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Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 07 Verbs with Obligatory Objects 45 / 600

košarka basketball

nogomet football (soccer)

šah chess

tenis tennis

For example:

Ana igra šah. Ana plays chess.

Ivan igra košarku. Ivan plays basketball.

However, if someone does not play some sport, or a game, but plays on their own

(e.g. with toys...) you must use a se²:

Goran se igra. Goran is playing.

The verb igrati is not used for "playing" musical instruments. For that, another verb is

used, svirati. This is the same difference as Spanish jugar vs. tocar.

There are more verbs that use the se². Some of them, like nadati hope have always

a se² with them, so they are usually listed as nadati se². Another such verb is smijati

(smije) se² laugh ®. You will discover more such verbs as you go.

________

® You’ll later see an example where Standard Serbian spells some second-position

words not as separate words.

Instead of juha, the word supa is used in Serbia, most parts of Bosnia, and in some

regions of Croatia as well.

In the “Ekavian” pronunciation, which completely dominates in Serbia, the verb

smijati (smije) se² has the unexpected form smejati (smeje) se²; there are more

verbs which behave like that; this alternation is not predictable – such verbs must be

learnt by heart, if you want to know both pronunciations.

• Something Possibly Interesting

In many grammars, verbs that have the particle se² are called reflexive. I’m not using

that term, since it’s not a property of the verb, it just has the ‘reflexive’ particle with

it. More precisely, the whole construction could be called ‘reflexive’. However, in

many languages, there are uses of such particle (or pronoun) that are not ‘reflexive’

at all. You can check examples in Wikipedia (Reflexive verb) and you’ll see how

Croatian examples nicely correspond to Spanish, French, Italian, German and

sometimes Danish ones. Unfortunately (for learners) English grammar is quite

different in this aspect.

Words behaving like se² – fixed to the second place in the sentence – are called

second position clitics. Besides Slavic languages, they appear in a number of Iranian,

Native American, Native Australian languages, and some others. Some older

languages also had them, including Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Hittite.

Languages with second position clitics are typically quite flexible and have no articles

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