Stressed (full) forms of the personal pronouns

At A1 you learned the short pronoun objects: Vidim ga (I see him), Dajem ti knjigu (I give you the book). Those short words are clitics — they have no stress of their own, they hide in second position, and they cannot carry any weight. But every pronoun also has a full form, a word you can lean on: mene, tebe, njega, njoj, nama. Serbian uses the full form in exactly four situations, and in each of them the short form is simply impossible.

When the full form is required

1. After a preposition. za mene (for me), kod njega (at his place), sa tobom (with you), o njoj (about her). A clitic can never follow a preposition: za me does not exist.
2. For emphasis or contrast. Ne zovem njega, zovem tebe. (I'm not calling HIM, I'm calling YOU.) When the point of the sentence is who, the pronoun takes the full form.
3. As a one-word answer. Tebe. (You.) A clitic cannot stand alone, so the answer to "who?" is always the full form.
4. At the start of a sentence. Nama je dosadno bez tebe. (WE are bored without you.) Clitics cannot open a sentence; a full form can.

Everywhere else — an ordinary, unstressed object — the clitic stays the default. Vidim ga is the normal way to say "I see him"; Vidim njega means "I see HIM (and not someone else)".

The forms

The full forms cover three groups of cases. The genitive and accusative share one form (except for she, which keeps two), the dative and locative share one form, and the instrumental has its own. In the plural the dative, locative and instrumental are all the same word.

In the plural the full genitive-accusative looks like the clitic: nas, vas. The difference is only stress and position — Vidim vas (clitic, unstressed) against Ovo je za vas (full, after a preposition). Write the same letters, but know which one you are using.

She is the only pronoun whose genitive and accusative differ: after a genitive preposition it is nje (kod nje, bez nje, od nje), after an accusative preposition it is nju (za nju, na nju). The masculine njega and the plural njih serve for both cases.

Each preposition brings its case

Nothing new to learn about the prepositions themselves: each one governs the same case it governed with nouns. Just pick the full form of that case.

With me is always sa mnom — the preposition takes its long form sa before mnom, because s mnom cannot be pronounced. Before the other instrumentals both s and sa are correct: s tobom and sa tobom.

Emphasis: the same rule with verbs that take a dative

Verbs like verovati (to believe someone) and pomagati (to help someone) take a dative object. Unstressed, that is the clitic: Verujem mu (I believe him). Under contrast it is the full dative: Verujem tebi, ne njemu (I believe YOU, not him).

The trap runs both ways. Do not put a full form where nothing calls for it — Zovem njega sounds like you are singling him out. And never put a clitic after a preposition or at the start of a sentence — za ga, Ga vidim are not Serbian.

For recognition: the reflexive does the same

The reflexive se (oneself) is also a clitic, and it also has a full form: sebe after za, kod, bez, sebi in the dative and locative, sobom in the instrumental. Ona misli samo na sebe (She only thinks of herself), Uvek nosi telefon sa sobom (He always carries his phone with him). You do not need to produce these yet — just recognise them when they appear.