Contemporary glottodidactic research on foreign language teaching increasingly emphasizes the importance of viewing the language learning process from the learner’s perspective, and attitudes and motivation for learning emerge as a more important source of data for language learning theory than its formal properties. Affective factors in the studying of a foreign language are primarily relate to the study environment, i.e. the attitudes of the learners towards the programme and the curriculum, the teacher’s personality, behaviour, methods and teaching style, a pleasant atmosphere for studying, and the characteristics of the study group itself. The starting point of this paper is the assumption that it is the affective factors which are crucial to success in learning Croatian as a foreign language. In order to verify this assumption, research was conducted on 20 students from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, Venezuela, Russia, Kenya, Great Britain, Lebanon, Ukraine, Lithuania and Peru, who had taken courses in Croatian at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Osijek. The research was based on the attitudes of attendees according to the language level of the course and the learning environment.