This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
The possessive genitive: whose, and of what
The best-known job of the genitive is to say whose something is and what it is part of. English does this in two ways: with 's (my brother's book) or with of (the centre of the town, the end of the world). Serbian uses neither. It simply puts the owner in the genitive and sets it after the thing owned: knjiga brata, centar grada, kraj sveta. No preposition, no apostrophe: the case ending does all the work.
This lesson is about the genitive that hangs on another noun: how to build possession out of words, how to make the owner’s own describing words agree with it (auto moga brata, my brother’s car), how the genitive describes a person (čovek dobre volje, a man of good will), how surnames change, and when Serbian prefers a possessive adjective to the genitive. You already know the forms (-a / -e / -i in the singular, three endings in the plural, from “Genitive singular forms” and “Genitive plural”); here you learn to use them.
Word order: the owner comes second
The big difference from English is the order. English 's puts the owner first: my brother's car. Serbian does the opposite: first the thing, then the owner in the genitive. If you want an English guide, think of the of phrase with the word of taken out: the car (of) my brother.
The order is fixed. knjiga brata is “the brother's book”; turn it round to “brata knjiga” and a Serbian ear hears either a poetic inversion or a mistake. So the first word says what, the second says whose. English gives you a choice between the brother's book and the book of the brother; with the genitive, Serbian in practice gives you only the second order.
Agreement: the owner's describing words go into the genitive
If the owner has describing words of its own (my, this, older), they go into the genitive too, agreeing with it. The result is a chain of matching endings:
Notice the ending -oga / -og on pronouns and adjectives of the masculine and neuter: moga, ovoga, starijeg. It is the same genitive, only in its adjective version, and the long and short forms are both correct: auto moga brata and auto mog brata. This is the part that is new for an English speaker: English my, this, older never change, whereas in Serbian every word of the owner phrase carries the case. If you know some German, you have seen the pattern: das Auto meines Bruders, where both meines and Bruders are marked. The full adjective declension is in the lesson “Adjective declension”; for now it is enough to see that the whole chain takes the same case.
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.
The possessive genitive: whose, and of what
The owner goes into the genitive and comes after the thing owned, with no preposition and no 's: knjiga brata, centar grada. Questions: čiji? (whose?), čega? (of what?).
Word order: thing + owner
Fixed order: first what, then whose. Think “English of phrase minus of”.
Agreement: the owner's describing words are genitive too