Words that go together

Lesson opening

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

Words that go together: the pairs Serbian uses by habit

Your grammar is flawless, every word is from the dictionary, and yet your listener winces slightly. You said “napravio sam odluku”, thinking “I made a decision”. You will be understood, but a Serb would not put it that way: in Serbian a decision is brought, doneti odluku. There is no logic to it, only habit: which word goes with which. Such habitual pairs are called collocations, and they trip up even learners who have mastered everything else.

Light verbs: what goes with what

Read the table by rows: the verb on the left goes with every noun on the right. Learn it, and much of business and newspaper Serbian becomes easy to read.

The verb keeps both aspects inside the pair: doneti odluku “to make a decision”, donositi odluke “to make decisions”; podneti zahtev, podnositi zahteve (the lesson “Aspect pair formation”). When the action repeats, the noun often goes plural, as in these examples.

Forks in the road: one noun, different verbs

The trickiest pairs are those where one noun takes different verbs and the choice changes the meaning, not just the style. Learn them together, like opposites. You have met some of them in the lessons “Work & study” (exams) and “Professional & business” (leaving a job).

Three more ready-made phrases turn up in business Serbian daily: uzeti u obzir “to take into account”, staviti do znanja (or dati do znanja) “to make it clear, to let someone know”, staviti tačku na nešto “to put an end to something” (literally, to put a full stop to it).

Adjective plus noun

The second big class: an adjective that “belongs” to one particular noun. English chooses differently, so a literal translation stands out.

Cheat sheet

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Words that go together

A collocation is a pair fixed by custom: no synonym swaps (jaka kafa, not “snažna kafa”). With a light verb the noun carries the sense: doneti odluku = odlučiti; office pairs (izvršiti proveru) lift the register.

Light verbs

Forks

Adjective plus noun

With preposition and case