kvariti / pokvariti (to break/spoil)

Pokvariti / kvariti ("to break, to spoil, to ruin") is the verb for things going wrong — a machine that stops working, food that goes off, a mood or a plan that gets ruined. As a transitive verb it is unremarkable: it takes an accusative object, just like its opposite popraviti ("to fix"). What makes this verb worth a full page is the reflexive pokvariti se, one of the clearest examples in Croatian of the se-anticausative — the construction where se says "this happened by itself, no agent did it". Auto se pokvario ("The car broke down") is not "the car broke itself"; it is "the car went and broke", agentlessly. And Croatian almost always adds a dative of the affected person — Pokvario mi se auto ("My car broke down on me") — to say who got the bad luck. That pairing, se-anticausative plus dative of misfortune, is the spine of this page.

Aspect

This is a prefixal pair: the base imperfective kvariti gains the prefix po- to become the perfective pokvariti (see forming aspect pairs by prefix). The perfective marks the single completed event ("it broke", "it went off"); the imperfective marks the ongoing or repeated process ("it's spoiling", "this keeps ruining things"). Note that kvariti alone (without the prefix) is also the verb you want for the idea of "corrupting / spoiling" something gradually — kvariti djecu ("to spoil children", to be a bad influence).

Present tense

The perfective pokvariti is a regular i-class verb; the imperfective kvariti is too.

The perfective present pokvarim is not a "now" tense — it sits in subordinate clauses or carries a future/conditional reading (ako pokvarim — "if I break it"). For the spoiling-in-progress, use the imperfective kvarim.

The l-participle

Both are regular -iti verbs.

Watch the agreement in the anticausative: with auto (masc.) it's pokvario se, with perilica (fem.) pokvarila se, with računalo (neut.) pokvarilo se.

Perfect tense (perfekt)

Clitic biti + l-participle. This is where the verb lives most of the time — reporting that something broke.

Future I (futur prvi)

The infinitive drops its -i before the clitic: pokvarit ću (pf), kvarit ću (impf). Separate word — never pokvariti ću.

Imperative

Mostly used in the negative: you rarely tell someone to break something on purpose, so the everyday form is Nemoj pokvariti… ("Don't break / Don't ruin…").

Conditional I (kondicional prvi)

bih-clitics + l-participle.

Other forms

• Passive participle: pokvaren, pokvarena, pokvareno ("broken / out of order / spoiled / rotten"). This is a high-frequency adjective in its own right: pokvareno mlijeko ("spoiled milk"), pokvaren lift ("a broken lift / out-of-order elevator"), and figuratively pokvaren čovjek ("a corrupt / rotten person"). Note there is no jotation here — the stem ends in r, a consonant that does not soften, so the participle is plain pokvar- + -en → pokvaren. (Contrast its antonym popravljen, where the labial v does jotate.) The imperfective gives kvaren.
• Verbal adverb: imperfective kvareći ("[while] spoiling/ruining"). The perfective has no present verbal adverb.

Key uses and government

1. Transitive pokvariti + accusative — someone breaks something

With an agent subject, pokvariti takes a direct object in the accusative: somebody breaks or ruins something. See the accusative direct object.

2. The se-anticausative — it breaks by itself

This is the heart of the verb. Add se and the object becomes the subject, and the meaning shifts to "break down / go off by itself" — no agent, nobody to blame. English uses the bare verb "break (down)" for exactly this ("the car broke down", not "the car was broken down by someone"). Croatian marks it with se. The thing that breaks is now the grammatical subject, so the participle agrees with it. For the full mechanism, see the se passive and impersonal.

3. The dative of misfortune — whose bad luck it was

Croatian rarely leaves the anticausative bare. To say who is affected by the breakdown — who suffers the inconvenience — it adds a dative pronoun: mi, ti, mu, joj, nam…. This is the dative of misfortune (a flavour of the dative of the affected person): Pokvario mi se auto literally puts the breakdown "on me". English has no clean equivalent — "my car broke down" hides the affectedness in a possessive, while Croatian foregrounds it with the dative. The dative pronoun is not possessive: Pokvario mi se auto does not strictly say the car is mine, only that the breakdown happened to me. For this dative pattern, see the dative with verbs and adjectives.

4. The opposite verb: popraviti "to fix"

When the broken thing gets repaired, you switch to popraviti. Note the asymmetry of the reflexives: popraviti se means "improve / clear up" (good), while pokvariti se means "break down" (bad) — they are not a tidy mirror in the reflexive.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• pokvariti (pf, pokvarim, pokvario) / kvariti (impf, kvarim) — a po- prefix pair; transitive object = accusative.
• The big payoff is the se-anticausative: Auto se pokvario = "the car broke down by itself", agentlessly — and the participle agrees with the thing that broke.
• Add the dative of misfortune to say who suffered it: Pokvario mi se auto ("my car broke down on me"). The dative clitic marks affectedness, not strict possession.
• Passive participle pokvaren (no jotation — stem ends in r): pokvareno mlijeko, pokvaren lift, pokvaren čovjek.
• Its opposite is popraviti "to fix"; the reflexives are not symmetrical (popraviti se = improve, pokvariti se = break down).