Cardinals 1–10

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

Cardinals 1–10: numbers that make the noun change

You may already count to ten in Serbian from the lesson “Numbers, time & days”: jedan, dva, tri, pet. But knowing the words and counting things correctly are two different skills. In English a number is a label you put in front of a noun, and the noun only has to know whether it is one or more: one city, two cities, five cities. In Serbian the small numbers give orders to the noun and change its form, and the most demanding of them, jedan, behaves like an adjective, agreeing with its noun in gender, number and case.

So this lesson is about agreement, which the survival lesson on numbers left out. There you learned the forms after numbers as ready-made phrases (dva grada, pet gradova); here you will see how they work: why jedan is “the number that refuses to be a number”, why two has two faces (dva and dve), where the special noun form after 2–4 comes from, and why from five onwards the number suddenly wants the genitive case. Prices, ages and dates all stand on it.

First, the words, with a rough English guide to the sound. Every one of them is stressed on the first syllable, and every vowel is pure, as in Spanish or Italian; the r of tri is rolled.

Watch 9 and 10: devet and deset differ by one letter, so give the v and the s their full weight, especially on the phone.

jedan: the number that refuses to be a number

In Serbian, "one" is less a number than an adjective meaning "one". It has to agree with its noun in gender, and like any adjective it has three gender forms:

These are the endings you know from "Adjective agreement": no ending for the masculine (jedan), -a for the feminine, -o for the neuter. English one never changes; Serbian jedan changes with every noun, and it takes the gender of the Serbian noun: jedno dete, because dete (“child”) is neuter. After it the noun stays singular, in whatever case the sentence needs: jedan grad (nominative, the subject form), vidim jedan grad (“I see one city”: accusative, and an inanimate masculine noun does not change there), but vidim jednog prijatelja (“I see one friend”: a living being, as in “Accusative forms”), u jednom gradu (“in one city”: the locative, which gets its own lesson later). The number imposes nothing on the noun beyond the usual; it simply walks beside it, like an adjective.

Cheat sheet

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Cardinals 1–10

A number decides the form of the noun after it. Only jedan truly declines; dva/dve and oba/obe also show gender; tri to deset never change.

Counting 0–10

jedan: an adjective in disguise

Three steps of agreement

Compounds: the last word is in charge