Adjective agreement in the accusative singular

You already do two things separately. You put a direct object in the accusative: Kupujem kaput, Vidim psa, Pijem kafu. And you make an adjective agree with its noun in the nominative: crven kaput, crna kafa, belo vino. This lesson puts the two together. When a noun is a direct object, the adjective in front of it goes into the accusative with it — and the adjective has its own endings, which are not the noun's.

The four endings

Two of the four rows cost nothing: with an inanimate masculine noun and with a neuter noun, the adjective as a direct object looks exactly like the nominative — the same thing you already know about those nouns themselves. The work is in the other two rows.

Feminine: -u

A feminine noun in -a changes to -u as a direct object (haljina → haljinu), and its adjective does the same: plava → plavu, nova → novu, stara → staru. The two -u endings sit side by side, which makes this the easiest row to hear: plavu haljinu, crnu kafu, staru stolicu.

Masculine and alive: -og

This is the row to memorise. You know from A1 that an animate masculine noun — a person or an animal — takes its genitive form as a direct object: pas → psa, lekar → lekara, čovek → čoveka. The adjective in front of it takes -og: crnog psa, dobrog lekara, starog čoveka. The ending is the same whatever the noun itself ends in: komšija is masculine, so it is novog komšiju.

After a soft consonant — č, ć, đ, š, ž, j — the ending is -eg rather than -og: svež → svežeg, loš → lošeg, vruć → vrućeg.

Neuter: -o or -e

A neuter noun does not change as a direct object, and neither does its adjective: belo vino stays belo vino, staro ogledalo stays staro ogledalo. The adjective ends in -o, or in -e after a soft consonant: sveže mleko, loše vreme.

Adjectives that lose a vowel

Some adjectives have an -a- in the masculine nominative that disappears as soon as an ending is added — you met this in the nominative already (dobar, dobra, dobro). The accusative endings go on the same short stem. Two others, topao and beo, end in -o that turns back into -l before an ending (topla, bela).

• dobar → dobrog, dobru, dobro
• hladan → hladnog, hladnu, hladno
• sladak → slatkog, slatku, slatko
• kratak → kratkog, kratku, kratko
• topao → toplog, toplu, toplo
• beo → belog, belu, belo

Possessives go the same way

moj, tvoj, naš, vaš, njegov, njen and njihov take these same endings in front of a direct object: mog brata (also mojeg brata), tvoju sestru, naše dete, njegov auto, njenu torbu. Nothing new to learn — the same four rows.

The animate -og belongs to masculine nouns only. A feminine person or animal takes plain -u (vidim staru ženu, imam crnu mačku), and a neuter one keeps -o (volim malo dete). An inanimate masculine noun takes nothing at all: Kupujem crven kaput, never crvenog kaput. Ask two questions — is the noun masculine, and is it alive? Only when both answers are yes do you reach for -og.

Only the object changes. An adjective after je or su describing the subject stays in the nominative: Kaput je crn. Haljina je plava. The accusative endings appear when the adjective and its noun are together the thing being bought, seen, wanted or worn: Tražim crn kaput. Hoću plavu haljinu.