Serbian 101 · Vocabulary
Twelve colours — and the first place where Serbian grammar becomes visible to the eye.
Look at the list below and you'll notice every colour ends the same way: bela, crna, plava. That isn't how the words are stored in a dictionary — it's because they're agreeing with a hidden noun. Boja, colour, is feminine, so when you name a colour on its own you name it in the feminine.
Attach it to something else and it changes shape. Colours are adjectives, and Serbian adjectives take the gender of whatever they describe. This is the same machinery you'll meet in moj / moja / moje and in jedan / jedna / jedno — so learning it here, on something as concrete as red, makes the abstract cases far easier later.
Dvanaest boja
Latin, Cyrillic, and how each one sounds. Stress is on the first syllable except where marked.
Take the -a off and you have the masculine. Swap it for -o and you have the neuter:
| Muški | Ženski | Srednji | |
|---|---|---|---|
| red | crven | crvena | crveno |
| green | zelen | zelena | zeleno |
| yellow | žut | žuta | žuto |
| beige | bež | bež | bež |
| navy | teget | teget | teget |
So: crven auto, crvena jabuka, crveno vino. The noun decides, not you.
Bež is the exception in that table, and it's exception for a good reason — it's a French loanword that never learned to decline. Bež jakna, bež auto, bež odelo: one form, always. The same happens to teget (navy) and roze — teget odelo, teget suknja, teget more, one shape throughout. Teget is a Serbian favourite: school uniforms, winter coats, and, as it happens, the darker blue on this website.
Two colours worth a second look. Plava means blue, but plava kosa is blonde hair — Serbian uses the same word for both, and nobody finds it odd. And ružičasta comes straight from ruža, a rose; the colour is literally rose-coloured, which is easier to remember than the six syllables suggest.
Play it
A Wordwall round, then the falling-colour game where you catch each word in its own lane.
Boje na srpskom — matching round
Igraj ovde, bez odlaska
Colours race down four lanes in masculine, feminine and neuter — catch each one in its matching colour.
Print it
Eight PDFs for this one — the colours lesson is the best of the printables.
The exercise on masculine and feminine adjectives — where colours stop being a list and start agreeing.
Fem. vs. Masc. Adjectives →Serbian 101
Thirty letters, thirty sounds, and not a single silent one.
BasicsNine everyday phrases, and the TI/VI decision behind them.
BasicsOne to ten — nine never change, and then there's jedan.
VocabularyWhat you do for a living, and the feminine forms that go with it.
GrammarMoj, moja, moje — the same agreement you just met in the colours.
GrammarThe first verb, the short and long forms, and the word order that follows.