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08 Weather and General Statements
Let’s take a look how you can express general statements in Croatian, such as it’s
cold in English. Such statements are often used for weather conditions.
In English, such sentences use ‘dummy’ it and the 3rd person present of the verb to
be (is), and that’s mostly shortened to it’s.
In Croatian, no pronouns can be used in such sentences, only the 3rd pers. present of
the Croatian version of the verb to be. It’s quite irregular:
biti (je² +) be
I have written a plus sign after je to indicate that other present tense forms cannot
be obtained by the usual rules – the forms of this verb must be learned, as in English.
(For example, the 1st person form isn’t "jem" but sam.)
There are useful words (called adverbs) that can be used with je² in such
expressions:
dosadno boring
hladno cold
kasno late
lijepo beautiful
mračno dark
oblačno cloudy
rano early
sunčano sunny
toplo warm
vedro clear
vruće hot
zabavno entertaining
There’s another important point: as you can probably see from the mark ², the word
je² behaves like se² and wants to be at the second place:
Hladno je. It’s cold.
Danas je hladno. It’s cold today.
Hladno je danas. (the same meaning)
Word order in Croatian is quite free – as you can see, words hladno and danas can
be exchanged – but it does not apply to some words like se² and je² that must go to
a predefined place in a sentence! (Therefore, I have introduced a special mark for
such words in 7 Verbs with Obligatory Objects.)
The adverb vedro is opposite of oblačno – it means the skies are clear.
There are a couple of useful words (adverbs of intensity) that can be placed before
adverbs above, and a prefix (not a separate word, but something that gets fused
with the word following it):
malo a bit
jako very (not formal) ®
vrlo very (more formal)
prilično considerably
dosta quite
stvarno really
pre- too