The name
Vuk, which in Serbian means "wolf," was supposed to protect him from witchcraft. Vuk learned the alphabet from a literate relative, the local merchant Jevto Savic-Cotric, and began to write in a solution of gunpowder on pieces of paper from discarded cartridges. In 1796, after a brief stay in the Loznica grammar school, he spent a short time in the monastery of Tronosa until his father took him home to watch over his goats.
In 1804, the year of the first Serbian insurrection against the Turks, Karadzic was not able to join the fighters because of physical underdevelopment and lameness already apparent in his left knee. Instead he became a secretary to the local insurrectionist Djordje Curcija. In the fall of the same year Karadzic went to Sremski Karlovci, where he studied Latin, Church Slavonic, German, arithmetic, and catechism under Archimandrite Lukijan Musicki, a renowned poet of Serbian classicism. Karadzic was not admitted to the local high school because he could not produce a certificate of elementary education. Therefore he moved to Petrinja, Croatia, where he hoped to perfect his knowledge of German.
On his return to Serbia in 1807 Karadzic served as a secretary to the insurrectionist hero Jakov Nenadovic and later to the Serbian Governing Council in Belgrade.
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