How often do we hear a phrase: “It is not what you said, it is how you said it”? This simple sentence demonstrates why the understanding of intonation in communication and meaning transmission is decisive. The aim of this paper is to present and compare intonation patterns of Croatian and Russian and their usage. While, on the one hand, the Croatian language uses only five different intonation patterns, the Russian language, according to Bryzgunova (Hobzová: 2011), differs between the seven of them. The examples listed in this paper show that the Croatian language, in the majority of cases, uses only two basic tone movements (falling and rising) in all types of sentences, while variations (fall-rise; fall-rise) are used only to give special emphasis to the text, or to change the style from formal to less formal and vice versa, while the usage of intonation patterns in the Russian language is extremely limited. In this paper, various approaches to the study of intonation, examples of its correct usage and comparisons of intonation patterns of the two languages were discussed, indicating their similarities and differences.