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Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 04 No, Oen, Probably and Again 26 / 600

Such words are often placed before the verb, and svaki dan is often found at the

end of the sentence as well. Word order is quite free in Croatian and you can place

many words as you like.

Ana rijetko gleda televiziju. Ana watches TV rarely.

Ponekad pijem kavu. I drink coffee sometimes.

Ivan pije kavu svaki dan. Ivan drinks coffee every day.

There’s another useful word: skoro almost (it has other meanings as well). Used

with nikad(a), it expresses almost never. However, you still have to use negation:

Skoro nikad ne pijem kavu. I almost never drink coffee.

There are more useful words. For example when you say that someone is doing

something, you could be perfectly sure, or just guess. That’s where these words

come into play:

možda maybe

očito obviously

sigurno for sure

vjerojatno probably ®

Such words are again usually put before the verb. For example:

Goran možda spava. Goran is maybe sleeping.

Ivan sigurno pije kavu. Ivan is drinking coffee for sure.

There are couple of words to indicate that something repeats or happens for the

first time:

opet / ponovo / ponovno again

prvi put for the first time

There’s really no difference among the three words meaning again. The word opet

is the most frequent one in everyday life:

Ana opet spava. Ana is sleeping again.

Goran prvi put čita knjigu. Goran is reading a book for the first time.

You will sometimes hear and read prvi puta, e.g. in newspapers. (Some people think

that form is not acceptable as standard, but it can be seen in publications issued by

the Croatian government!) It’s basically the same variation as nikad vs. nikada.

If you are asked what you’re doing, and you aren’t doing anything in particular, you

can answer with:

Što radiš? What are you doing?

— Ništa. Nothing.

If you want to use ništa nothing with a verb, the verb must be negated too:

Ivan često ne radi ništa. Ivan frequently does nothing. (lit. ‘isn’t doing nothing’)

This is again quite unlike English. In English, there’s at most one negation in a

piti

piti

piti

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