Serbian 301 — a family, a summer, and every way there is to get to the coast.
A short story with the verbs taken out. Each gap gives you the infinitive in brackets — you supply the present tense, in the right person. Read the whole paragraph before you start filling: the subject changes from we to the children and back again.
The first paragraph hides a second lesson. When you say what you travel by, Serbian uses the instrumental with no preposition at all:
| Nominativ | Čime putuješ? |
|---|---|
| kola | kolima |
| auto | autom |
| autobus | autobusom |
| avion | avionom |
No sa, no u — just the ending. Sa would mean you're travelling in the company of a bus, which is a different holiday.
And one verb that turns the sentence inside out: sviđati se. The thing that pleases is the subject; the person who likes it goes into the dative — meni i mom suprugu se sviđa. Literally: "to me and my husband, it is pleasing."
Svake godine (putovati) na (more) sa svojom porodicom. U zavisnosti od odredišta, idemo (kola) ili (autobus), a ponekad i (avion).
Deca najviše (voleti) da putuju (auto) zato što (moći) da se zaustavimo kada zažele. Mogu da jedu slatkiše sve vreme, (moći) slobodno da pevaju i da se svađaju.
Meni i mom suprugu se najviše (sviđati se) kada (ići) avionom, pošto su deca tada mirna, a i put ne (trajati) dugo.
SR (lat): Pazi ko je subjekat — menja se iz rečenice u rečenicu. Može latinicom ili ćirilicom; dijakritici su opcioni.
СР (ћир): Пази ко је субјекат — мења се из реченице у реченицу. Може латиницом или ћирилицом; дијакритици су опциони.
EN: Watch who the subject is — it shifts from sentence to sentence. Latin or Cyrillic, diacritics optional.
Next level, and it opens with the word English simply doesn't have: svoj.
SVOJ u Genitivu →