EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 17 Adjecves in Dave/Locave 102 / 600
Atlantski ocean Atlantic ocean → u Atlantskom oceanu ®
There are more nouns in Croatian that are (historically) adjectives and therefore
change as adjectives. For example, the name of the month of November in Croatian
changes as an adjective. To inform you about it, I will indicate such behavior with
(adj.) after the noun:
studeni (adj.) November ®
Another very frequent use of nouns-that-are-actually-adjectives are names of
languages. The full name of a language is e.g.:
engleski jezik the English language
talijanskiʷ¹ jezik the Italian language
They are very often shortened just to adjectives (e.g. engleski, talijanskiʷ¹) which
keep the gender of the noun jezik – masculine inanimate. Such adjectives that stand
for countries of origin and languages are:
češki Czech
engleski English
francuski French
hrvatski Croatian
njemački German
ruski Russian
srpski Serbian
španjolski Spanish ®
švedski Swedish
talijanskiʷ¹ Italian
If you compare them to the country names above, you can verify that the country
names are actually just feminine versions of these adjectives. For a comprehensive
list of country names and associated adjectives, check L2 Countries and
Nationalities.
To say that something is in some language, you should use na¨ + adjective in masc.
DL:
Knjiga N je na njemačkom DL . The book is in German.
If you want to ask how to say some word on some other language (including
Croatian) you should use a sentence like this:
Kako se kaže „carrot” N na hrvatskom DL ?
(Such sentences exactly correspond to Italian come si dice and Spanish cómo se dice,
so you will find another similarity to those languages.)
If you want to say that you speak or don’t speak a language, you should use the verb
znati know:
Učim hrvatski A . I’m learning Croatian.
Znam engleski A . I ‘know’ English. (= I speak
Ana N ne zna ruski A . Ana doesn’t ‘know’ Russian. (= doesn’t speak)
(I hope you remember that this verb shifts the stress to ne¨ in both Standard and
‘western’ stress scheme.)