Get the world’s best learner’s chart for the seven cases of Serbian/Croatian grammar: nominative, accusative, genitive, locative, dative, instrumental, and vocative. Designed for both comprehensiveness and ease of use.
Get more charts for verbs and pronouns: Serbian language charts.
Serbian is a hard language for native English speakers. Reading and writing Serbian is easy since its spelling is phonetic and it can be written in Latin script (in addition to Cyrillic), but like other Slavic languages, Serbian grammar is no joke. The US Department of State has been teaching languages to US diplomats for 70+ years, and based on their experience they helpfully break down the average duration needed for students to achieve proficiency in 66 different languages. Serbian (listed as Serbo-Croatian) is a “category 3 language,” surpassed in difficulty only by Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. While Italian or Spanish, for example, take English speakers ~600 class hours on average to learn to a reasonable level, Serbian takes ~1,100.
Since I’m also learning Japanese, I’ll note that contrary to popular belief, spoken Japanese is easy compared to many other languages—certainly easier than Serbian. What’s not to love about a language with no cases, genders, plurals (!), or tones, almost no use of pronouns (pronouns in Serbian are hard), only two tenses (past and present/future), verb conjugation that works the same for all subjects, almost no irregular verbs, and a simple pronunciation system. The challenge and reputation of Japanese mostly come from how it’s just so different than English, and from reading and writing all those damn kanji. 幸運を祈る！
Perhaps the thing that makes Serbian the most difficult for English speakers is its seven cases (English has none, except with pronouns where you get e.g. they/them/theirs). Having so many cases would be hard enough on its own, but then the cases go and mix with both plurality and Serbian’s three different genders. Plus there are different case declensions for nouns and adjectives.
I’m still a beginner in Serbian, but while studying Serbian grammar under fabulous teacher Neda Djurovic at the Serbian Language and Culture Workshop in Belgrade, I gradually built up my own chart to fully capture the details I needed. I made this since I couldn’t find existing charts that were easy to follow but also comprehensive. It includes all the singular and plural word endings for the seven cases and three genders, along with many exceptions, prepositions, and more. Numerous Serbian natives and language learners have told me it’s the most comprehensive and well-organized chart for Serbian cases they’ve ever seen.
Here it is, in hopes that it helps you, too. I’m sharing this under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which means you should feel free to give it away, reuse it, or adapt it with appropriate credit. Click the image to view the full PDF.
You can download this as an A4-size PDF (it looks beautiful printed), or download my PPTX source file if you want to edit it for your own needs:
The chart is focused on comprehensiveness, simplicity, and ease of use. How can I improve it in future versions? Did I make any mistakes? Are there important aspects missing? Leave a comment to let me know.
Bonus: Here are a couple fun, related videos from friend, YouTuber, and Serbian language lover Liz Duong (the videos are in Serbian, so turn on English subtitles): 10 Reasons Why Serbian is Difficult for English Speakers and 10 Reasons Why Serbian is Better Than English.
Version History
- V2.0 (2021-07-14): Corrections, changed the order of cases, and other tweaks.
- V3.1 (2021-07-21): Added the -i declension (for feminine consonant nouns), complications for genitive plurals, more details for vocative and instrumental, and more.
- V4.0 (2023-10-06): Added color, changed gender order to M➜N➜F (which enabled making some things simpler and more consistent), and various other small changes.
- Want more Serbian language guides? See my collection of definitive Serbian language charts.
- Studying on your phone? Check out the best apps for learning Serbian.
What an amazing resource! Helping me on my learning journey so much! Much appreciated ❤️
Reddit
It already looks really great I’d say! And it is a really good idea.
There are only three things coming to my mind.
2. There are two declinations of adjectives but you don’t need the other one often, as far as my teacher said.
But I think it would maybe lose its comprehensiveness if you would include these so I would just leave it like that.
Reddit
Saved a copy for myself lol I’m Serbian but even I mess them up sometimes. Great work.
Reddit
Ha ha ha, this is nuts! Hats off for making the effort, I would never be able to do so.
I learned Russian it was a part of my middle school (grade 5-8) curriculum. I remember how frustrating it was having a vocabulary that is so similar but also having to re-learn cases, adverbs, preposition rules. It drove me nuts. Nothing caught on at the end.
Good luck to you!
Reddit
Hey Steve! Fancy seeing you here. I got to say, this has got to be the most comprehensive and well organised list I’ve seen on cases ever!
I would also include the declensions for dece and brate because they have quite unique exceptions that just have to be rote learnt.
You should post your final version in the Serbian language subreddit too!
Great chart, just two suggestions:
Another suggestion: you don’t need “questions” for cases. They are useful only for native speakers who know forms already, and can immediately produce a noun form given a question.
Minor things:
među is also used with ins. (među lišćem). Likewise pod, nad, pred (Jazavac pred sudom).
[For reading Serbian] it’s not completely trivial. First, the place of stress is not marked. Second, most speakers in Serbia clearly distinguish short from long vowels, esp. when stressed. But it’s not visible in spelling. So all texbooks for foreigners introduce additional marks for stress, many for length, and I haven’t mentioned rising and falling stress…
Endings -ovi/-evi is added to some disyllabic nouns as well: pojas-evi, labud-ovi, galeb-ovi etc, and to many nouns that have 2 syllables in nominative, but not to all:
• vetar, vepar, lakat – vetrovi, veprovi, laktovi
• but: metar, glumac, nokat – metri, glumci, nokti
The ending -evi is added to nouns in -c but it changes that -c to -č: zec – zečevi, stric – stričevi, princ – prinčevi
Also, some nouns in -s get the -evi ending: nos-evi, pojas-evi
It’s actually if an ending added starts with -i, e.g. jezik – jezic-ima, putnik – putnic-ima etc.
Distinguishing dative and locative pronouns – actually, dative and locative case – makes no sense for contemporary Serbian. Differences in stress in some nouns found by Vuk Karadžić are basically gone.
[More:]
I strongly suggest the placement of cases N A G DL I. Then it becomes obvious that nom = acc for many nouns (all feminine plural nouns!) and dat/loc = ins. You can then merge columns or just write = DAT/LOC for ins.pl. And so on.
And, no, this is not definitive by any means. Many nouns move stress in cases, they move in plural, some endings are pronounced with long vowels, some with short…
• u — to (with open space), on (day of week)
• na — to (with closed space or event)
u is actually with closed spaces (u sobu, u dvoranu) and na with open (na dvorište, na polje), tops of surfaces (na sto) and events/activities. This is regardless which case follows (acc or dat/loc)
Thanks for the amazingly detailed and fantastic feedback, Daniel! I’ll definitely incorporate parts of it in future versions.
(Since you posted this as a series of many comments spread across Reddit and my blog, I’ve gone ahead and edited your comment above to combine them all into one place to make it easier to follow. I hope you don’t mind!)
I’ve just updated the chart, incorporating much of the feedback I’ve received since first posting this. I’ve also marked the sections of comments above that I’ve addressed in at least a minor way. E.g. I changed the word “irregular” to “special”, but didn’t list all the examples of additional outliers.
Hi Steven! That’s an excellent summary.
Examples:
radnik – radnici – radnicima
psiholog – psiholozi – psiholozima
tepih – tepisi – tepisima
Thanks, Magdalena! That was called out implicitly where I mentioned the rule applies to all added endings that start with -i, but I’ve gone ahead and updated the chart to describe it explicitly and I used your examples. I’ve also added the rule for vocative masculine plurals.
Examples are always appreciated in class 🙂
Мислим да је све одлично
Thank you so much for creating this. It’s funny that you said that japanese doesn’t use case structure. They do and they don’t. Words like WA, GA, O, E, Kara, Koko, Soko, etc etc….. Create a case system in my mind.
I’m new to Serbian but I’m going to approach it in a similar way to how I learned Japanese.
Thank you so much and I will continue to follow this page.
Amazing job. Thank you so much for sharing!
You have no idea how much your chart has helped me learn the grammar. You’re a godsend!