imati and its fused negative

To say what you have — a brother, a sister, a house, a cat — Serbian uses the verb imati. It behaves exactly like the a-class verbs you met in lesson 12: take away the -ti and add -am, -aš, -a, -amo, -ate, -aju. Nothing surprising there.

The surprise is the negative. In the last lesson you learned to put ne in front of a verb: ne radim, ne pijem. With this verb that does not happen. The ne has grown into the verb and become part of it, so I do not have is one single word: nemam.

The two paradigms side by side

Read the two columns down: the endings are identical. The negative column is simply the positive column with ne- glued to the front, and the i of the stem disappears. Once you know imam, you already know nemam.

Never write ne imam. It is not a mistake Serbs make and it is not something they say — the negative of this verb is always the one-word form. You have already seen this pattern once: biti did the same thing, nisam rather than ne sam. Serbian has only a handful of verbs like this, and these two are the ones you will use every day.

Asking about it

Questions work just as they did in lesson 10. Put da li in front: Da li imaš sestru? — Do you have a sister? Or put li straight after the verb: Imaš li sestru? Both are normal; the second sounds a little lighter. To answer no, you do not need ne on its own — the verb already carries it: Nemam.

What you have

The word for the thing you have often changes its ending: sestra becomes sestru, ćerka becomes ćerku, žena becomes ženu. That is the object form, and it has a lesson of its own coming shortly. For now, learn these little phrases whole — imam sestru, imam brata — and let the endings sink in on their own.

Imam answers a wider range of questions in Serbian than I have does in English. Age is one of them: Imam trideset godina is how you say how old you are. You will meet that use again with numbers.