EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 56 Desires and Demands 327 / 600
— Da zatvoriš prozor A . lit. ‘That you close the window.’
Answers are usually short, but they must be full clauses, what is desired, i.e. da is
mandatory.
Next, there are a couple of impersonal phrases (with an experiencer in DL) that can
use atemporal clauses:
bitno
stalo + DL + biti (je² +)° + da...
važno
They mean it’s important, it matters to DL that... For example:
Bitno mi DL je da ga A nazoveš. lit. ‘It’s important to me that you 1 | 3m/n | nazvati
call him.’
Stalo mi DL je da dođeš. lit. ‘I care that you come.’
1 | doći
(The idiomatic use of stalo was introduced in 52 Stand, Become, Exist, Cease.)
Of course, you can further strengthen these expressions by putting stvarno really,
jako much, a lot or prilično quite a lot in front of adverbs:
Ani DL je jako važno da vratiš novce A . It’s very important to Ana that you return the
money.
(In Croatian, the noun novac (novc-) money is sometimes used in plural as well.)
The phrases, except ones with stalo, can be also used without any experiencer, as
‘objective’, ‘independent’ statements:
Važno je da vratiš novce A . It’s important that you return the money.
Suggestions and permissions use the same grammar: they will be described in 71
Suggestions, Permissions and More Verbs.
However, other superficially similar impersonal expressions, like drago mi je... use a
different type of clauses – indicative-type clauses, so you can use any tense, but not
perf. verbs in the present tense. They will be introduced in 59 Knowing and Telling:
Content and Noun Clauses.
If both a desire clause and a purpose clause are used in the same sentence, the
purpose clause comes last:
Želim [da kupiš mobitel A ] [da možemo razgovarati svaki dan A ]. I moći pres-1pl
want you to buy a cellphone so that we can talk every day. ®
Finally, there’s a form that extends the rules described above: the verb voljeti
(voli,...) used in conditional. (Hopefully, you recall this verb shifts its meaning a bit in
conditional.) It is a very common way to express wishes. When talking about
possible future things (or even things possible right now) with this verb in
conditional, inf is used ®. Using inf is possible only if someone expresses a desire