EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 11 Colors, More Adjecves and Adverbs 66 / 600
ružan (ružn-) ugly
žedan (žedn-) thirsty
You see that two adjectives have meaning dark. The adjective mračan (mračn-)
means not well-lit, or gloomy (e.g. movie), while taman (tamn-) means something
painted in a dark paint, or having a dark color (e.g. hair).
The ‘case-base’ usually looks like nominative masculine form without the last a, but
sometimes there are other kinds of alternations:
bolestan (bolesn-) sick topao (topl-) warm
Warning. Some books give a rough rule that -a- is always lost, whenever anything
is added. This is true for most adjectives with more than one syllable – but not
for all. Also, it’s not the complete rule, as you can see from additional consonant
changes that sometimes apply.
Let’s put the adjectives above to use:
Ivana je žedna. Ivana is thirsty.
Ivan je žedan. Ivan is thirsty.
As I have already explained, adjectives usually get an -i before masculine nouns,
especially colloquially; but it doesn’t happen with all adjectives, e.g. dobar (dobr-)
good is almost always used without -i:
On je dobar prijatelj. He’s a good friend.
Compare this with:
On je stari prijatelj. He’s an old friend.
Other adjectives with a specific case-base are often used without -i before
masculine nouns as well.
The following adjectives are used a bit differently than in English:
debeo (debel-) thick
lagan light(weight), ‘easy’
kratak (kratk-) short
mastan (masn-) fat
nizak (nisk-) low
težak (tešk-) heavy, ‘hard’
Croatian uses težak heavy and lagan light in the literal sense:
Kamen je težak. The stone is heavy.
Kutija je lagana. The box is light.
Croatian also uses these two adverbs to indicate difficulty, in a quite different
fashion than in English (the word dosta is here just to practice adverbs a bit):
Knjiga je dosta teška. The book is quite ‘heavy’. (= hard)
Problem je lagan. The problem is ‘light’. (= easy)
Next, the adjective nizak (nisk-) low is used to specify low height of things in
Croatian: