What is included in the free preview on this page?

You can read live-generated stories at the A0 and A1 levels directly on this page, complete with tap-to-translate vocabulary and line-by-line translations. If you join the Reading List, you will also receive 3 sample stories as a PDF without creating an account.

Which levels will be available when Educator Studio launches?

At launch, Educator Studio will support every proficiency level from A0 through B2, allowing you to create appropriate materials as your students move beyond beginner texts.

How do I share reading passages with my students?

At launch, you will be able to generate a link for any story you create and send it to your students. You can create as many share links as you need for your classes.

Do my students need to create an account to read shared stories?

No, your students can open and read shared links directly in their web browser without making an account. They will have an option to set up a free account if they want to keep track of their stories and vocabulary, but it is never mandatory.

Can my students listen to the stories being read aloud?

At launch, students reading a shared text can tap any individual word to hear it spoken in a standard computer voice. Full story narration with distinct voices for dialogue, as well as MP3 file exports, will be accessible through the Premium Audio add-on.

How accurate are the texts generated by the platform?

Texts are written by AI and automatically reviewed against grammar and vocabulary rules for the chosen level. Because the system does not use human editors, small errors can occasionally happen, so you should read through each story before passing it to your students.

How does the platform handle regional variations in Bosnian vocabulary?

Bosnian features distinct loanwords from Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, and retains the h sound in words like kahva. Standard Bosnian accepts regional variants such as kahva, kava, and kafa, so your students can learn to recognize these normal differences without treating them as mistakes.

Graded Bosnian Reading Passages for Your Students

Generate beginner reading passages live and share custom texts with your students.

Teaching Bosnian requires materials that introduce complex case endings and strict clitic order at a manageable pace. With Stichos, you can preview simple reading passages right away or generate new ones designed for beginners. It helps your students read natural texts supported by line-by-line translations and vocabulary tools.

Rebeka i zubar

Danas je sunčan dan u Sarajevu.

Today is a sunny day in Sarajevo.

Rebeka ide kroz grad.

Rebeka goes through the city.

Ona ima veliku zubobolju.

She has a big toothache.

Zub je jako boli.

Her tooth hurts her very much.

Rebeka brzo dolazi u zubnu ordinaciju.

Rebeka quickly arrives at the dental clinic.

Doktor je tamo.

The doctor is there.

Zubar je vrlo dobar i fin.

The dentist is very good and kind.

On gleda tužnu djevojku.

He looks at the sad girl.

Rebeka sjedi na stolici.

Rebeka sits on the chair.

Rebeka tiho sjedi na velikoj stolici.

Rebeka sits quietly on the big chair.

Pogledaj gore.

Look up.

Rebeka gleda u malo svjetlo.

Rebeka looks into the small light.

Zubar pažljivo gleda bolesni zub.

The dentist carefully examines the bad tooth.

On vidi mali problem.

He sees a small problem.

Zubar uzima malu lampu i vodu.

The dentist takes a small lamp and water.

Uzmi vodu.

Take the water.

Rebeka pije hladnu vodu.

Rebeka drinks cold water.

Zubar brzo popravlja zub.

The dentist quickly fixes the tooth.

Bol nestaje.

The pain disappears.

Rebeka ima lijep osmijeh.

Rebeka has a nice smile.

Ona je sada mirna i sretna.

She is now calm and happy.

Rebeka kaže hvala i sretna ide kući.

Rebeka says thank you and happily goes home.

Key Facts About the Bosnian Language

Speakers

About 3.3 million native speakers (2020–2023), according to the figure cited in Wikipedia's Bosnian language article. Counts vary, because speakers of the closely related standards choose which name to give their language.¹

Did you know?

Bosnian stands out among the Serbo-Croatian standards for its many Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish loanwords, and for keeping an h in words such as kahva (coffee), where Serbian has kafa.¹

The main challenge

Nouns change their endings across seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative and instrumental), with a lot of overlap between forms in the plural.²

Where students struggle

Unstressed short words such as sam, se, mi, ga and je must sit in second position in the clause: Zovem se Ana, but Ja se zovem Ana.²

Teaching notes

If students also meet Croatian or Serbian material, point out that pairs such as kahva, kava and kafa (coffee) are normal variation between the standards, not errors. Standard Bosnian accepts all three; Croatian uses kava and Serbian kafa.³

Sources

About the Bosnian language

Language family	Indo-European → South Slavic (Shtokavian). It is one of four closely related, mutually intelligible standards, alongside Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian; its standard is based on the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect. The standard accepts only the Ijekavian pronunciation (mlijeko, not mleko).¹^,2^,3
Speakers	About 3.3 million native speakers (Ethnologue, 2020–2023). Counts vary between sources, because speakers of these closely related standards choose which name to give their language.¹
Primary script	Latin script (Gaj’s Latin alphabet, 30 letters, one per sound) is the predominant script and the one in everyday use; Cyrillic is also official but less widely used. Stichos writes Bosnian in the Latin alphabet.¹^,4^,3
Word order & typology	SVO by default, but word order is flexible because seven noun cases mark who does what. Inflection is fusional, subject pronouns are usually dropped, and unstressed clitics sit in second position in the clause.⁵^,6
Official status	An official language of Bosnia and Herzegovina alongside Croatian and Serbian (set at entity level; the state constitution names none). In official use in Montenegro, and a recognised minority language in Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia and Kosovo.¹^,7

Bosnian reading proficiency benchmarks (CEFR)

Stichos level	Approximate framework equivalent	Reader profile
A0	Pre-A1	Early Beginner
A1	CEFR A1	Beginner
A2	CEFR A2	Elementary
B1	CEFR B1	Intermediate
B2	CEFR B2	Upper Intermediate

Stichos levels are modelled on the Council of Europe’s CEFR reading descriptors; A0 roughly corresponds to the CEFR’s Pre-A1 band. They describe what a reader can handle; Stichos does not test or certify Bosnian.

Reference corpora

Large corpora of contemporary Bosnian are recent and mostly built from the web.¹^,2

bsWaC: Nikola Ljubešić and Filip Klubička built the Bosnian web corpus by crawling the .ba domain in 2014. Version 1.1 (2016) holds about 287 million tokens in 896,059 texts, lemmatised and tagged, under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.¹^,2
Standard vocabulary: Stichos writes Bosnian readers with standard, dialect-neutral vocabulary and avoids regionalisms and non-standard loanwords at every level.

Readability design principles

We found no readability formula validated on Bosnian texts. The nearest published work is on Croatian, a closely related standard.¹

Decoding: Spelling is highly phonemic, with one letter for each sound, so sounding out words is rarely the hard part. Difficulty sits in case endings, verb forms and clitic order.²
Pitch accent: The standard pronunciation has a pitch accent: a stressed syllable is rising or falling, and long or short, giving four accents. Ordinary spelling marks neither the accent nor vowel length; dictionaries do.³
Croatian precedent: Sanja Brangan (2014) adapted Flesch Reading Ease to Croatian. It has not been tested on Bosnian texts.¹
Stichos: Stichos controls difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits. At A0 a sentence has at most five words and no conjunctions; the limits widen at each level.

Script & grammar scaffolding

Tenses: A0 uses only the present (prezent). A1 adds the past (perfekt), A2 the future (futur I), and B1 the present conditional (kondicional I). B2 opens futur II, passive participles and verbal adverbs (glagolski prilog). The aorist and imperfect (aorist, imperfekt) are held back until C1, where they appear for style.
Imperatives: At A0 commands appear only inside fixed formulas such as Izvolite (“here you are”), and requests take the form Jednu kafu, molim. A1 allows five informal imperatives: pogledaj, dođi, uzmi, sačekaj and sjedi.
Clitics: Pronoun and auxiliary clitics take the second position in the clause (Wackernagel’s law), with verbal clitics before object clitics except je.
Register: Friends and family use ti; strangers and formal settings use Vi with plural verb agreement.

Related academic & framework resources

The CEFR Levels (Council of Europe): The Council of Europe’s description of the six common reference levels, A1 to C2.
Bosnian web corpus bsWaC 1.1: The CLARIN.SI repository entry for the corpus, with download and licence details.
{bs,hr,sr}WaC – Web Corpora of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian: The 2014 paper by Nikola Ljubešić and Filip Klubička describing how the corpora were built.
Quantitative Assessment of Text Difficulty in Croatian Language: Sanja Brangan’s 2014 paper in Rasprave Instituta za hrvatski jezik, proposing a Flesch-based formula for Croatian.
Bosnian language (Wikipedia): An overview of Bosnian, including its phonemic orthography.
Serbo-Croatian phonology (Wikipedia): An overview of the sounds shared by Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian, including the four-way pitch accent.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is included in the free preview on this page?: You can read live-generated stories at the A0 and A1 levels directly on this page, complete with tap-to-translate vocabulary and line-by-line translations. If you join the Reading List, you will also receive 3 sample stories as a PDF without creating an account.
Which levels will be available when Educator Studio launches?: At launch, Educator Studio will support every proficiency level from A0 through B2, allowing you to create appropriate materials as your students move beyond beginner texts.
How do I share reading passages with my students?: At launch, you will be able to generate a link for any story you create and send it to your students. You can create as many share links as you need for your classes.
Do my students need to create an account to read shared stories?: No, your students can open and read shared links directly in their web browser without making an account. They will have an option to set up a free account if they want to keep track of their stories and vocabulary, but it is never mandatory.
Can my students listen to the stories being read aloud?: At launch, students reading a shared text can tap any individual word to hear it spoken in a standard computer voice. Full story narration with distinct voices for dialogue, as well as MP3 file exports, will be accessible through the Premium Audio add-on.
How accurate are the texts generated by the platform?: Texts are written by AI and automatically reviewed against grammar and vocabulary rules for the chosen level. Because the system does not use human editors, small errors can occasionally happen, so you should read through each story before passing it to your students.
How does the platform handle regional variations in Bosnian vocabulary?: Bosnian features distinct loanwords from Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, and retains the h sound in words like kahva. Standard Bosnian accepts regional variants such as kahva, kava, and kafa, so your students can learn to recognize these normal differences without treating them as mistakes.

Learning Bosnian yourself? Try the learner reader →

Free Language Reading Samples for Tutors · Stichos