives you the names of materials and tools, the verbs that tell you whether a thing is being used or used right up, and a whole layer of words that arrives from outside — from the commune, the court and the army. Some of it is still heard on the scaffolding and in the cellar. Some belongs to offices and trades that no longer exist — bandur, apalat, śtanjin — and is learned as local history rather than as everyday speech.

Komiža never lived from the sea alone. The town kept a joiner, a barber, a cobbler, a shopkeeper and a mason, and each of them has his own name, his own tools and his own bill. This unit follows that order: first the people and their trades, then timber and nails, then concrete and water, then fitting and finishing — and at the end the buleta, the bill that closes the whole thing.

Alongside the fish, Komiža has always lived by its hands: someone hewed, someone plastered, someone forged, and someone sat at a desk writing the papers for all of them. This unit gives you the words of those jobs — from beam and twig to wire, hook and scaffolding — and everything that goes with them: how to say a job is finished, how to say it was botched, and what to call the man who does it. A good many of these words are still heard on a building site and in the cellar; duvona, kapopośta and apalat name offices that no longer exist, and are learned as history.

This unit is about the work you cannot see from the waterfront: the tools hanging in the cellar, the vine grafted onto wild rootstock, the barrels sulphured before the harvest, and the patch that buys another year for a net, a pair of trousers or a wall. Nearly everything here still has a living name, because the work is still being done. Along the way you'll pick up the patterns the dialect uses to build words: how a verb becomes the name of a job, how a vessel gets smaller, and how you say a thing is already done.

This unit walks a boat from the bottom up: kolumba under your feet, madir along her side, parong on the quay, gaśa at the end of a rope, jidro overhead. Around her, the sea itself — śarbun, milura, fjumera, ardura. Much of this vocabulary was made aboard a gajeta under a lateen sail and is at its most exact there; but a lot of it also has a second, dry-land life, which is why you still hear it far from the water: brac is also the floor of a house, śtrop is also a room's ceiling, and fora just means out.

Komiški talks about a boat in short words: not 'the boat is anchored and holding' but śurgon, not 'she is trimmed too far down by the stern' but apupon, not 'go down into the deep' but afundo. This unit shows the machinery behind that — the ending -on for a job already done, the pair -at and -ovat for once and for always, -onje for the work itself, and the -o adverb that never changes — and teaches it on the vocabulary of anchors, ballast, masts and rope.

This unit is about a boat that gets used, not admired: how she behaves under you, what you do to keep her sound, and the names of the parts you actually put your hands on. The words come from Božanić's Komiški dikcionar and Mardešić's dictionary, and you will hear them on the quay, at the slipway and in every conversation about somebody else's boat. Grammatically it is a unit about word-building: one root gives you the verb, the name of the doing, and the state it leaves behind — blakat, blakovonje, blakun.

This unit covers what holds a boat and what receives her: ropes and their splices, hauling out and launching, a name for every stretch of shore, the ways of sailing along a coast, and the timber the hull is put together from. The words come from Mardešić's dictionary, Božanić's dikcionar and the Komiška ribarska epopeja. Grammatically you pick up a handful of things heard in every other sentence: the prefix in-, the little śe for something happening of its own accord, the prepositions used along the shore, and na with the accusative for manner.

This is the vocabulary of the things you actually pick up in a house: the pot, the pan, the bottle, the towel, the needle, the brush. These are words you hear in a Komiža kitchen or out on the landing rather than read in a book — when somebody wants the frying pan, or says something needs washing. Along the way come three things you cannot learn without them: how a relative clause is built with ca, how half a dictionary grows out of one root, and where the infinitive really sits in a sentence with vajo.

This unit walks through the house job by job: heating and cooling, the table and its dishes, clothes, dirt and tidying, the bedroom, and the small things that are forever going missing. With it comes the machinery that holds half the komiški dictionary together — how a verb yields the name of the action (grodit → grodjenje) and the name of its trace (grodit → grodjen), and why one object so often has two names.

A short unit on the three jobs that kept a house standing: whitewashing and patching walls, the wooden vessels for wine and water, and the things you hit with — from the pestle in the mortar to the beater for the mattresses. With them come three points that are nowhere else this visible: how lj disappears into j when words are built, where komiški says u while standard Croatian wants an instrumental, and what the infinitive of an -sti verb looks like.

Unit thirteen gave you the body and the way to the doctor. This one goes further and teaches what can actually be seen and heard on a person: how somebody turns pale and passes out, how they breathe, how they swallow, what has broken out on their face, whether they are bald or moustached, and how they are dressed. These are the words that come out in Komiža long before anyone mentions a doctor — afon, aśma, brek, kulap, bale, brun, ćela, roba, promina. The grammar of this unit is suffixes. Komiški builds whole families off one root: dihćot and dihćonje, blid and blidit and blidilo and blidoća, bale and balit and balov. The six lessons that follow are really six endings, and once you can see them you will see them everywhere, far beyond the body.

This unit teaches you to say what somebody looks like, how they sleep, how they breathe and how they walk — everything, in other words, that is noticed about a person before they open their mouth. Here are the words for a face and a skull, for snoring and wheezing, for fever and delirium, for a hunched back and a limp, for a shin and a joint, and for the clothes that go over all of it. Some of it speaks plainly about illness, excrement and the genitals. These are ordinary words that children and old men use in Komiža; you learn them here as calmly as any other, with a note telling you how coarse each one is. The grammar that comes with it: nouns that exist only in the plural, the participle in -on and -en, adjectives in -uź, verbs of becoming, and a whole family of words beginning with h — a sound komiški never drops.

A net is the most expensive thing a fisherman owns, which is why there are more words for it than for anything else. This unit gives you the parts of a net, the way the water is read before the net goes in, the orders shouted while it goes over the side, and what is done with it once it comes back. Almost all of it is still current in Komiža, because nets are still set, hauled, picked clean, washed and mended.

Komiža does not take every fish with the same net, and the language shows it at once: a net carries the name of the fish it catches. This unit gives you fish names you will not find in a standard dictionary, the nets and tackle named after them, and the verbs of the work — spreading out, untangling, patching, shooting the net around a shoal. All of it is current, because these nets are still being set.

This unit follows food from one end to the other: from leaven and flour, through the pan and the fire, out to the fruit in the fields, and back to the words people use at table to say whether it came out right. Komiški has an astonishingly dense vocabulary for taste — above all for taste that has gone wrong — and this part of the language is entirely alive, because people still knead, fry and salt. After this unit you will follow what your host says while cooking, and be able to praise the result or complain about it carefully.

This unit covers what grows, ferments and waits in a cellar on Vis. You will learn the names of varieties — of vine, fig, peach and olive — because on Vis fruit is almost never called by its general name but by its variety; you will learn the words that follow wine from must to barrel; and you will learn the words for meat, for wild greens, and for the bread baked twice so it will keep. All of it is still said in Komiža, in the cellar and at the market.

This unit covers the things people in Komiža do because that is how they are done: customs, the stories that get retold, the games on the waterfront, and the words for merriment, faith and fear. Most of it you will hear on a terrace, in a konoba or at the bowls court rather than in a book. Along with the words come a few patterns — how a custom is stated, how a story is told, and how you say what you are playing at — without which the words stand on their own.

This unit holds two vocabularies that Komiža still speaks daily and rarely writes down: the vocabulary of play — bowls, cards, children's marbles — and the vocabulary of church, from catechism class to vespers. With them comes what happens around a game and a feast: racket, masks, rhymed toasts and the signs people read. You will also get the three patterns by which these words grow, so you can recognise the ones not listed here.

This is the densest corner of the Komiža vocabulary: a hundred-odd words for what a person is like. You will not need to produce them all, but you will hear them daily, because Komiža does not describe a person with an adjective — it names them with a noun: un je floćun, provi je ćumbre, ona je provo divjakuśa. You will also learn the three machines that build them: the suffix -un, the prefix deź-/deś-, and word families like the one round the root divj-.

A short three-lesson unit built round one of the most recognisable things about komiški: the sound h is pronounced clearly here, including in places standard Croatian has no h at all — words like hlonje, hnjura, hinhorit. With it come the words for being born and being brought up (nośeća, rojkinja, baketa) and for what is left when an estate is divided (dilba, dilbica, daruvśćina).

In komiški vrime is both the weather overhead and the time that runs out, so this unit teaches both at once. You will learn to say that something happened udij, all at once, all day long or non-stop; to name the dark, the months and the nights of the moon; and to tell drizzle from rain that comes down mihon, as if out of a bellows. By the end you will have some fifty names for the things a Komižan checks each morning before answering the question about the weather.

This unit works outward from the nearest thing to the furthest. It starts with the words for inside and out, behind and above; goes on to the ground underfoot and what grows on it; then to the buildings of the town and the names of the coves and quarters around Komiža; and ends with the mainland and the world — Dalmocija, Mleci, Jamerika. You will learn to place yourself in relation to things rather than to street names, because that is how people here actually give directions.

Unit fifteen has already been round this yard: it gave you the dog, the donkey, the goat and the dolphin, but also the poultry, the lamb and the summer vermin. This one crosses the same ground by a different road — not by species but by word-building. The bird that turns up at the vintage, the fly that buzzes differently from the bee, the centipede in the cellar, the piglet, the kid, the lamb: some of these names are new here, and some you will recognise from unit fifteen, because they are what the rules are made of. Three lessons give you those names and the six rules behind them: how a noise turns into a verb, how the -ji adjective is built, how two words weld into one insect's name, and how an animal's name ends up describing a person.

This unit has no single subject and does not pretend to one. These are the words left at the end: a handful from every domain, none of them enough for a unit of its own. So one lesson gives you the preposition beź and the verb cecnut, the next the colour of the sky and the man who is glad to ask and slow to give, the third an ignition coil and the stole a priest wears at the altar. Three pairs of rules hold them together — and once you are through, there is no living word left in the dictionary that the course teaches nowhere.

This is the last unit of the course and the hardest one. Most of these words are abusive — the dictionary says so itself — and they are here because they were recorded and because they get said, not because we recommend them. With them comes the rest of the tail: a few winds, two words for the moon, one fish, one wild green, and the names for countries and peoples on the far side of the sea. Every word arrives with its register attached: how hard it hits, and whether you can say it to someone's face. Once you are through, no living word in the dictionary goes untaught anywhere in the course.