Direct & indirect speech
Lesson opening
This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
Direct and indirect speech: passing on someone else's words
There are two ways to pass on what someone said. You can quote it word for word, in quotation marks, and that is direct speech: On kaže: „Umoran sam.” Or you can weave it into your own sentence, and that is indirect, or reported, speech: On kaže da je umoran, “He says he’s tired.” The lesson “Indirect questions” showed you half of this machine: how to build a question into a sentence and, pleasantly, that Serbian does not shift the tenses when it does so. The lesson “Basic da-clauses” gave you the main tool, da + the present. Now for the whole picture: how to report statements, questions and orders, what changes and what stays, and how to punctuate it all.
The good news: Serbian reported speech is far simpler than English. English makes you move the tense one step back (“I'm tired” becomes “he said he was tired”); Serbian leaves the tense exactly where the speaker put it. The small catch: the pronouns and “pointing” words such as “here” and “today” still shift. So an English speaker has one habit to unlearn and another to keep.
Reported statements: da + the original tense
A reported statement is built with da + a verb with a personal ending: the same da-clause you already know. The verb inside takes whatever person the sense requires, and the tense stays the one used in the direct speech: Serbian never pushes it back.
Look at the tenses. In Rekao je da dolazi sutra the main verb is in the past (rekao je, “he said”), yet the verb after da is in the present (dolazi, “he is coming”), because the original line was in the present: „Dolazim sutra.”, “I’m coming tomorrow.” English obliges you to move it into the past, “he said he was coming”; Serbian leaves it as it is, so word for word the Serbian says “he said that he is coming tomorrow”. Every tense works this way: „Video sam ga.” “I saw him” → Rekao je da ga je video, and „Doći ću.” “I’ll come” → Rekao je da će doći, with no room for a “would”. Here your English instinct leads you astray: behind an English “was” or “would”, look for the tense the speaker actually used. The finer points come in “Tense in reported speech”.
Other verbs of speaking work the same way: odgovoriti “to answer”, dodati “to add”, objasniti “to explain”. Odgovorio je da ne zna. “He answered that he didn’t know.” Objasnila je da je voz kasnio. “She explained that the train had been late”: the line was in the past, and so is the report. And when you pass on something you have just heard, Serbian uses the present, as English does: Zvao je Marko. Kaže da kasni. “Marko rang. He says he’s running late.”
Not only verbs of speaking: mislim da, čujem da
The da clause introduces not only other people's words but also the content of a thought, a piece of knowledge or a perception, and a whole circle of verbs stands behind it: misliti “to think”, znati “to know”, čuti “to hear”, videti “to see”, nadati se “to hope”, bojati se “to be afraid”. All of them “report” what someone thinks, knows or fears, and they follow the same rules: the tense does not shift, the pronouns are recalculated. And where English happily drops its “that” (“I hope it'll be fine”), Serbian keeps its da.
Take Bojim se da neće stići: both the future and the negative stay exactly as they were in the thought, “they won’t make it”, and they stay so even when the fear itself is in the past: Bojao sam se da neće stići. “I was afraid they wouldn’t make it.”
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.
Direct and indirect speech
Direct speech: the exact words, in quotation marks or after a dash. Indirect speech: a clause after a verb of speaking. Key: the tense does not shift (Serbian has no English-style backshift), but pronouns and pointing words shift with the speaker.
Three types and their introducers
After da li or a question word, the order of a statement; with li: Pitao je hoće li doći. Question words: gde where, kada when, ko who, zašto why. The person of the verb after da shows who acts: „Dođi!” → Rekao mi je da dođem. (English “to come” has no person.)