This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
Describing things: what it's like, what it's made of, what it looks like
You can already name a thing and make an adjective agree with it; that was the lesson “Adjective agreement”. Now let's make it a skill: describing an object so that the shop assistant knows exactly which bag you want. A description rests on three questions: what is it like? (size, shape, colour, quality), what is it made of? and what does it look like? We’ll take them one by one, then bring them together in a conversation at the counter.
Size and shape
The most common pairs of opposites are about size. Learn them as pairs: that is how they stick and how they come back when you speak.
In speech it all looks simple: Tražim manju torbu. “I’m looking for a smaller bag.” (manju “smaller”; more on comparing below.) Sto je previše dugačak. “The table is too long.” (dugačak means the same as dug, it is just a longer word; both are common.) Colours work the same way; the basic ones: crven (red), plav (blue), zelen (green), žut (yellow), crn (black), beo (white), smeđ (brown; in speech people often say braon, which never changes its ending). They all agree with the object just as velik does.
Serbian gives the material with the preposition od, literally “from”, followed by the genitive case (a case is a form of the noun; here it mostly means a new ending, -a or -e). English says “made of wood” or “made from wood”; Serbian always takes the “from” road: od drveta “(made) of wood”, od plastike “(made) of plastic”. One look at the table shows the pattern:
In a full sentence: Ova stolica je od drveta, a ne od plastike. “This chair is made of wood, not plastic.” You know od with the genitive from the lesson “Spatial genitive prepositions” (od kuće “from home”); for material the form is the same. As in English, the material can also be an adjective: drvena kuća “a wooden house”, staklena čaša “a glass tumbler”, kožna torba “a leather bag”, metalna kutija “a metal box”. Note that Serbian needs a real adjective here: English can put a noun in front of a noun (“leather bag”), Serbian cannot, so not “koža torba”. The lesson “Adjective-forming suffixes” covers these words in full; to describe a thing, od is enough. With several adjectives the order is as in English, the material right next to the noun: velika crna kožna torba “a big black leather bag”.
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.
Describing things
A description rests on three questions: what is it like?, what is it made of?, what does it look like? The adjective agrees with the noun in gender, number and case: velika torba “a big bag”, veliki sto “a big table”, veliko ogledalo “a big mirror”. The question too: Kakav je sto?Kakva je torba?Kakvo je ogledalo?