Indirect questions with da li and question words

At A1 you learnt to ask questions directly: Da li dolazi? (Is he coming?), Gde je stanica? (Where is the station?). Very often, though, you do not ask the question itself — you talk about it. You say that you do not know the answer, or you pass on a question someone else asked: I don't know whether he's coming. She asked me where the station is. This is an indirect question: a question tucked inside a bigger sentence, after a verb like know, ask, tell me or see.

Which word opens the embedded question

Serbian keeps this very simple. The opening word of the embedded question is the same word the direct question started with. There are two cases.

• A yes/no question starts with da li, so the embedded version starts with da li too: Da li dolazi? → Ne znam da li dolazi. (I don't know whether he's coming.) English uses whether or if here; Serbian just keeps da li.
• A question with a question word (gde, kad, ko, šta, zašto, koliko, kako, koji) keeps that question word and nothing else: Gde je stanica? → Ne znam gde je stanica. (I don't know where the station is.)

Word order and punctuation

Inside the bigger sentence the question is no longer a question in its own right. It takes the ordinary statement word order you already use, and the whole sentence ends with a full stop, not a question mark, unless the main clause is itself a question (Znaš li gde je stanica? — Do you know where the station is?). Clitics such as je, sam, se, mi still go in second position inside the embedded clause, right after da li or the question word: Ne znam gde je stanica. Pitam se kad se vraća.

The same construction works after any verb that can take a question as its content: znati (know), pitati (ask), pitati se (wonder), reći (tell), videti (see), razumeti (understand), and after phrases like nije važno (it doesn't matter) or nisam siguran (I'm not sure). The verb before the question does not change anything: Pitam da li dolazi. Reci mi da li dolazi. Nije važno da li dolazi.

The trap: da against da li

In lesson 24 you learnt da after znati, misliti, reći: Znam da dolazi means I know that he is coming — a fact, asserted. Ne znam da li dolazi means I don't know whether he is coming — an open question, no assertion at all. Both stand after znati, both are followed by a present-tense clause, and only the little li tells them apart. Drop it, and you have said the opposite of what you meant.

When the main verb is negated (ne znam, nisam siguran, ne vidim), the embedded clause is STILL introduced by da li or the question word, exactly as after a positive verb. Ne znam da li dolazi — not ne znam da dolazi, which would be an odd, half-finished claim. And the embedded verb itself is not negated just because the main verb is.

You may hear or read a shorter variant that puts li straight after the verb: Ne znam može li doći. Recognise it if you meet it, but do not use it yet — in this course you always say Ne znam da li može doći.

The two verbs you will use most

With pitati the person asked is a direct object in the accusative — Pitao me je gde stanujem (He asked me where I live) — and the question follows straight after. Note that the tense inside the embedded clause stays as it was in the original question: he asked Gde stanuješ?, so I report pitao me je gde stanujem with the present, even though the asking happened in the past.