EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 10 Gender 58 / 600
name for a gender that’s neither male nor female.)
There are exceptions – e.g. names Luka and Marko look as if feminine and neuter;
in fact, both are masculine, and frequent male names. All personal names (for
people and animals) are either masculine or feminine (names ending in -o are
typically masculine).
Another exception – the noun tata – is actually masculine, it means Dad.
It’s actually only important to remember (and indicate) gender for exceptional
nouns, and there are only 50-100 such nouns used in everyday life. For example:
most bridge — masculine as expected, no need to indicate gender
kost f bone — feminine, contrary to the common rules, so we must indicate its
gender (f)
The biggest group of nouns that have unexpected gender are feminine nouns not
ending in -a. Almost all of them end in a consonant. Common ones are:
bol f pain ®
bolest f disease
jesen f fall, autumn
kost f bone
krv f blood
ljubav f love
noć f night
obitelj f (close) family ®
ponoć f midnight
riječ f word
sol f salt ®
večer f evening ®
To help you with nouns that have unexpected gender, they will be underlined with
a bluish line, and their gender will be printed on the right margin. (If more that one
hint appears on the right margin, they will be separated with a vertical line.) For
example:
Vidim krv. I see blood.
Vozim auto. I’m driving a car.
Gender of words for people normally matches their natural sex (there are some
exceptions, though). Consequently, many terms represented by only one noun in
English have two nouns in Croatian: one for male and one for female (the same
holds in Romance languages like French, Italian or Spanish):
male female
English friend
French ami amie
Spanish amigo amiga
Croatian prijatelj prijateljica
In Croatian, main words that must adapt to noun gender are adjectives – words that
indicate properties like big, red. In Croatian, adjectives also include words like my
f
m