This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
Fractions, multiplicatives and numeral nouns
The number system is almost complete: you name numbers, put the right case after them (dva grada versus pet gradova), count in order (peti sprat “the fifth floor”) and count people (troje dece, dvojica kolega). One storey is left, the one you need to buy half a kilo of cheese, read a discount tag or understand a school mark. All four families of words in this lesson grew out of numbers, and nearly all of them are real nouns: they decline, and they take the genitive (the “of” case) after them, exactly like dvojica in the previous lesson.
Fractions: an ordinal number turned into a noun
Take the ordinal number and add -ina, much as English turns “third” into “a third”; the fraction declines like žena “woman”.
The stem shortens wherever it shortens in the ordinal: sedam → sedmi → sedmina. The hundredth breaks the pattern: in sport it is stotinka (stotinka sekunde “a hundredth of a second”), and in everyday life people simply say procenat “per cent”.
A fraction is read like any count: 1/3 is jedna trećina (or just trećina), “one third”. It is feminine, so the number in front is feminine too: jedna, dve, never dva. That number then chooses the form of the fraction, as it would for any noun:
Dve trećine glasova su bile protiv.Two thirds of the votes were against.
The verb agrees with the fraction, not with the thing counted. Polovina and trećina are feminine singular nouns, so the verb is feminine singular, even where English, thinking of the pupils, switches to a plural (“half of the pupils were”):
Polovina učenika je stigla na vreme.Half of the pupils arrived on time.
After dve trećine the verb is plural (su bile above). The indeclinable pola shows no gender, so the verb after it is neuter singular, as after pet:
Pola grada je ostalo bez struje.Half the town was left without power.
pola and polovina: two halves for different jobs
Pola is short and indeclinable: it stays pola in every case, and the noun after it goes into the genitive. Polovina is a full feminine noun (it declines like žena), more formal and precise; you need it whenever the half has an adjective such as prva “first” or druga “second”.
Presekao je lubenicu napola.He cut the watermelon in half.
You know i po “and a half” and the quarter četvrt from the lesson “Measurements, dimensions & units”: after i po the noun obeys the last whole number (dva i po sata, pet i po sati). As in English “an hour and a half”, the unit itself comes first: sat i po, hiljadu i po “one and a half thousand, fifteen hundred”; the bare number 1.5 is jedan i po. A quarter of an hour is četvrt sata, and three quarters of an hour is tri četvrt sata (as good as tri četvrtine sata); the same word četvrt also means “quarter, district”, just like the Latin Quarter of Paris: stambena četvrt “a residential quarter”. And on the clock pola counts towards the coming hour, as German halb sechs does: pola šest is 5:30 (British “half six” is the opposite, 6:30), and u pola sedam is “at half past six”.
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.
Fractions, multiplicatives and numeral nouns
Almost everything here is a noun: it declines and takes the genitive.