Instrumental Ženskog Roda

These nouns are feminine, they end in a consonant, and they behave nothing like žena. In the instrumental they take -ju — and that j immediately melts into the consonant in front of it. The technical name is jotation; in practice it is four little collisions worth memorising.

Every noun in -ost follows the first row, and there are hundreds of them: any quality turned into a noun. Once you can say odgovornošću, you can say all of them.

There is a second, quieter form: -i, identical to the genitive and dative. S odgovornosti and s odgovornošću are both correct, the first more common in bureaucratic writing, the second in ordinary speech. This exercise accepts either.

And keep two pairs apart. Svest is consciousness or awareness — svešću. Savest is conscience, the moral one — savešću. One letter, and the difference between knowing something and feeling guilty about it.