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Guided lesson A1 8 activities

Common preposition slips

Ten minutes on the topic's own five common mistakes: location left in the motion/accusative form, motion left in the location form, из left with no genitive ending at all, с used before a word starting with с instead of са, and о (about) left with the bare nominative instead of its own ending. Build sentences around a hotel and a cinema, catching each slip in turn, before the unit's own listening and reading put the whole topic to work.

The rule
Osnovni predlozi

The part of the grammar page this lesson drills — read it here, then use it.

У and на - location versus motion

Both у (in/at) and на (on/at) have two different endings depending on the question they answer. For location (где? - where?), masculine and neuter nouns take a fixed ending, the same pattern days-months-a1 used for months: у Београду (in Belgrade), на столу (on the table). Feminine nouns take instead: кућа → у кући (at home).

For motion toward a destination (куда? - to where?), the noun instead takes the accusative pattern from cases-introduction-a1: masculine and neuter nouns stay unchanged, feminine nouns become . Идем у Београд. (I'm going to Belgrade) leaves Београд unchanged; Идем на плажу. (I'm going to the beach) changes плажа to плажу.

Из, од, до - the from family

Из (out of/from), од (from/since) and до (to/until) all take the same genitive-shaped ending numbers-a1 already introduced as the 5+ count form: masculine/neuter стостола-type ending, feminine .

Долазим из Београда. (I'm coming from Belgrade), Идем од куће до школе. (I'm going from home to school) - Београда, куће and школе are all genitive-shaped, not nominative.

Special cases

Са (with) takes yet another ending, -ом, on the noun that follows: путујем са сестром (I'm traveling with my sister). The short variant с is used before most words, but са replaces it before words starting with с/з/ш/ж/ц/ч (to avoid an awkward consonant cluster) and always before the pronoun мном (me): са мном, never с мном.

За, in the sense of for - direction or purpose - reuses the accusative pattern from the motion section above; за has other senses with a different case pattern, covered in a later lesson. О (about) reuses the same location endings as у - for masculine/neuter, for feminine nouns: причамо о Београду (we're talking about Belgrade) looks exactly like живим у Београду (I live in Belgrade).

Read the whole rule
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