nedostajati / faliti (to be missing / to miss)

Nedostajati is the Croatian verb for "to miss" — but the grammar is turned inside out compared with English. In English I am the subject and you are the object: "I miss you." In Croatian the missed thing is the subject (nominative) and the person doing the missing is in the dative: Nedostaješ mi — literally "you are-missing to-me". This subject/object flip is the headline fact of the verb, and it is exactly the kind of structure that, once it clicks, makes a whole family of Croatian verbs (sviđati se, trebati, faliti) suddenly transparent.

Aspect

Nedostajati is imperfective and, for practical purposes, has no everyday perfective partner — missing someone is a state, and states are imperfective through and through. You will use it in the present (the missing now), the past (the missing then), and the future (the missing to come), all imperfective. Its colloquial twin faliti (also imperfective) means exactly the same thing and is heard constantly in casual speech, especially in coastal and northern usage: Fališ mi = Nedostaješ mi = "I miss you". Faliti is informal; nedostajati is the neutral-to-formal standard.

Present tense

Grammatically nedostajati is a regular e-class (j-present) verb: the -aja- infinitive gives a present stem nedostaj- + -em, -eš, -e, -emo, -ete, -u. All six persons exist, because the subject (the missed thing) can be any person — including you and I.

In practice the two forms you use constantly are the 3rd-person nedostaje (one thing/person is missed) and nedostaju (several are missed) — because most things we miss are "he/she/it" or "they". The verb agrees with the missed thing, never with the misser:

The experiencer is dative

The misser is the dative, almost always a second-position clitic: mi (to me), ti (to you), mu (to him), joj (to her), nam (to us), vam (to you pl.), im (to them).

For a named misser, use a dative noun: Ani nedostaje brat ("Ana misses her brother", dative Ani). The construction is the same dative-experiencer machinery covered at dative with verbs and adjectives.

The l-participle

Regular for the -ati infinitive. It agrees with the subject (the missed thing), not with the misser — so a man saying he missed home still uses masculine nedostajao because dom is masculine.

Perfect tense (perfekt)

The auxiliary je / su agrees in number with the missed thing; the participle agrees in gender and number with the missed thing; the dative misser rides along as a clitic.

Future I (futur prvi)

The infinitive drops its -i before the clitic: nedostajat će. Used for the missing you anticipate.

Imperative

The imperative is effectively nonexistent: you cannot command something to be missing, nor command someone to miss you. The forms nedostaj, nedostajte are grammatically derivable but you will never produce them in real Croatian. To tell someone you want to be missed, people use other phrasing entirely (Nemoj me zaboraviti — "Don't forget me").

Conditional I (kondicional prvi)

The bih-clitics + l-participle, agreeing with the missed thing. Useful for hypotheticals: what one would miss.

Other forms

• Passive participle: none — nedostajati is intransitive (it has no accusative object to passivise).
• Present verbal adverb: nedostajući exists but is vanishingly rare; you will not need it.

Key uses and government

1. The core pattern: dative misser + nominative subject

The fixed skeleton is [dative experiencer] + nedostaje/nedostaju + [nominative missed thing]. Internalise it as a template, exactly as you did for sviđati se. The clitics cluster in second position. Compare the inversion to English directly:

2. "to be lacking / be short of" — with the genitive of quantity

Nedostajati also means "there isn't enough of / to be short of". Here the lacking substance often appears in the genitive after the verb, especially with mass nouns and quantities — the partitive logic of "some of X is missing". Nedostaje mi novca = "I'm short of money" (genitive novca). With a countable, definite subject you keep the nominative (Nedostaje mi jedan tanjur — "I'm missing one plate"). This partitive use connects to the partitive genitive.

3. faliti — the colloquial equivalent

In casual speech, faliti (informal) replaces nedostajati with identical grammar: Fališ mi = "I miss you"; Fali mi sitniš = "I'm short of change". It is warmer and more everyday; nedostajati is what you write and what you say in formal settings.

4. Same inversion family

This subject/object flip is the same trick behind sviđati se (the liked thing is subject, the liker is dative) and the experiencer use of trebati. Learning one teaches the others; the whole inversion family is treated at the svidjati / trebati inversion.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Nedostajati is a dative-experiencer verb: the missed thing is the nominative subject, the misser is in the dative (clitic mi/ti/mu/joj…).
• The verb agrees with the missed thing: nedostaje (sg.) vs nedostaju (pl.); the participle agrees too (nedostajao dom, nedostajala obitelj).
• Nedostaješ mi = "I miss you" — the inversion is the whole point.
• It is imperfective with no real perfective; colloquial faliti is its everyday informal twin (Fališ mi).
• A second sense is "be short of / lack", often with the genitive (Nedostaje mi novca).