jedan / dva / tri / četiri / pet

Basic Numbers and Nouns

Level 2

Jedan agrees with its noun. Dva, tri and četiri use a small-number counting construction, while pet and higher normally take genitive plural.

How It Works

Jedan has gender forms jedan, jedna, jedno: jedan stol, jedna knjiga, jedno selo. For two, use dva with masculine or neuter nouns and dvije with feminine nouns.

Learn the common counted forms as pairs: dva stola, tri stola, četiri stola, but pet stolova. With a feminine noun, compare dvije knjige and pet knjiga.

This is an introduction to simple counting expressions. Compound numbers, inflected numerals and subject–verb agreement introduce further rules. The form after a number can look like another case form without having the same syntactic function in every analysis.

Examples (4)

  1. Imam jedan stol.

    I have one table.

    Jedan agrees with masculine stol.

  2. Imam dva stola.

    I have two tables.

    Two selects the small-number counted form.

  3. Imam četiri knjige.

    I have four books.

    Četiri occurs with knjige.

  4. Imam pet knjiga.

    I have five books.

    Pet takes genitive plural knjiga.

How It Connects

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jedan / dva / tri / četiri / petLevel 2Basic Numbers and Nouns

Learn This First

Number-plus-noun phrases vary with noun gender and introduce their own counting forms.

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Patterns that build on this one.

Words in This Pattern

jedandvatričetiripet