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Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 32 Love and Like 184 / 600

32 Love and Like

There are two most common verbs used to express that you love or like something:

voljeti (voli, volio, voljela)

sviđati se²

love/like

The first verb is about lasting emotions (you love a person, a city) and the second

one about impressions, e.g. when you eat something and you like it, but also when

you feel someone attractive.

The first verb is straightforward to use, the object is in the accusative case, as usual:

Goran N voli Anu A . Goran loves Ana.

Ana N voli sladoled A . Ana likes ice-cream.

However, the second verb is a bit more complicated: the thing one likes is the

subject of the sentence, and who likes it comes in DL. For instance, if you’ve just

eaten a soup and you liked it, you could say:

Sviđa mi DL se juha N . I like the soup. ®

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If e.g. Ana feels attraction or affection to someone (e.g. Ivan) – and it’s not

necessarily erotic, you can just like someone’s personality – one could say:

Ani DL se sviđa Ivan N . Ana likes Ivan.

This is probably quite familiar to you if you know some German, French, Italian or

Spanish, since all these languages have verbs that express like that behave exactly

the same (and use a form that corresponds to the Croatian DL):

(Spanish) Me gusta el libro.

(Italian) Mi piace il libro.

(French)

(German)

Le livre me plait.

Das Buch gefällt mir.

Knjiga mi DL se sviđa.

All five sentences above mean I like the book, but the book is the subject in all five

sentences, and the person who likes (I, emphasized in the sentences) is not the

subject. Therefore, all five verbs – Spanish gustar, Italian piacere, French plaire,

German gefallen and Croatian sviđati se² – are above in the 3rd person. The only

real difference is the word order, which follows quite different rules in Spanish,

Italian, German and Croatian (the French word order is here quite similar to the

Croatian order, though).

As with such sentences, in Croatian, what you’re talking about comes first: if you are

talking about Ana, she comes before the verb, but Ivan (or a book) is really the topic,

it can sometimes come to the first position in such sentence. (Of course, second

position words are always placed in the second position.)

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