EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 25 Plural 146 / 600
vrijeme (vremen-) time/weather → vremena
A few neuter nouns have alternative, more expressive and poetic, longer plural
forms in -esa; the most common is:
nebo sky → nebesa
Unfortunately, we still don’t know how to say birds are singing: we need to make
plural of the first Croatian verb form we have learned, pres-3. How to make it? The
rules are a bit more complicated than for other verb forms, it depends of the last
letter of the pres-3:
pres-3 pres-3pl example
-a -aju pjevati sing → pjevaju
-i -e voziti drive → voze ®
-e -u ® jesti (jede) eat → jedu
It’s interesting that pres-3pl for any verb ends in either -u or -e. For example:
Ptice N pjevaju. Birds are singing.
Many verbs that end in -a in pres-3 have – in the Standard scheme – the stress in the
pres-3pl on the same syllable as in the inf, regardless of stress in other present
forms. This is a rather small detail, and even if you’re trying to learn the Standard
stress, you might just ignore it.
If we want to express what more than one subject is doing (or their state) we can
link them with the following word:
i¨ and
For example:
Ana N i Goran N pjevaju. Ana and Goran are singing.
Ivan N i Damir N jedu. Ivan and Damir are eating.
jesti
There’s a common way to express mutual action, corresponding to English each
other – just use se²:
Ana N i Ivan N se vole. Ana and Ivan love each other.
As you can see, here se² is actually the fourth word, since the words Ana i Ivan are
treated as one ‘unit’.
This use explains farewells like vidimo se and čujemo se – they mean we see each
other (later, again) and so on. If you know a Scandinavian language, e.g. Swedish,
you’ll notice it has exactly the same construction:
(Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) Vi ses! = Vidimo se!
This literally translates as we see-s, where the appended -s means each other. A