Croatian grammar A1: beginner
The complete guide from A1 to B1: the rules, examples to listen to, the usual mistakes.
- 0 · Letters and sounds
- A1 · Beginner
- A2 coming soon
- B1 coming soon
Level A1 covers the grammar of first exchanges in Croatian: saying who you are, naming and describing people and things, saying what you do, want, can and must do, where you are, where you go and where you come from, counting and telling the time, and saying what happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow. Four of the seven cases and three tenses of the verb are met at this level.
What A1 covers
- the present of biti and of the main verb classes (čitam, govorim, kupujem), with the irregular ići, jesti, piti, pisati and the modal verbs;
- the perfekt (bio sam, radila je) and futur I (radit ću);
- the nominative, accusative, locative and instrumental of nouns, adjectives, possessives and pronouns, in the singular and the plural;
- the genitive in a few fixed patterns only: iz Zagreba, s posla, pet eura;
- the numbers, the clock, the days, the months and the first ordinal numbers.
What is new for an English speaker
- Croatian has no articles: kuća is “a house” or “the house”, as the situation shows;
- every noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, things included, and the gender can usually be seen in the ending: grad, kuća, selo;
- a noun changes its ending with its role in the sentence, its case; of the seven cases, A1 brings four, the nominative, the accusative, the locative and the instrumental: Pijem kavu, u kući, s mamom;
- each person of the verb has its own ending, so the subject pronoun is usually left out: Živim u Splitu;
- short unstressed words, the clitics (sam, si, je, se, ga, ću), stand second in the clause: Jučer sam radio;
- the perfekt shows the gender of the subject: a man says bio sam, a woman bila sam;
- ti is said to a friend, Vi to a stranger, with a plural verb: Kako si?, Kako ste?;
- a negative word such as nitko or ništa is used with a negated verb: Nitko ne zna.
The usual difficulties
- u or na for English “in”, “at” and “on”, and the case after them: u gradu (where), u grad (where to);
- gdje, kamo and odakle for English “where”;
- the noun after a number: dva brata, dvije kave, pet eura;
- the infinitive after a modal verb, never da with the present: Želim spavati.
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The present tense
The Croatian present tense translates both the English simple present and the present continuous: čitam is “I read” and “I am reading”.
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Nouns and adjectives
Every Croatian noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, and in the nominative singular its gender can usually be read from its ending.
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The cases
Croatian has seven cases: the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative and instrumental.
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Pronouns and possessives
The Croatian possessives are adjectives in form: the word is chosen by the owner (moj, “my”; njezin, “her”), and its ending agrees with the noun owned, in gender, number and case.
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Numbers and the time
Croatian numbers are partly adjectives and partly words that do not change: jedan agrees with its noun like an adjective, and dva has a feminine form, dvije.
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Modal verbs
Croatian modal verbs, htjeti and željeti (“to want”), moći (“can”), morati (“to have to”), trebati (“to need”) and smjeti (“to be allowed to”), take the person ending, and the verb after them is in the infinitive, with no word for English to: Želim čitati.
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Where to and where from
English has one where; Croatian has three question words: gdje? for where someone or something is, kamo? for where someone goes, and odakle? for where someone comes from.
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The past
The perfekt is the everyday past tense of Croatian.
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The future
Futur I, the Croatian future, is formed with a short auxiliary, the clitic forms of htjeti (ću, ćeš, će, ćemo, ćete, će), and the infinitive.
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Small words and spelling
A few short words are used to join sentences and to shade their meaning: the conjunctions i, a, ali and ili, the time words već, još and više ne, and adverbs of manner, degree and frequency such as dobro, jako and često.