Traps with adjectives
Five slips that turn a correct Serbian adjective into a wrong one: a masculine ending left on a feminine subject, a feminine accusative noun paired with a masculine adjective, a fleeting а kept instead of dropped, a masculine ending forced onto an inanimate accusative noun that needs none, and a neuter ending left on a feminine noun. Ten minutes of building the right version and catching each mistake before it happens - the last of the series, right before the unit's own second words lesson.
The part of the grammar page this lesson drills — read it here, then use it.
Gender and number endings
A regular adjective like нов (new) takes no ending for masculine, -а for feminine and -о for neuter, with -и/-е/-а in the plural in that same order - see the table below.
The adjective normally comes directly before the noun it describes: добра сестра (a good sister), never сестра добра.
The fleeting a pattern
A large group of adjectives end in a consonant cluster that needs a helper vowel in the masculine, but lose it as soon as any other ending is added: добар (good) → добра, добро, добри, добре, добра - the masculine is the odd one out, and every other form is built from the shorter stem добр-.
This is reliable enough to expect by default in adjectives ending in -ан in the masculine: гладан (hungry) → гладна, гладно; жедан (thirsty) → жедна, жедно. Adjectives ending in -ак or -ар are less predictable - many keep the vowel as part of the root instead: јак (strong) → јака, not јка; стар (old) → стара, not стра.
Agreement with case
An adjective agrees not only in gender and number but also in case: when a feminine noun takes the accusative -у ending from cases-introduction-a1, its adjective takes -у too - добра сестра (nominative) → добру сестру (accusative, direct object).
Masculine inanimate nouns keep their nominative-shaped accusative; neuter nouns always do, regardless of animacy - and so does the adjective in front of either: нов сто stays нов сто whether it is subject or object.
| Gender | Singular | Plural |
|---|---|---|
| muški | nov | novi |
| ženski | nova | nove |
| srednji | novo | nova |