Measurements, dimensions & units

Lesson opening

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

Measurements, dimensions and units: the language of the market, the kitchen and the tape measure

Asking what a kilo of tomatoes costs, saying that the centre is five kilometres away, that you are one metre eighty, that it is minus ten outside: you need this every single day. The good news: you already have all the grammar it takes. Measuring is counting, and you have just worked through counting: jedan metar, dva metra (the small plural, from “Agreement with 2–4”), pet metara (the genitive plural, from “Agreement with 5 and up”).

So this lesson brings no new grammar, only its use in real life: the names of the units, “half a kilo” and “a quarter”, shopping at the pijaca (the open-air market), giving your height and weight in one short phrase, degrees, and the size of a flat.

Units: metar, kilogram, litar, stepen

The basic units are international, so you will recognise them at a glance: Serbia uses the metric system and Celsius. Nearly all of them are masculine (jedan metar, jedan litar), and only the ending changes, by the counting rules:

A centimetre is centimetar or santimetar; both forms are in use. In everyday speech kilogram is nearly always shortened, just as English says “a kilo”. The short form is kilo, a neuter noun (jedno kilo, dva kila, pet kila), or kila, a feminine one (jedna kila, dve kile). Both are colloquial, and both are common. That feminine kila is where the everyday pola kile and četvrt kile come from; from kilo it would be pola kila. Drinks in a café and liquids in recipes come in decilitres, called deci (from decilitar, 0.1 litre): dva deci vina (200 ml of wine), tri deci soka (300 ml of juice). The word never changes, and you will hear both dva and dve before it. The goods themselves go into the genitive after the measure, as in čaša vode, “a glass of water” (“Partitive & quantity”): kilo jabuka (a kilo of apples), pola litra mleka (half a litre of milk), sto grama sira (a hundred grams of cheese), Kupi mi kilo brašna i litar ulja (buy me a kilo of flour and a litre of oil).

Cheat sheet

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

Measurements, dimensions and units

No new grammar: a unit is an ordinary counted noun, nearly always masculine. 1 → singular, 2–4 → small plural, 5+ → genitive plural. The goods after a measure: genitive too. One question for every measure: koliko.

Units and counting

Also gram (pet grama), centimetar / santimetar. Drinks: deci (decilitre, never changes): dva deci vina, tri deci soka. Goods after a measure: genitive (kilo paradajza, litar mleka, sto grama sira, kilo jabuka).

Halves and quarters

pola (half) always + genitive (pola kile from feminine kila; from kilo, pola kila); četvrt = a quarter; unit + i po = “and a half”, unit singular. Number + i po: the unit follows the number (dva i po sata, dve i po godine, pet i po godina). 2,5 = dva zarez pet.

Dimensions: adjective + measure

No noun for “height”: the adjective comes first, agreeing with the thing; the measure follows in the accusative. dugačak = dug. Weight: adjective or the verb težiti.

Koliko si visok? (to a woman visoka) — Visok sam metar i osamdeset. Koliko je težak? / Koliko teži? Koliko je dugačak sto? — Dugačak je metar i po.

Temperature, distance, area, the market