Prepositions governing the dative

You already know two ways to talk about movement: u and na with the accusative take you into or onto a place — Idem u grad means you are going to the town and will arrive there. But often you only want to say which way someone is heading, without saying they get there: We walked towards the river. For that Serbian uses prema or ka, and the noun after them stands in the dative — the same case you use for the person who receives something.

Four prepositions, one case

A small group of prepositions always takes the dative. The case never changes, whatever the meaning.

The dative forms you need

Nothing new here: after these prepositions you use exactly the dative endings you already know.

After a preposition a pronoun is always in its stressed form: prema meni, ka njemu, never prema mi or ka mu.

prema: direction and attitude

prema is the everyday word. Physically it means towards: Okrenuo se prema prozoru (He turned towards the window). But it is just as common for feelings and behaviour: how you treat someone, what you think of something. English uses to, towards or with here; Serbian uses prema + dative every time.

• biti ljubazan / grub / pravedan prema nekome — to be kind / rude / fair to someone
• poštovanje, ljubav, nepoverenje prema nekome — respect, love, distrust for someone
• odnos prema poslu — attitude to work

prema also means according to (prema planu — according to the plan), still with the dative.

ka: the formal twin

ka means the same as physical prema, but sounds a little more formal. You see it on signs, in written directions and in phrases like ka severu (towards the north). It is only for direction: for an attitude always use prema.

nasuprot and zahvaljujući

nasuprot places one thing across from another: Pošta je nasuprot staroj crkvi. zahvaljujući means thanks to and names a cause that helped: Zahvaljujući mapi nismo se izgubili. Learn it as a single word — just a preposition with the dative.

Both zahvaljujući and zbog give a reason, but they take different cases: zahvaljujući + dative for a cause that helped (zahvaljujući komšiji), zbog + genitive for a neutral or bad cause (zbog kiše). Do not put a genitive after zahvaljujući.

Heading somewhere is prema/ka + dative; arriving is u/na + accusative; reaching the edge of something is do + genitive: Išli smo prema reci, ali nismo stigli do obale.