Desperate Serbwife

You have got to be kidding me!

So I was on a website today trying to learn a bit of Serbian (since I'm feeling really dumb not being able to communicate with the maid). Read this little bit about the numbers:

"The number one, jedan, changes its ending according to the gender of the noun it accompanies; therefore you would say "jedan sok" one juice, "jedno pivo" one beer, "jedna kafa" one coffee. If you are to request one of these items you will need to put them into the accusative case. Serbian is a language with a case system. Nouns appear in different cases, indicated by different endings, according to the role they fulfill in the sentence. There are seven cases in Serbian: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, vocative, instrumental and prepositional.
The nominative case of a noun is used when that noun is the subject of the sentence. This is the form in which it will be listed in the dictionary and is the from we look at to determine the gender. The accusative case is dealing with the direct object and masculine and neuter nouns would not change its endings but feminine would replace -a by -u. So when ordering coffee you would say: Jednu kafu, molim vas, but: Jedno pivo, jedan sok.
The correct form of the words for two also depends on the gender of the noun. It is right to say "dva soka" two juices, "dva piva" two beers but "dve kafe." Apart from number two being changed, the nouns that follow also change their endings. They go into genitive case as the rule of the language (and those rules are not to be questioned) says that numbers are followed by the genitive case. The numbers three and four would keep their form but any noun following them would have genitive singular endings. Therefore you would say tri soka, tri piva, četiri soka, četiri piva but tri kafe, četiri kafe."

All I know is that if my backwards brain is actually able to learn any of this, I want serious kudos from all of you!!!

Did I mention that the maid spent almost 45 minutes scrubbing our our tub? How embarrassing!!

posted by Brooke @ 8:51 AM