Adjective agreement in the genitive singular

You already put nouns into the genitive all the time: after od, iz, kod, do and bez, to say whose something is (ključ od stana — the key to the flat), and after ima and nema to say what a place has or has not got (nema stola — there is no table). Until now the noun in those phrases stood alone. This lesson puts an adjective in front of it — the key to the NEW flat, there is no BIG table — and the adjective has to change its ending together with the noun.

The endings

Two endings cover all three genders. A feminine noun takes an adjective in -e; a masculine or a neuter noun takes an adjective in -og. The adjective is doing the same job as the noun ending: velikog stola and velike kuće are both signalled twice, once on each word.

Masculine and neuter go together. Notice that only the nominative and accusative tell masculine and neuter adjectives apart (veliki sto against veliko ogledalo). In the genitive — and in every other case you will meet from here on — the two genders take exactly the same adjective ending. So whenever you learn a new oblique ending for masculine, you have already learned it for neuter as well.

The masculine and neuter ending has a longer variant, -oga (velikoga stola), which you will see in writing. Use the short -og yourself; both are correct.

Soft stems take -eg. After a soft consonant (č, ć, đ, š, ž, j, lj, nj) the ending -og becomes -eg: svež vazduh (fresh air) → nema svežeg vazduha; loš krevet → bez lošeg kreveta. The feminine -e is unaffected: sveže vode. You met the same swap in the accusative of animate masculine nouns.

Where you will use it

• Whose or of what: ključ od novog stana (the key to the new flat), prozor male sobe (the window of the small room), sto od tamnog drveta (a table of dark wood), boja dnevne sobe (the colour of the living room).
• What there is not: nema velikog ogledala (there is no big mirror), nema tople vode (there is no hot water). The thing that is missing stands in the genitive, adjective and all.
• After prepositions of place: besides od, iz, kod, do, bez, the words for next to, in front of, behind, under and above also take the genitive: pored, ispred, iza, ispod, iznad. Lampa stoji pored starog kauča (the lamp stands next to the old couch), ispred novog ogledala (in front of the new mirror), ispod drvene police (under the wooden shelf).

The trap: changing the noun and forgetting the adjective. Nema veliki stola is wrong — once the noun is in the genitive, the adjective goes with it: nema velikog stola. The same applies to moj, tvoj, naš and the demonstratives: ključ od mog starog stana (the key to my old flat), iz naše nove kuće (from our new house).