This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
The genitive in dates and time: petnaestog marta, jednog dana, imam dvadeset godina
You can already say numbers and ordinals: petnaesti “fifteenth”, prvi “first”, dvadeset peti “twenty-fifth”. You also know that “at three o'clock” is u tri sata, with u and the accusative, and that “last week” is a genitive with no preposition at all, prošle nedelje. Now we put these bricks together into the things you say most often and get wrong most easily: dates, years, age and half hours. The main character is the genitive case.
Why are they tricky? Because English does the “when” work with little words: on the fifteenth of March, in 1990, one day, at half past two. Serbian drops the preposition and puts the ending on the words themselves: petnaestog marta is “on the fifteenth of March”, all in two words (you met it in the lesson “Ordinal numbers”). On top of that come three Serbian peculiarities: how a year is named, how age is built (imam dvadeset godina, literally “I have twenty years”), and why pola tri means 2:30 and not 3:30.
A date: the ordinal and the month in the genitive
A Serbian date is two words in the genitive: the ordinal number of the day and the name of the month. “On the fifteenth of March” = petnaestog marta. Both words carry the genitive: petnaesti → petnaestog (an ordinal declines like an adjective), mart → marta. English “the fifteenth of March” is a good hook: that “of” is the genitive’s meaning, spread in Serbian over both words, with no “on”. Why the genitive? A date answers “when?”, and Serbian answers many “when?” questions with the genitive and no preposition, as in prošle godine “last year”. The month sets the gender: all twelve months, from januar to decembar, are masculine, so the ordinal in a date is always masculine: petnaestog, prvog, petog.
Now the fork in the road that learners stumble on. Compare two answers about a date (datum “date”). Koji je danas datum? “What’s the date today?” — Danas je petnaesti mart “Today is the fifteenth of March”: here the date is the subject of “is”, so it stands in the nominative, the dictionary form, and the ordinal agrees with the month. Kada se vidimo? “When are we meeting?” — Petnaestog marta “On the fifteenth of March”: here the date answers “when?”, so it goes into the genitive. English uses “the fifteenth” for both and only adds “on” for the second; Serbian changes the endings instead.
A range of dates is built on the genitive too, with the familiar pair od … do … “from … to …”: od prvog do petog maja “from the first to the fifth of May”, od petnaestog juna “from the fifteenth of June”, do petog maja “until the fifth of May”. Both od and do take the genitive anyway, so the date inside a range keeps the same form.
A year: naming 2026
The year is a little harder, but the rule is clear. Where English names a year with a plain number (“in 2026”), Serbian calls it “the two thousand twenty-sixth year”, and in that big number only the last word becomes an ordinal and goes into the genitive; everything before it stays a cardinal number. “In 2026” = dve hiljade dvadeset šeste godine: dve hiljade dvadeset “two thousand twenty” (cardinals) + šeste “sixth” (an ordinal, genitive) + godine “of the year” (genitive). The word godina “year” is feminine, so the ordinal is feminine too: šeste, devedesete.
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.
The genitive in dates and time
The genitive answers “when?” with no preposition: a date, a year, “this / last / one day”. It also turns up in age (godina) and in pola sata.