Quantity expressions with the genitive

English says a lot of apples, a little bread, a glass of water. Serbian builds all of these the same way: the quantity word comes first, and the thing being measured follows it in the genitive. You already know both genitives you need — the genitive singular from A1 (hleba, vode, vremena) and the genitive plural from the last lesson (jabuka, prijatelja, jaja). This lesson is about choosing between them.

The quantity words

Countable or mass: which genitive?

Ask one question about the noun: can you count it one by one? Apples, eggs, friends, days — yes. Then the noun stands in the genitive plural: mnogo jabuka, nekoliko jaja, malo prijatelja, puno dana. Bread, water, sugar, meat, time, money, work — no, you measure them rather than count them. Then the noun stands in the genitive singular: malo hleba, mnogo vode, dosta šećera, malo vremena, puno posla.

Notice that malo and mnogo translate differently depending on the noun — malo jabuka is few apples, malo hleba is a little bread — but in Serbian it is the same word; only the noun changes. English has separate words (many/much, few/little); Serbian has one word and two genitives.

Remember the irregular genitive plurals you met last time: čovek has ljudi (mnogo ljudi — a lot of people) and dete has dece (nekoliko dece — a few children). A quantity word does not make these regular.

Containers and measures work the same way

A glass, a bottle, a cup, a kilo, a litre, a bag, a box, a piece — these are ordinary nouns, but they behave like quantity words: whatever they contain or measure follows in the genitive. The container itself takes whatever case the sentence needs; the thing inside is always genitive.

So in a shop or a café you order with the container or measure in the accusative and the contents in the genitive: Molim vas jednu čašu vode. — Kupila sam dva kilograma jabuka. — Uzmi jednu flašu soka. The number rules from A1 apply to the container (dva kilograma, pet flaša), and the contents simply sit in the genitive after it.

The verb with a quantity subject

When the quantity phrase is the subject of the sentence, the verb does not go plural. It stays in the third person singular, and in the past the participle is neuter: Ovde ima mnogo ljudi. — Na pijaci je bilo puno ljudi. You will meet this a lot; just notice it for now, it is not drilled here.

The common mistake is to put a mass noun in the plural because English a lot of feels plural: it is mnogo vode, never mnogo voda, and malo novca, never malo novaca. If you cannot count it, the genitive is singular. The second trap is nekoliko: it means several, so it only ever goes with countable nouns — nekoliko jabuka is fine, nekoliko hleba is not; say malo hleba instead.