Numbers in Use: Money, Time, Phone, Age

You have learned the master rule of numeral government — that 1 takes the singular, 2-4 take the paucal, and 5+ take the genitive plural. This page puts that rule to work in the four places you will need it every single day: handling money, telling time, giving your age, and reading out phone numbers and quantities. None of these introduce new grammar; they are the numeral government rule applied to high-frequency nouns. But each has its own vocabulary and its own trap, and getting them right is the difference between sounding like a tourist and sounding like someone who lives here.

Money: prices in euros

Croatia adopted the euro on 1 January 2023, replacing the kuna. The currency word is euro (masculine), and its subunit is the cent. Both are ordinary masculine nouns, so they obey numeral government exactly like stol or auto:

The one quirk worth memorising: the genitive plural of euro is eura, which happens to look identical to the paucal eura. So both "two euros" and "five euros" come out eura — the only thing that changes between them is the number in front. This is a small mercy; the noun does not visibly shift between the 2-4 and the 5+ class here.

The subunit cent works the same way: jedan cent, dva centa (paucal), pet centi (genitive plural — note the -i, an i-stem genitive plural). In real speech, people very often drop the word cent entirely and just say the number: dva eura pedeset ("two euros fifty").

Telling the time

The word for both "an hour" and "o'clock" is sat (masculine). It governs exactly like any other masculine noun, so the hours run jedan sat, dva sata (paucal), pet sati (genitive plural — again an i-stem -i).

To ask the time, Croatian uses a fixed plural-flavoured question: Koliko je sati? — literally "How many of-hours is it?" The answer uses je for one o'clock and su for the others, with the hour in the right class:

To say at a given hour, use the preposition u + the accusative (which for these inanimate masculine nouns equals the nominative numeral phrase): u tri sata ("at three"), u pet sati ("at five"), u jedan sat ("at one").

For minutes past and to the hour, the everyday system is built on i ("and") for past and do ("to") for the run-up: tri i petnaest ("three fifteen"), pet do osam ("five to eight"). Half past uses pola plus the next hour: pola tri literally means "half three" but is read as half past two — Croatian counts toward the coming hour, exactly as German does (halb drei) and the opposite of English. This catches every English speaker.

Age: the highest-stakes place to apply the rule

This is the page's headline insight. Croatian does not say "I am twenty"; it says Imam dvadeset godina — literally "I have twenty years." The verb is imati ("to have"), and godina ("year") is the counted noun. That means your own age runs through the full numeral government rule, and the form of godina changes with the final digit of your age:

Look hard at age 21. Because the phrase ends in jedan/jedna/jedno, the noun is dragged back to the singular, and since imati takes a direct object, that singular is the accusative: jednu godinu. So "I am twenty-one" is Imam dvadeset jednu godinu — a singular noun inside a sentence about twenty-one years. This is the same final-digit logic from the government page, but it lands on a sentence you will say constantly. Get it wrong and you have produced the most common age error there is.

To ask someone's age: Koliko imaš godina? (informal) or Koliko imate godina? (formal). For a child you will often hear Koliko mu je godina? ("How old is he?"). The answer follows the same final-digit rule every time.

Phone numbers and reading digits

Croatian reads phone numbers digit by digit, just as English does — there is no grammar to track because each digit is spoken in isolation in the nominative: nula devet jedan... ("zero nine one..."). Speakers often group them in twos for rhythm, but the digits themselves do not decline.

The full how-to for saying long numbers aloud, including years and decimals, lives on reading numbers aloud.

Shopping quantities

At the market, quantities pair a measure word with a genitive of the substance — this is the partitive genitive, the "of" built into Croatian quantities. The measure itself still obeys numeral government:

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Money: euro and cent obey numeral government — jedan euro, dva eura, pet eura; the genitive plural of euro (eura) looks like the paucal, which simplifies things.
• Time: sat = "hour/o'clock"; ask with Koliko je sati?, say "at" with u
  • the hour. Half past names the next hour (pola tri = 2:30).
• Age: imati
  • godina runs the full rule on the final digit — dvadeset jednu godinu (singular!), dvadeset dvije godine (paucal), dvadeset pet godina (genitive plural).
• Phone numbers are read digit by digit, no government.
• Quantities combine numeral government on the measure with a partitive genitive on the substance.