Serbian For Beginners: How to Ask Questions

I'm your online Serbian tutor, Nikola.

Before we start, make sure to follow my Instagram page, Learn Serbian or Serbian

Language Network, where you can book your free trial lesson and find even more

learning materials. If you have any questions, you can also write me an email

in the description of each episode.

Today, we are learning how to ask questions in Serbian.

This is one of the most useful skills you can master within minutes and

use it in everyday situations, when traveling, getting around or talking with your friends

and family. After we cover the theory, we are going to apply what we

learned in three texts in three different levels.

Ready? Okay, let's start.

Simple one-word questions.

These are very frequent questions you can use to get answered to absolutely anything.

Let's see the list.

zašto meaning why?

Koliko meaning how much.

That's it. This is all words you will need for getting around.

Be careful not to mix zašto with zato što.

The second word means because and it's common mistake to mix these two.

With this list, all of your sentences can be consisted just of one word.

Of course, it would be better if we could expand those sentences.

Let's take a look at some basic interrogative sentences.

Kako se zoveš?

Or kako se zovete?

Meaning, what's your name?

Koliko imaš godina?

Or koliko imate godina?

How old are you?

Gde živiš? Or gde živite?

Where do you live?

Kako si? Or kako ste?

How are you?

Ko je to?

Who is that?

Šta je to?

What is that?

Koliko košta? How much is it?

Gde je? Where is?

You've probably heard some of this before, right?

That's because these sentences are quite frequent.

And you can use them a lot.

Try mixing them with the stuff you already learned to say in Serbian.

Now, let's take a look at the syntax of interrogative sentences.

How to make a full sentence when asking questions?

Using DALI.

This is the most common, the most standard and polite way to ask a

question in Serbian.

There will be other ways, some may be even more frequent in use, but

to someone who is a beginner in learning Serbian, this is the syntax I

would advise you to use.

DALI, two words.

On its own, it doesn't mean anything.

It is simply a marker that says, I'm starting a question.

Similarly to French ESK, you would use this at the start of a question.

Let's look at the example.

And the question, da li ti sviraš klavir?

Ti si učenik?

And the question, da li si ti učenik?

We have a starting sentence and a question we made out of that sentence.

In the first sentence, there is an action involved.

The person you are talking to plays a piano.

Therefore, when you make a question, it will be pretty easy.

You just put DALI at the start and copy the whole starting sentence.

But, if we take a look at the second sentence, we can see that

in it, there is no action involved.

Therefore, we need to do an inversion.

We switch the places of the first two words, subject and the verb to

be. TC becomes CT.

English language does this as well.

You are a student compared to Are you a student?

However, unlike in English, in Serbian this will only happen if there is no

action involved in the starting sentence or interrogative sentence.

There you go.

Those are some basic skills for making a question in Serbian.

If you would like to practice and do exercises, you can message me on

my Instagram page and apply for the full course.

Now let's take a look at some texts in three different levels, from more

simple to more complex.

Pay attention to syntax of making questions that we covered so far.

Be sure to read the transcript that is provided below each episode on the

Buzzsprout website, because it will make more sense when reading and studying grammar.

Level 1

Good morning, I'm Petar Petrovic.

How many years have you been working on?

I'm from 34 years old and I'm from Beograd, but I live in the

New York Times.

How many years have you been working on the IT sector?

I've been working on 5 or 6 years.

I'm ready, thank you.

I'm going to go to the next level.

What do we have for today?

Those

are

all three texts.

in all three different levels.

When making sentences using DALI syntax, you can exclude subjects or personal pronouns, names

from the sentence.

Also, you can use word molim to politely ask someone to repeat what they

said.

That's it. We went over some basic vocabulary, did some grammar and syntax and

we went through the text with practical examples.

There is a lot more to learn here.

There are two more ways you can ask a question, one of those two

is the most frequent but mostly used in spoken Serbian.

Try combining these skills with all previous grammar and vocabulary that we covered in

these episodes. There is a lot more to come so if you're interested please

follow our Instagram page LearnSerbian or Serbian Language Network.

Here you can find more materials and book a trial lesson.

You can also send me an email to my email address which is in

the description of every episode.

And finally, you can support the show by donating at BuyMeACoffee website.

Hvala and vidimo se uskoro.

Ćao!