This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
Adjective agreement: dobar, dobra, dobro
You can now tell the gender of a noun, and this is where that skill pays off. A Serbian adjective never stands on its own: it has to agree with its noun, taking on the noun's gender, number and case. English "good" never changes: a good man, a good woman, good wine, good people. Serbian "good" changes shape three times in the singular alone: dobar hleb ("good bread"), dobra kafa ("good coffee"), dobro vino ("good wine"). Without it you cannot say "tasty coffee", "a big city" or "my new flat"; with it you can describe the world, and that is half of real conversation.
If you have met French, Spanish or German, the idea is familiar (bon vin but bonne soupe; vino bueno but casa buena). If not, there is good news: the singular endings are the very ones you saw on nouns in “Grammatical gender”. You have even met a few of these forms already, dobar hleb in “Grammatical gender” and dobri gradovi in “Plural formation”. We will cover the basics: the three genders in the singular, the adjective before a noun and after “is”, the plural, and the fleeting a you know from muškarac → muškarci, which makes dobar lose a letter in its other forms.
Three genders in the singular
Here is how “good” and other adjectives take on the three genders. Watch the adjective's ending echo the gender of the noun:
The feminine and the neuter simply add an ending to the masculine: nov → nova, novo; star → stara, staro. Now let's put each adjective together with a noun of the right gender:
To choose the ending, all you need is the gender of the noun, and as you remember, the last letter of the noun almost always shows it. First find the gender, then dress the adjective in the matching ending: voda (“water”) is feminine → hladna voda (“cold water”), not “hladan voda”. It is the gender that decides, not the letter: tata (“dad”) is masculine though it ends in -a, so dobar tata (“a good dad”); noć (“night”) is feminine though it ends in a consonant, so hladna noć (“a cold night”).
Before the noun and after “is”
Compare the same adjectives sitting right before their noun and coming after je, “is”, apart from it:
The ending is the same in both columns: it is set by the gender of the noun, not by the position. The je (“is”) in the right-hand column is a form of the verb biti (“to be”). Serbian needs it just as English needs “is”: Kafa je dobra, never “Kafa dobra”. Notice, too, that there is no word for “the”: kafa is “coffee”, “the coffee” or “a coffee” as the context requires. The whole verb biti is covered in the lesson “biti in the present”.
Cheat sheet
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Adjective agreement: dobar, dobra, dobro
An adjective (pridev) agrees with its noun in gender, number and case. Its singular endings are the nouns’ own: no ending in the masculine, -a in the feminine, -o in the neuter.