EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 63 Bigger and Beer: Comparaves 367 / 600
of regular, believe it or not):
dobar good → bolji
dug long → dulji
lak light, easy → lakši
lijep nice → ljepši
loš bad → gori
mali small → manji
mekan soft → mekši
velik big → veći
There’s an adjective malen with more or less the same meaning as mali small; both
use the same comparative. The same goes as mek, a bit archaic variant of mekan
soft. The opposite happens to loš bad – it has a regular comparative and an irregular
one! Both are used. The same happens to dug long, where two comparatives exist,
dulji and duži (some people claim there’s a small difference in meaning, but they are
used with the same meaning in the spoken language).
Comparatives always have the obligatory -i in nominative sing. masc., and in cases
where there’s a choice of two endings in masc. and neut. genders (i.e. o vs. e) they
always have e in endings, even širi wider. (Take care when making impersonal and
inflected forms!)
To help you remember irregular comparatives, they will be underlined with a pale
blue line, and the positive form will be printed at the right margin.
There’s an often quoted rule that -ije- is always shortened to -je- or -e- in
comparatives, but it’s not always so in real life:
blijed pale → bljeđi (sometimes: blijeđi)
lijep nice → ljepši
vrijedan valuable → vredniji / vrjedniji / vrijedniji
At least since 1950’s, comparative forms like vrijedniji more valuable have been
condemned by prescriptive grammarians (i.e. the language police) but they persist.
Currently, you can see three forms of this comparative, and the most common one
on the .hr domain of the Internet is the non-standard one (the most recent Croatian
orthography manual allows forms vredniji and vrjedniji):
form hits
vredniji 18700
vrjedniji 11600
vrijedniji 22900
To say that something is e.g. bigger than something else, use od¨ + G after the
comparative:
Damir N je stariji N od Ane G . Damir is older than Ana.
We know now to say that something is bigger, but what about much bigger? It turns
out that with comparatives you can use the adverbs of quantity (introduced in 45