Everyday Number Phrases

You meet numbers in Croatian on day one — telling someone your age, reading a phone number aloud, asking the price of something at the market. The catch is that Croatian numbers do not just sit beside a noun; they govern its case, and the rule changes depending on the last digit. This sounds forbidding, but it is best learned not as an abstract table but baked into the everyday phrases where it actually bites. The single most frequent place it bites is saying your age — and getting it right is a small badge of competence. This page drills the 1 / 2–4 / 5+ rule through real, spoken phrases.

The rule in one breath

Croatian numerals split the noun that follows into three buckets, decided by the last digit (or last two, for the teens):

The full machinery — why the paucal looks like a genitive singular, how it behaves in other cases — is on numeral government. Here we just use it. (For the bare numbers themselves see cardinals 0–10 and cardinals 11–100.)

Giving your age: imati + a number + godina

This is the headline. Croatian does not say „I am twenty" — it says „I have twenty years," using the verb imati („to have") plus godina („year") in whatever form the number demands. So your age sentence is a live numeral-government drill every single time.

Notice the trap hidden in plain sight: twenty-one takes the singular — dvadeset jednu godinu, one year-form, even though you are clearly older than one. The last digit is what counts, and it is a 1. This surprises every learner, and getting it right is the clearest sign you have internalised the rule rather than memorised a single phrase. (More on imati itself, including its irregular negative nemam, on the verb imati.)

koliko + genitive: how many / how much

The question word koliko („how many / how much") always takes the genitive — singular for uncountable things (koliko vode „how much water"), plural for countable ones (koliko ljudi „how many people"). This is the everyday phrase for shopping, ordering, and asking quantity.

At the shop: quantities and prices

Buying things is constant numeral government in miniature. Euro and kuna (and kilogram, litra) all bend to the last digit just like godina.

Phone numbers and counting aloud

Phone numbers are read digit by digit (or in small groups), so you simply string the bare cardinals together — no government applies, because there is no following noun. Counting aloud (jedan, dva, tri…) is likewise just the bare list.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Age uses imati („to have"), not „to be": Imam… godina. Croatian „has" years.
• The noun form follows the last digit: 1 → singular (jednu godinu), 2–4 → paucal (dvije godine), 5+ → genitive plural (pet godina).
• The 1-rule is the surprise: dvadeset jednu godinu uses the singular even though you're 21.
• koliko („how many/much") always takes the genitive — koliko godina, koliko ljudi, koliko vode.
• Government switches off for counting aloud and phone numbers — there's no noun, so just say the bare cardinals.