Fractions, Decimals, and Approximation

Up to now numbers have been whole and exact. This page covers the messier, more human side of counting: fractions (half a litre, a quarter), decimals (3.5), percentages (ten percent of the population), and — the most quietly useful of all — approximation, where Croatian does something English cannot: it builds "about a hundred" into a single word. Most of these constructions share one grammatical thread: a fraction or a quantity word pulls the following noun into the genitive, the same "of" logic you met with partitive quantities.

"Half": pola

The word for "half" is pola, and it is grammatically a quantity word, so whatever follows it goes into the genitive: pola litre ("half a litre"), pola sata ("half an hour"), pola kruha ("half a loaf"). Pola itself does not change form — it is frozen — so all the action is in the noun.

There is also a fuller adjective, polovica (or polovina), used when "half" is a noun in its own right ("one half of the team"): polovica momčadi. Pola is the everyday choice; polovica is slightly more formal or more precise.

Quarters and thirds

The fraction nouns are formed with the suffix -ina on the ordinal stem: četvrtina ("a quarter," from četvrti "fourth"), trećina ("a third," from treći "third"), petina ("a fifth"), desetina ("a tenth"), and so on. They are feminine nouns and, like all quantity words, take the genitive of what they measure.

Note that when you count the fraction words themselves, they obey numeral government: jedna četvrtina, but tri četvrtine (paucal of četvrtina) and pet četvrtina (genitive plural).

Decimals: the comma, not the point

Continental Europe, Croatia included, writes decimals with a comma, not a point: 3,5 means "three point five." When read aloud, the separator is zarez ("comma"): tri zarez pet (3.5). In careful or scientific speech you may also hear tri cijela pet ("three whole [and] five"), where cijela marks the integer part, but tri zarez pet is the everyday norm.

Percentages: posto

"Percent" is posto (literally "per hundred"), an invariable word written %. Like a quantity word, it pulls the following noun into the genitive: deset posto stanovništva ("ten percent of the population"). Posto never changes form, regardless of the number in front of it.

You may also meet postotak ("a percentage" as a count noun) when percent is the head of the phrase: visok postotak ("a high percentage"). And the older word postotak vs the Latinism procenat (regional, more common in Serbian and Bosnian usage) — in standard Croatian, prefer posto / postotak.

Approximation: the heart of this page

Here is what makes Croatian elegant. To say "about ten," "around a hundred," "thirtyish," English needs a separate hedge word (about, around, roughly, -ish). Croatian has those too, but it also bakes approximation directly into the numeral with a suffix — a compact device English lacks.

The free-standing hedges

The most common approximators are simple words placed before the number:

• oko
  • genitive — "about, around" (oko deset ljudi "about ten people")
• otprilike — "roughly, approximately" (a sentence adverb, stands anywhere)
• približno — "approximately" (slightly more formal)
• negdje — "somewhere around" (colloquial: negdje deset)

Note that oko is a preposition governing the genitive, so the number-noun phrase after it goes into the genitive — though in practice, because 5+ already forces a genitive plural, the surface form often does not change.

The -ak / -(in)jak suffix: approximation as morphology

This is the distinguishing feature. Attach -ak (or -injak after longer stems) to a round number and you get "approximately that many," with no separate word:

These approximative numerals behave like 5+: the counted noun goes into the genitive plural (desetak ljudi, stotinjak kuna). The word stotinjak ("about a hundred," from an older stotina plus -jak) is especially common and worth memorising as a unit.

Doubled numerals: "a day or two"

Croatian also approximates by pairing two consecutive numbers with no conjunction, giving the sense "X or Y": dan-dva ("a day or two"), sat-dva ("an hour or two"), dva-tri ("two or three"), godinu-dvije ("a year or two"). The noun takes whatever case the first number would require.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• pola ("half") and posto ("percent") are invariable quantity words that pull the following noun into the genitive (pola litre, deset posto stanovništva).
• Fraction nouns end in -ina: trećina, četvrtina; when counted, they obey numeral government themselves (tri četvrtine).
• Decimals use a comma, read aloud as zarez (tri zarez pet = 3.5); the point marks thousands.
• Approximation has its own morphology: the -ak / -injak suffix turns a round number into "about that many" (desetak, stotinjak), governing the genitive plural — a single-word device English lacks.
• Doubled numerals (dan-dva, sat-dva) mean "X or Y," a tidy way to be vague.