Traps with gender
Four slips that turn a correctly gendered Serbian sentence into a wrong one: a feminine noun given the masculine adjective ending, a masculine noun given the feminine ending, the -a exception noun тата pulled toward feminine agreement by its ending, and a neuter noun given the feminine ending. 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 walk through a new home.
The part of the grammar page this lesson drills — read it here, then use it.
Guessing gender from the ending
For most nouns, the nominative-singular ending predicts the gender: a noun ending in a consonant is normally masculine (сто, брат, град); a noun ending in -а is normally feminine (жена, кућа, школа); a noun ending in -о or -е is normally neuter (село, поље, име).
This ending-based rule is a strong first guess for any new noun - trust it while learning the smaller set of exceptions below.
Gender drives agreement
Adjectives change ending to match the noun's gender - велик (big) for masculine, велика for feminine, велико for neuter - the same pattern reappears with past-tense verbs in a later lesson.
Serbian also uses он/она/оно for inanimate objects, not just people - a table is он, a house is она, a village is оно.
The two exception classes
A closed set of nouns for male people ends in -a but stays grammatically masculine: тата (dad), деда (grandpa), судија (judge) - they decline like feminine -a nouns but take masculine agreement: мој тата, not моја тата.
A second set of feminine nouns ends in a consonant instead of -а - most productively, virtually every abstract noun in -ост (младост, радост, могућност), plus a handful of concrete nouns like ноћ, реч, крв. Worth memorising as a class, since the consonant ending alone would otherwise suggest masculine.
| Ending | Gender | Example |
|---|---|---|
| suglasnik | muški | sto |
| -a | ženski | žena |
| -o | srednji | selo |
| -e | srednji | polje |
| suglasnik (izuzetak) | ženski | noć |
| -a (izuzetak, muška osoba) | muški | tata |