Home & daily life

Lesson opening

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

Home and daily life

A move starts with a roof over your head. Before you get to the cases, you need to rent a flat, tell the kitchen from the storeroom, make sense of the heating bill and the contract. This lesson is a practical vocabulary of the home: rooms and things, a simple account of your day and, most useful for a newcomer, how people find a place to live, what kirija and depozit are, and where the bills come from.

The grammar comes in ready-made blocks: the reflexive se of the routine verbs and the cases after prepositions get lessons of their own. Here the point is to say where you live and what you need without stumbling.

Stan or kuća: where do you live?

Three key words for housing. Kuća is a house (a building of its own), stan is a flat (an apartment), zgrada is the building, a block of flats. But “at home” is always kod kuće, even if you live in a flat, and “I’m going home” is idem kući. And dom is “home” in the warm sense: the hearth, the place you belong. The greeting at the door, Dobro došli! (“Welcome!”), has nothing to do with it: literally it is “well come”, from doći, “to come”. A floor or storey is sprat, and the ground floor is prizemlje.

Floors are counted the British way, from the prizemlje up: prvi sprat is the first floor above the ground floor (na prvom spratu, “on the first floor”, is an American’s second floor), and na trećem spratu is the third floor in London, the fourth in New York.

Rooms

“Room” is soba, and flats are described by how many rooms they have: a two-room flat is a dvosoban stan, a one-room flat jednosoban, and a studio flat is a garsonjera. The living room counts, so a dvosoban stan is typically a living room plus a bedroom. Here is the standard set:

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.

Home and daily life

Three words for “home”: kuća is a house (the building), stan a flat, dom home as the hearth (Dobro došli! is unrelated: literally “well come”, from doći). The building is zgrada, a floor sprat, the ground floor prizemlje; prvi sprat is the British first floor. “I’m at home” is the idiom kod kuće, even in a flat; “I’m going home” is Idem kući.

Rooms and furniture

Room: soba; one-room flat jednosoban stan, two-room dvosoban (the living room counts), a studio garsonjera. Furniture: nameštaj.

A separate toilet is toalet or WC (said "veh-tseh").

My day

Renting a flat

Bills and utilities

A bill: račun; to pay a bill: platiti račun. Utilities as a whole: režije: struja (electricity), voda (water), grejanje (heating), smeće (rubbish collection), internet. Heating, water and rubbish come on one slip, the objedinjena naplata; struja separately, from EPS; the internet to the provider.