tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65531074939553420512012-01-29T03:50:29.048+01:00A blog with introduction and a course of Croatian language.Daniel Nikolićhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14585410511935134909noreply@blogger.comBlogger881100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6553107493955342051.post-7131102182270270582011-06-20T12:34:00.008+02:002011-09-16T12:07:02.422+02:00

• • • Review: Appositions, Roles and Family Relations Grown-ups everywhere use a simplified language when speaking with small children. Croatian is no exception. Baby talks include simple sounds and avoid irregular and difficult stuff. The most frequent words are for Mum and Dad (never capitalized in Croatian): mama "Mom" tata (or: ćaća Dalm.) ma "Dad" The word tata is a masculine a-noun. These

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There's a number of common suffixes to create nouns; I will introduce some of them here. Adding them is not a regular process and meanings can be sometimes unexpected. Places Croatian sometimes expresses "ground" (as in "playground") with the suffix -ište, for instance čistim "clean" → čistilište "purgatory" gradim "build" → gradište "building site" igram "play" → igralište "

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Warning! This entry contains words that can disturb some people :) Every language contains some "strong" words that are considered taboo in many circumstances, and are chiefly used by adult males, or in extremely emotional circumstances. There are four types of "cursing": a real curse, directed at someone, it really a kind of magic formula, for instance, you wish that someone dies, never

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Every language has many idiomatic phrases, constructs that have unexpected meanings. Generally they cannot be translated from language to language. A few often used phrases have standard abbreviations: phraseabbr.meaning (Engl. abbr.) na primjernpr."for example" (e.g.) to jesttj."that is" (i.e.) i tako daljeitd."et cetera" (etc.) Furthermore there are some phrases where words are always used

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This chapter summarizes differences among dialects. Slavic Languages All Slavic languages share a lot of similarities with Croatian. They are conveniently divided to four (geographical) groups: Western Polish, Czech, Slovak Eastern Russian, Ukrainian, Belarus Western South SlovenianKajkavian ČakavianŠtokavian Eastern South Macedonian, Bulgarian All languages in the right (western) side

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Macedonian and Bulgarian These two languages are quite similar. They belong to "Eastern South Slavic" group. The most striking feature is that they lost cases, there are only basic forms for personal pronouns (nom., acc., dat.) — and the result is a grammar similar to Spanish and Italian. For instance (Macedonian): Jas ja imam pročitano kniga-ta. Iithavereadbook-the "I have read the book."

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Zagreb City dialect is a Kajkavian dialect with a lot of Štokavian features. However, not all citizens speak the same dialect. Generally, older people will use more German words and more Kajkavian forms, younger ones will use a lot of štokavian features. This is the dialect used everyday by myself. People who move to Zagreb from non-Kajkavian parts either adopt some features of Zagreb dialect (

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Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin are separate standard languages that are quite similar to the Standard Croatian. The first difference is that Serbian and Montenegrin use another alphabet — Cyrillic. However, there is an 1:1 correspondence between Croatian Latin and Serbian Cyrillic: Serbian Cyrillic А аБ бВ вГ гД дЂ ђЕ еЖ жЗ зИ и Croatian Latin A aB bV vG gD dĐ đEeŽ žZ zI i Serbian

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[under construction!] Slovenian (or Slovene) is Kajkavian on steroids, or Kajkavian is simplified Slovenian — it's hard to tell. Luckily, an international border separates them conveniently, so it' easy to tell them apart... Slovenian has many dialects, some of them spoken in Croatia (in Gorski kotar region, where they are called Kajkavian, but are actually much closer to Slovenian) and a

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[under construction] Characteristic preposition for Kajkavian is pri + loc. "at". Tak se negda pri nami delale. "It was done like that at our place in the past." (lit. "at us") {Tako se nekad kod nas radilo.} Characteristic relational words: gdo prep. "who" {tko} negda(r) adv. "sometimes", "in the past" {nekad(a)} teri adj. "which" {koji} unda adv. "then" {onda} Some examples: Tam je

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The first thing that one notices when listening to a typical Kajkavian speech is that it sounds different. Kajkavian is spoken in the north of Croatia, around Zagreb and in a broad diamond-shaped area between borders with Slovenia and Hungary. Sounds The Kajkavian sounds different because it usually has a different vowel system than other dialects. It has two types of e and sometimes two types

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These two dialects are very similar, and they serve as bases for Standard Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin languages. The reason that you can use Croatian in Serbia is that both Standard Croatian and Standard Serbian are based on similar dialects. The main difference between ije-štokavian and e-štokavian is yat (ijë, jë, ë) which is always ë in e-štokavian. The grammar is very similar

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[incomplete. grammar details still missing.] We arrive at two dialects that are mixing quite often, and most of the times it's hard to tell if a speech is more Čakavian or Štokavian. Both dialects have just i for the 'yat' and are therefore called ikavski ("ikavian"). Therefore, dite, mliko, lipo, svit, cvit, vrime, mriža vs. Std. dijëte, mlijëko, lijëpo, svijët, cvijët, vrijëme, mrëža. The

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There is much variation in some details of the grammar of NW Čakavian I have described. First, in some dialects long e is pronounced (and written) as ie, and long o as uo. In most čakavian dialects there's a slightly modified table of case endings. The most common is: [under construction!] casema-nounsmi-nounsn-nounsa-nounsi-nouns nom.sg.---œ-a- acc.sg.-a-u dat.sg.-u-i -i gen.sg.-a-ē-i

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[under construction] After nouns, adjectives and pronouns, verb patterns of Northwestern Čakavian are much more similar to the Standard. pers. "be" neg. "be" cond. "go" 1st sg. sân nīsân, nîs bîn (g)rên 2nd sg. sì nīsì bìš (g)rêš 3rd sg. jê, j nî (!) bì (g)rê 1st pl. smò nīsmò bìmo (g)rēmò 2nd pl. stè nīstè bìte (g)rētè 3rd pl. sû nīsû bì (g)rēdû The special conditional verb (actually,

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[under construction. the following is incomplete and the tables are likely wrong.] "It is well-known that in north-western Croatia spectacular dialect differences are found..."   — Willem Vermeer This dialect might be a surprise to you; it is quite unlike the Croatian you have seen, but it's really Croatian without any doubt — as someone said, nobody even tried to say that Čakavian is not

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• • • Review: Introducing Dialects There are some characteristics shared by many WSS dialects, especially by the western ones. Here I'm going to list the most important ones. The Locative Case In the Standard Croatian and in some dialects, there's no difference between the dative and the locative, but in many dialects there is one. So, I must re-introduce the locative case. It is used only

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Warning: you might want to skip this chapter and the following ones in the first reading. It introduces some advanced topics. What are dialects? There's no simple answer, but everyone seems to understand the concept. They are different varieties that are hidden under one "umbrella" language. So, in a perfect world, there would be discrete languages, and they would be internally divided into

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[under construction]

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This blog is titled "Basic Croatian". Having read all this, you may ask yourself: is this really the basic Croatian, or the complete Croatian? Well, I have left out intentionally some stuff. You may call it advanced stuff — you will find them in newspapers, books, in TV news. Nobody uses them actually in casual conversation or in normal writing. I hate when people describe features of the

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Expressing "do" and "happen" Croatian has no verb that translates English 'generic' verb "do". If you are asking about what someone is doing, you should use radim "work": Što radiš? "What are you doing?" The verb is impf., and when used in this meaning, napravim is used as the perf. verb: Što si napravio? "What have you done?" Što ćeš napraviti? "What are you going to do?" The verb radim

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Final L Lost In the Standard Croatian, there is a special sound rule that introduces many apparent irregularities. Recall that past participles end on -o for m, but follow a more usual pattern -lo n, -la f with other genders. Recall that I said that not all m-nouns and i-nouns end on a consonant in nom.sg. Some of them actually end on -o in nom.sg. It's all a consequence of of "the final l rule

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• • • Review: Demonstratives This strange term is about words used to convey emotions or simply to shout, like "ouch", "hey", etc. Some of them are: hej to call someone joj to express strong emotions, surprise, or even pain jao to express pain or suprise, "woe" aha stress on the last a; to express agreement a, ah emotions o, oh emotions, surprise etc. Some of them can be used with pronouns;

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In most languages, there are difference between "street" language, and "official" language. Some words are never heard in Parliaments or TV news, for instance, English "ain't" and "wanna" are often used, but not in "serious" occasions. Such words are called colloquial. Most of them are used by younger people. Some of them are: meaningStandardcolloquial "(loud) party"zābava tùlum "boy", "

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There's a big group of Croatian verbs (in fact, there are thousands of them) that are quite similar in many aspects. Let's see their common features and meet the most important ones. These verbs are mostly older and less older loans, that is, words taken from another language. For instance, old loans in English are "collect", "connect", etc. The Croatian verbs I'm talking about are most often

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The three verbs hvatam, držim and puštam mean respectively "catch", "hold", and "release, let go". Verbs hvatam and držim are impf. and therefore verbs derived from them follow the asymmetric pattern; puštam ~ pustim and verbs derived from them follow the symmetric pattern (that is, ones derived from puštam are impf., and ones derived from pustim are perf. The derived verbs are quite important,

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The verb krećem, kretao ~ krenem "move, depart", follows a symmetric aspect pattern. ...

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Two verb families, znam and mislim demonstrate how there's far from a word to word correspondence between English and Croatian. For example, the following sentences use the same English verb, but not when translated to Croatian: "I know what happened." "I know him." Likewise, the following sentences use different verbs in English, but when translated to Croatian, use only one verb: "I meant

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Accent or stress is emphasizing one syllable in a word. For example, I have highlighted stressed syllables in few English words: together, American, consequence, insist It's not seen from the spelling, one must just remember the stress for each word. English vowels also differ by their length: e.g. "keen" vs "kin". In English, it's an important feature, so it's featured in spelling. In Croatian

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An important verb is nosim with a basic meaning "carry" (impf.), but with a lot of derived verbs and meanings. The verb itself is often used, having an object in accusative (it's a plain vanilla i/i type, so I'm not going to list forms!): Ana nosi knjigu. "Ana is carrying (a) book." Ana nosi knjigu Ivanu. "Ana is carrying (a) book to Ivan." (added a recipient) Ana nosi knjigu u školu. "Ana is

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In this chapter, I venture a bit into the spoken Croatian, but such features are a part of the Standard too. There's a feature normally called ethical dative, but it has nothing to do with ethics. Actually, the name comes from Latin, and the feature there is really not the same as in Croatian, just a similar one. Recall impersonal constructs with je describing situation, similar to English

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We have seen a long ago how Croatian treats all nouns and adjectives — squeezes them into a scheme of case endings; all adjectives additionally adapt to the gender of the noun they describe. The scheme of endings in far from obvious and logical and not easy to learn at all. However, there are exceptions, so-called indeclinables (that is, nouns and adjectives that don't change case and gender,

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[in construction]

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Appositions English can just chain nouns, where all nouns but the last one serve as adjectives. For instance, a "car engine tuning service" is a kind of a "service". Croatian cannot do that. Nouns cannot be used as adjectives, but genitive and prepositional phrases must be used: Servis za podešavanje motora automobila lit. "service for tuning of engines of cars" However, there's a construct

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The verb budem, -, -, - is very curious one: it's the only verb that has only forms for present, no past, and no infinitive. It's the perfective counterpart of säm, bio, bila, biti - "to be", the most important (imperfective) verb. It means something like "start being", "get to be", "become". For instance: Ako budem gladan... "If I get hungry..." It's meaning and aspect, in a way, imply

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What is this?! This is a word that coresponds to English "-ing" forms. It's really constructed easily. One just adds -ći to the 3rd pers. pl. of the present tense of impf. verbs: pišem (pišu) "write" → pišući "writing" padam (padaju) "fall" → padajući "falling" pečem (peku) "bake" → pekući "baking" idem (idu) "go" → idući "going" tečem (teku) "flow" → tekući "flowing" It's a participle,

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• • • Review: Verbs 'stavim', 'tvorim'; More on Aspect Verbs such as stojim "stand", stajem "come to stand", and padam "fall" are important verbs indicating basic placement of things. However, verbs derived from them have really diverse and important meanings. stojim The verb stojim has a "stationary" meaning: just "stand", non-metaphorically (not "tolerate"!). There's no perf. counterpart:

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Abstract nouns are nouns standing from some abstract property. For example, from adjective "deep", one can derive English abstract noun "depth". In English, that's not the only way: actually, the default way is to add "-ness", e.g. "blind" → "blindness". Such abstract nouns are all derived from adjectives. In Croatian, there are several ways to derive abstract nouns from adjectives. For some

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NOTE: I would like comments on this chapter. I don't know if anyone will understand this, and I need more fluent and realistic English examples. There are prepositions that have meanings other than spatial or temporal. There's no systematic way to list them. Some prepositions that have also spatial/temporal meaning demand other cases. Company: s + ins. We have already encountered this use,

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• • • Review: 'da' and Similar Clauses, Relational and Similar Subclauses There are three very peculiar words in Croatian, something like really special adverbs (you already understood that 'adverbs' are actually a quite strange category in Croatian). They are samo "only", osim "except", and kao "as". Samo The word samo "only" can stand before any phrase, indicating that action applies only to

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• • • Review: Questions, Part 1, Questions, Part 2 Warning. This is a difficult but important part of Croatian. koji: Relational (Adjective) Subclauses There's a way to turn any sentence into a clause appended to a noun. To see what I'm talking about, let's see how we can decribe a book: Čitam dobru knjigu. "I'm reading a good book." Čitam tu knjigu. I'm reading that book." Čitam tvoju

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• • • Review: Reflexive Pronouns and Verbs, Emotions and Dative Verbs Mediopassive We are now deep into strange waters of Croatian, and we're going to explore a controversial topic, the "passive" or "middle" construct, different people call it by different names (and it has more than one purpose). I'll use a compromise name; names are not that important! We'll start by emphasizing that English

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Diminutives Croatian (as many other languages do) has mechanisms for creating nouns standing for miniature versions of things. Those words are often applied to babies, children, and parts of them, and therefore stand for "cute" and "dear" things as well. For instance, in Croatian you can say that a baby has a nos "nose", but people mostly say that it has a nosić "little nose". Likewise, it has

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So-called satiative verbs (or sative, both meaning "satisfy") are perf. verbs that can be derived from many impf. verbs, meaning roughly "have enough of doing that", "do that a lot", "do that too much", or "overdo that". All satiative verbs have a prefixed na-, use a filler se, and have an object in gen., since acc. is blocked by the se: Jëdem kolače. "I eat cakes." / "I'm eating cakes." (

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• • • Review: Degrees of Adjectives and J-Softening Passive Adjectives Take a look at the following sentences: John has eaten the cake. The cake is eaten. English uses word "eaten" in two contexts — to make a past tense ("present perfect"), but also as an adjective, in the second sentence. Such adjective can be used before the noun: The eaten cake was delicious. Such word is called a "

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Finally, I'm going to explain how to yell! Or... how to sing an anthem. Here are some parts of the Croatian national anthem Hrvatska domovina "Croatian homeland", a song frequently referred to with the two first words Lijëpa naša...: The Croatian anthem, sung beforematch Brazil-Croatia, World Cup 2006. Lijëpa naša domovino, Oj junačka zemljo mila, Stare slave djëdovino, da bi

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This entry is under construction. Conditionals There are two conditional "tenses", past and present. They are constructed from the past participle in the following way: Pres. Cond. = (conditional verb) + (past participle) Past Cond. = (conditional verb) + bio/bila/bilo + (past participle) The "conditional verb" is a special verb that has following forms: pers.sg.pl. 1stbihbismo

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• • • Review: Prepositions 'u', 'na', 'iz', 'od', 'do', 's' Now, let me introduce more prepositions, dealing with space and time relations. Compared to u, iz, na, od, do, s these prepositions are more complex are use various cases. Some distinguish "motion to" from static position ("at"), some don't. Sometimes there's more than one preposition meaning the same thing. However, there's an

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The three verbs dajem "give", imam "have" and uzimam "take" are quite important; verbs derived from dajem are important as well. dajem, davao ~ dam Verbs derived from dajem, davao ~ dam follow the symmetric pattern: ones derived from dajem are impf. and ones from dam perf. Some verbs have two meanings: literal and symbolic: prefixgrammarmeaning —N (A) (D)N gives (A) (to D) do-N (A) (D)1. N

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• • • Review: Basic Sentences, Past Tense Verbs usually have one or more "arguments", i.e. a "subject", an "object", etc. In Croatian, a subject is in nom., an object in acc. In plain vanilla verbs, subject = person who does something, object = thing or person affected. So, Ana čisti kuću. "Ana is cleaning (the) house." Ana works, the house will get clean. However, in the next sentence,

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Ime and Other Strange n-Nouns There are some n-nouns that are not irregular, but really form a set of small sub-classes within n-nouns. Some common nouns are among them. A prototype of such nouns is ime n "name". In nom.sg. and all cases without endings (well, just acc.sg.) it has this form, but in other cases, -en- is inserted before regular ending. For some other nouns, -et- is inserted; for

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• • • Review: Conditionals Content Clauses The simplest type of compound sentences is where the whole sentence is inserted into another sentence meaning "action" taken as an object in the main sentence. Sub-sentences are usually called clauses, and this type is called content clause. For instance, in English (inserted sentences are marked with brackets [...]). "I saw [that you bought a car].

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A conjunction is a word that joins two words in a phrase, or two phrases, or even two sentences in a new sentence. I have occasionally shown use of a conjunction i "and" in examples, but now is the time to explain more. First, there are conjunctions that connect words and phrases quite freely, where both parts stay on equal footing, none of them has to be rearranged, etc. One example is before

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Many adjectives and some adverbs in Croatian have comparatives ("bigger") and superlatives ("the biggest"). However, possesives (Ivanov "Ivan's", moj "my") or material adjectives (voden "watery") don't have them, together with many adverbs. The basic form ("big") is called positive. Comparatives and superlatives of adjectives behave as normal adjectives regarding the case/number/gender forms.

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• • • Review: Numbers and Time Ordinals Now let's focus our attention to so-called ordinal numbers, called so because they are used to order things. All ordinal numbers in Croatian are normal adjectives, except there is no gradation — no "the firstest". For numbers 1-20, the ordinals are: 1 prvi 2 drugi 3 treći 4 četvrti 5 peti 6 šesti 7 sedmi 8 osmi 9 deveti 10 deseti 11 jedanaesti 12

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Conditional Tenses In Croatian, there are two "conditional" tenses: present and past conditional (or there is a "conditional mood" with two tenses... whatever). Basically, they represent desires: you could say almost the same with "I want to", but they are really often used as figures of speech. For instance, phrases "I would..." or "I could" are represented by conditionals in Croatian.

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Now I'm going to explain two "verb families", with very diverse meanings, we'll learn how to say "close" and "put" in Croatian! Verbs Derived from 'stavim'; the Symmetric Aspect Pattern The verb stavim perf. is a very often used verb, and means "place something", "put". It's imperfective form is stavljam: Stavljam meso u lonac. "I'm putting (the) meat in (a) pot." Stavio säm meso u lonac. "I

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Prepositions are words that somehow denote mode of action when added to nouns or noun phrases. For example, in English, "in", "to", "over", "under", "with", "except", etc. are prepositions. In Croatian, prepositions make prepositional phrases (PP's): PP = preposition NP The catch is that the whole noun phrase (more precisely, the "unlocked" part of it) must be put in the appropriate case.

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Telling when and how long is not so simple in Croatian. There are constructs involving cases and prepositions and a very weird feature that we are going to jump straight into! How Long First, how to tell how long did you work for a company or lived somewhere? Radio säm jednu godinu. (acc.) "I worked for a year." Radio säm pet godina. (acc.) "I worked for five years." Radio säm godinama. (ins.

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Compare the following sentences: "I see him." "I see myself." "He sees her." "He sees him." "He sees himself." There's a special form of pronoun used to indicate the object (one who is seen) is the same as the subject (one who sees). It's really not needed for the 1st and 2nd person ("I", "you"), since there's only one possible "I", but it is nevertheless used. Now, such "the same as

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Nouns and Pronouns In the second part we have seen more features of Croatian — more tenses, more cases. The new cases introduced are genitive and instrumental. In the Standard Croatian, ins. pl. is always equal to dat. pl.: casema-nounsmi-nounsn-nounsa-nounsi-nouns nom.sg.---œ-a- acc.sg.-a-u dat.sg.-u(+)i-i gen.sg. & dual-a-e-i ins.sg.-œm-om-i, -ju nom.pl.-[œv]+i-a-e-i acc.pl.-[œv]e

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The Croatian verb idem "go" is irregular in respect to its past participle: it's quite unexpected išäo, išla. However, there's a substantial group of very often used verbs derived from it: they are even more irregular. They are all perfective, and their impf. pairs are look quite different from them! They also have a wide range of meanings. A strange thing about these verbs: they are

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Negative sentences How to say "no" in Croatian? It turns out to be both simpler and more complex than in English. The easiest way is to say just ne "no". But it we have a more complex sentence, we must learn how to put sentence in negation. For instance, for sentences: Ana jëde jabuku. "Ana is eating an apple." Ana je jëla jabuku. "Ana was eating an apple." Ana će jësti jabuku. "Ana shall eat

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• • • Review: Questions, Part 1 Now, let's take a look at other question-words. We have already seen how to make questions asking for nouns or noun phrases. But it's possible to make other questions, about places, means (things usually described by prepositional phrases or "adverbs") or about adjectives. For instance: "I came here yesterday." Q: "Where did I come yesterday?

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This one and the next chapter will introduce to composing questions and the question-words (sometimes called "relational pronouns", but they are not really all pronouns, I prefer "generalization words"; together with demonstratives, they are part of a whole "generalization scheme" that will be introduced in the short while). Yes/No Questions The simplest questions are those where one just

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Now I'm going to describe the future tense in Croatian. Similar to the past tense, it's a compound tense, actually a phrase consisting of two words: Present of verb hoću in a short form; The form of verb called "infinitive" Infinitive The infinitive is a form that really does not exist in English; the closest match is the infinitive phrase ("to eat"). Infinitives are neither nouns nor

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Demonstratives are really a kind of adjectives, but have a somewhat grammatical role, they are close to "function words". Together with some other words they are a part of a larger "generalization scheme". English has demonstratives "this" (pl. "these") and "that" (pl. "those"). Croatian scheme is more like adjectives, that is, forms for all cases plus a threefold distinction instead of

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• • • Review: The Genitive Case Introducing Instrumental Case It's not a box used for instruments, it's a grammatical case! Well... actually it has something to do with tools and instruments, among other things. It's used to indicate manner of doing an action, tools used, and of course certain prepositions need it! The instrumental (abbreviation: ins.) is a very cheap case: one has to remember

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Now, let's take a look at forms of personal pronouns in accusative and dative — two basic cases beside the nominative. I have already shown forms in nominative singular and plural. There are two important points. First, forms in other cases are quite different than in the nominative. There are no nice rules like in adjectives, despite some forms being quite similar to adjectives. Second, in

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• • • Review: First Steps with Adjectives Possesives Possessive adjectives are formed from nouns and pronouns and denote "belonging to someone". In English, words as "John's" and "my" can be regarded as possessive adjectives. In Croatian, possessive adjectives behave as normal adjectives, but cannot be put into comparative or superlative — there's no "more John's" and "more my" both in English

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Now we tackle an important issue — numbers. Croatian cardinal numbers (there are also ordinal numbers: "first, second"; they will be discussed later) are a diverse assembly of words: some behave as adjectives, some as nouns, and some others even differently. Numbers 1-10 Here is a list of numbers from one to ten. Each number is listed with an example on use — with words konj "horse" ma, selo "

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• • • Review: Present Tense Past Participles; Simple Classes Croatian forms the past tense using present of verb "to be" (sam, si, je...) and something similar to an adjective (called "past participle"). Such sentences are actually very similar to "X is Y". Because adjectives have to agree with subjects of such sentences, form of the adjective changes according to gender: Ja säm rekäo. "I

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Croatian (as all other Slavic languages do) utilizes the so-called aspect distinction. By some accounts, this is the most difficult concept to grasp when learning Croatian. In my point of view, a similar distinction exists in English, so it should not be too hard! English has "continuous" and "non-continuous" tenses: "I was eating pizza." "I had eaten (up) a pizza." The first

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The Genitive Case Introduced Now we are hitting some hard stuff. It's finally time to introduce one more case: the genitive (abbreviation: gen.). What is it used for? Well, for many things. Most important, in phrases "x of y", and for counting and measuring. Let's take a look at genitive endings for nouns: casema-nounsmi-nounsn-nounsa-nounsi-nouns nom.sg.---œ-a- acc.sg.-a-u dat.sg.-u(+)i-i

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In the first part I have explained really basic features of Croatian. You should be able to use present of verbs, basic pronouns in the nominative, and use the three basic cases (nom., acc., dat.) in singular and plural of most nouns. This should enable you to create short but grammatically correct sentences. A short review of the first part Croatian has 6 cases in singular and plural for all

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I have shown one verb ("to be") in the present tense, and you have seen occasionally glimpses of some other verbs. Now, I will show how verbs are used in the present tense. English has 2 present tenses: "I eat." "I am eating." The first one is used for things that happen sometimes, everyday, and the second one for things going on right now. Croatian (and most languages, including German)

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For some reasons I really don't understand, basic pronouns ("I", "he") are always explained together with forms of verb "to be" — "I am", "he is", etc., and that's usually the first thing one learns. I explaining postponed such things... until now. So, there is a recipe how to use pronouns + "to be" in Croatian. As I have already explained, pronouns are almost always omitted in Croatian. However

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The last lesson omitted one important fact: all m-nouns add -i to form nom.pl. However, a great number of masculine nouns also insert -ov- or -ev- before that -i and all other endings in plural: prozor, prozori nom.pl. "window, windows" telefon, telefoni nom.pl. "telephone, telephones" krevet, kreveti nom.pl. "bed, beds" most, mostovi nom.pl. "bridge, bridges" zid, zidovi nom.pl. "wall, walls"

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Previously, we have examined how adjectives change in gender, case, and number. Adjectives don't have their own gender, case, or number — instead, you can (and must) create any combination of these for any adjective. On the other hand, nouns have fixed gender. Remember, gender is just way that nouns 'agree' with adjectives. One side is controlling it, and it is a noun. A completely different

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Basic Cases of Adjectives Let's take a look how can one make all necessary forms of adjectives in all genders, and three basic cases in the both singular and plural. I'm going to show all those forms for one adjective, for instance velik "big". Now, all these forms differ only in endings added to velik - and some forms don't add any ending at all. So, I'll list only the endings. Just a '-' means

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Suppose Ana is a woman, and Igor is a man. In English, the only effect will be that one has to use "she" for Ana, and "he" for Igor; "her" vs. "his". Words have to "agree" on gender. In Croatian, gender is much more comprehensive. Here I have underlined words affected by "gender agreement" in English sentences, and the same sentences translated to Croatian. I kept the word order of English

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Introducing Cases This post will introduce you to cases. English has 2 cases (the subject and object case), however they differ for pronouns only ("we" vs. "us"). Cases are forms of words when used in various places in a sentence (subject, object, indirect object, etc.) If the sentence "Ivan is writing a letter to Ana." is translated into Croatian, all three nouns (Ivan, letter, Ana) must be

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In this post I'll describe the structure of simple sentences. I have a serious problem - English is, in a sense, a very peculiar language. Regarding the sentence structure, most languages of the world are not so rigid as English is. In fact, even Mandarin Chinese is (in this aspect) more similar to Croatian. Germanic languages (English included) and French are somewhat different from the bulk!

Daniel Nikolićhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14585410511935134909noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6553107493955342051.post-3897768888925508612009-01-13T14:54:00.009+01:002011-11-25T15:20:55.690+01:00

This chapter should prepare you for what lies ahead, to introduce some basic concepts. For some reasons, English grammar divides words into various "parts of speech". I would rather use a phrase "types of words". In scientific use people prefer "word classes". I would rather use class to sub-divide various types. I hope you know at least about nouns (e.g. "Sun") and verbs (e.g. "shine"). There

Daniel Nikolićhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14585410511935134909noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6553107493955342051.post-36317505474010228522009-01-13T12:57:00.013+01:002011-11-25T16:15:47.729+01:00

I will here list some basic phrases, and some basic patterns of simple sentences. First, most basic words and politeness: da"yes" ne"no" možda"maybe" molim"please" [listen] hvala"thank you" [listen] oprostite"excuse me", "sorry" How to ask does someone know a language: Govorite li..."Do you speak..." Razumijem..."I understand..." Znam..."I know (speak)..." Ne razumijem..."I don't understand...

Daniel Nikolićhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14585410511935134909noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6553107493955342051.post-78830688412719615942009-01-13T09:38:00.027+01:002011-10-24T16:33:33.500+02:00

Usually, basic language courses give pronunciation rules. I find that somewhat strange — after all, a language is primarily spoken, writing can vary. If fact, over centuries, Croatian writing system did vary, but nowadays it settled to a quite simple one. Roughly, there is a rule: one sound = one letter. However, some "letters" are actually "double". But they are really considered as true letters

Daniel Nikolićhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14585410511935134909noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6553107493955342051.post-80274408957888464672009-01-12T15:14:00.018+01:002011-11-07T11:35:04.034+01:00

Croatian is a Slavic language. It's almost the same as Serbian or Bosnian, and similar to Czech and Russian. Its grammar resembles Old Greek and Latin, so it's quite complex (but don't get afraid!). Here's a map of Slavic languages: Basically, you can say that you almost learn 4 languages with one effort: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. Yes, there are some differences, but they

Daniel Nikolićhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14585410511935134909noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6553107493955342051.post-14150834489460886452009-01-12T14:57:00.006+01:002011-01-03T22:35:41.804+01:00

This is my Croatian language blog. I have been trying to put together a language blog for some time. I have collected some materials, and I'll be posting some Croatian lessons here. I think there's not enough information on the Internet about the Croatian language basics. I will concentrate mostly on spoken, everyday language. If you take a look at an average Croatian language book, or read

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