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02 Simplest Sentences
The simplest sentences are of type Ana is sleeping or Ivan is running. Such sentences
are in the present tense and in the 3rd person.
To make them in Croatian, you need the 3rd person present tense form or the verb
(I’ll call it pres-3 for short).
(Verbs are words that mean an action or state, like listen, wait, eat, sit.)
Verbs are normally listed in Croatian dictionaries in the so-called infinitive form (inf
for short). For most verbs, you just need to remove the ending -ti and you have the
form you need now. For instance, let’s take these verbs right from a dictionary:
čitati read
kuhati cook ®
pjevati sing ®
raditi work
plivati swim
spavati sleep
učiti learn, study
voziti drive
It’s very easy to make simple sentences like the following:
Ana čita. Ana is reading.
Marko kuha. Marko is cooking.
Ivana spava. Ivana is sleeping.
Goran uči. Goran is studying.
Here one Croatian word (e.g. čita) really corresponds to two English words (e.g. is
reading). Croatian present tense is just one word.
If you are new to learning languages, a warning: in very few instances you can
just translate from English word-for-word and get a meaningful sentence in
another language. For example, these two sentences in English have three words
each and differ in only one word:
I am cooking.
I like cooking.
However, the matching sentences in Croatian have 1 word and 2 words
respectively – and no words in common. Croatian, generally, uses less words than
English in an average sentence.
If you’re now asking why the verb čitati has the first vowel underlined, if the default
stress is on the first syllable anyway (e.g. voziti is stressed on the first syllable
without any special mark), be patient: you will get the answer in the following
chapters.
There are few verbs where you need to change the last vowel in the present tense,
from a to i. One of them is:
trčati run → trči