Weather & nature

Lesson opening

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

Weather and nature: Kakvo je vreme?

The weather is the safest small talk with anyone, and nature words come in handy on any trip out of town. Here: how to ask about the weather and describe it, read a forecast and give the temperature, the seasons and the climate, the landscape and places: the Danube and Fruška gora right on the doorstep of Novi Sad, the mountains, and the sea Serbia does not have. The anchor words of the lesson: vreme, kiša, sunčano, planina, reka.

Kakvo je vreme? Asking and answering

The key question is Kakvo je vreme? “What's the weather like?”. The answers are simple, and almost always one word with no subject: sunčano “sunny”, oblačno “cloudy”, vedro “clear”, vetrovito “windy”, toplo “warm”, hladno “cold”, vruće “hot”. English it is sunny is just sunčano je, with no “it”.

What the weather does: pada kiša, grmi, seva

Where English says it’s raining, Serbian makes the rain itself the subject: pada kiša is literally “rain falls”, and the wind “blows”. Thunder, lightning and a blizzard go further: one verb with no subject at all, not even an “it”; snow can do that too, sneži.

A few more common words for the sky and the air: promenljivo “changeable (sun and cloud)”, magla “fog”, rosa “dew”, mraz “frost”, led “ice”. Keep lightning and thunder apart: munja is the flash of lightning and grom is thunder, but when lightning strikes the ground, Serbian calls that grom too. The whole storm is oluja, and foul weather in general is nevreme, literally “un-weather”.

Cheat sheet

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

Weather and nature

The key question: Kakvo je vreme? “What's the weather like?”. The answer is usually one adverb, with no subject and no “it”.

What the weather is like

What the weather does

Rain and snow “fall” (pada), the wind “blows”; thunder, lightning, a blizzard: one verb, no subject, no “it”.

Sky and air

The forecast

The seasons: godišnja doba

Nature, animals, plants