Numeral government: the genitive plural from five upwards, and the last element of a compound

One to four were the difficult part. Jedan had to agree with its noun like an adjective, and dva, tri, četiri pulled a special counting form out of it. From five upwards Serbian stops changing its mind: every number from five to a thousand puts the noun into one single shape, and it is the same shape after five as after nine hundred. (Long numbers such as twenty-one have a twist of their own, and it comes at the end of this lesson.)

That shape is called the genitive plural. You have met the genitive singular already, after od, iz, kod and after ima and nema. This is its plural partner, and at this stage you meet it only here — a numeral from five up demands it, so you learn it as the form that follows a big number.

First, the numbers themselves

Nothing clever here, just words to learn. They come back in every price you will ever hear.

For a price in the hundreds you simply put the two words together: sto pedeset (150), dvesta trideset (230). And note hiljadu — that is the form you say when you count one thousand of something: hiljadu dinara.

What the number does to the noun

Put the three groups side by side and the system is easy to see. Jedan agrees, dva/tri/četiri take the counting form you learned last time, and everything from five up takes the genitive plural.

Look at the feminine row, because that is where the change is loudest: dve kafe but pet kafa. The masculine and neuter rows happen to look the same in the last two columns — dva dinara and pet dinara, dva piva and pet piva — which is good news: for most masculine and neuter nouns you say the same thing after two as after five.

The genitive plural ending is part of the word, so learn it together with the word. Most feminine nouns in -a end up looking exactly like their dictionary form again — žena, pet žena — and a few slip an extra -a- inside, as karta does in pet karata.

The commonest mistake: the teens are NOT compounds. Dvanaest sounds like dva, but it is a number above five and behaves like one: dvanaest kafa, never dvanaest kafe. The same for trinaest, četrnaest and the rest of them.

Long numbers: the last word decides

A number like twenty-one is two words in Serbian too, and the last word is the one that gives the order. The tens stay where they are and the noun changes shape underneath them.

With dinar two of the three shapes sound alike, so listen to the same three numbers with a feminine word, where all three are clearly different. Karta is a ticket, and after kupujem (I am buying) it is in the accusative you already know.

So trideset jedna kafa, trideset tri kafe, trideset šest kafa. Read the number aloud, listen to how it ends, and take the shape that ending calls for.

Asking what it costs

The verb is koštati — to cost — and it behaves like any other a-verb: košta for one thing, koštaju for several. To ask the price you say Koliko košta?

• Koliko košta ovo? — How much does this cost?
• Košta osamdeset dinara. — It costs eighty dinars.
• Koliko koštaju ove jabuke? — How much do these apples cost?

Words of quantity — koliko (how much/how many), mnogo (a lot), malo (a little, a few) — take exactly the same genitive plural as a big number does: koliko dinara, mnogo para, malo jabuka. When the thing cannot be counted at all, there is no plural to reach for and the word simply stays singular: malo novca, malo hrane.

Para is the everyday word for money in the plural — nemam para means I have no money. Novac is the more formal singular word for it.