Verb Government: Which Case After Which Verb

Every Croatian verb carries a hidden instruction: it tells you which case its object must take, and sometimes which preposition has to precede that object. Grammarians call this rekcija ("government" or "valency"). The default — most verbs — is the accusative, but a sizeable, high-frequency group instead demands the genitive, the dative, or the instrumental, and yet another group insists on a fixed preposition plus a case. The catch for an English speaker is that you cannot read the case off the meaning: "help someone" looks transitive but is dative in Croatian, "fear something" is genitive, "think about" is na + accusative. Government is a lexical fact, stored in the dictionary entry of each verb, and this page is the map of that territory — the index that points you to the detailed case pages.

The default: accusative for direct objects

The unmarked transitive pattern is verb + accusative, with no preposition. If a verb takes an object that English would call a plain direct object, your first hypothesis should be the accusative — and most of the time you will be right.

The everyday workhorses — vidjeti (see), imati (have), čitati (read), kupiti (buy), jesti (eat), piti (drink), voljeti (love), čekati (wait for), gledati (watch) — are all accusative verbs. Treat the accusative as the case you fall back to when nothing tells you otherwise.

Genitive verbs: fearing, remembering, getting rid of

A specific semantic cluster governs the genitive directly (no preposition). Many of them are reflexive (with se) and turn on the idea of relating to, separating from, or being affected by something.

The unifying idea is loose but real: these verbs treat their object as a point of reference, source, or thing-removed, which is exactly what the genitive is for elsewhere in the language. The full inventory lives on the genitive with verbs page.

Dative verbs: helping, trusting, bothering

Another high-frequency group governs the dative. These are the ones that trip up English speakers hardest, because their English equivalents take a plain direct object — you help someone, believe someone, thank someone with no preposition in English, but all three are dative in Croatian.

The deep logic is that Croatian frames these as something happening to/for a person rather than something done to a person — and the dative is precisely the case of the affected, benefiting, or addressed party. The complete list and the "experiencer" patterns (Hladno mi je, Žao mi je) are on the dative with verbs and adjectives page.

Instrumental verbs: occupying oneself, marrying, ruling

A smaller but very useful set governs the instrumental directly. Several of them describe occupying oneself with, controlling, or pairing up with something or someone.

Here the thread is "doing-with" or "joining-with": the instrumental is the case of the means and the companion, and these verbs extend that to occupation, pride (the thing you carry yourself with), and partnership. Details on instrumental: means and accompaniment.

Preposition + case verbs

Finally, a large class of verbs binds to a fixed preposition plus a case — the Croatian counterpart of English phrasal verbs. The preposition is not optional and is frequently not the one English would lead you to expect: "think about" is misliti na + accusative, "worry about" is brinuti se o + locative, "consist of" is sastojati se od + genitive.

Because the preposition and its case have to be drilled together as one unit, they get their own dedicated treatment on the verbs with fixed prepositions page.

How this differs from English

English encodes most object relations either with a bare noun (help her, believe him) or with a small kit of prepositions (think about, wait for, depend on). Croatian splits that work between four oblique cases and a set of fixed prepositions, and the mapping is not transparent: English "no preposition" can become Croatian dative (pomoći nekomu) or genitive (bojati se nečega), while English "wait for" becomes a bare Croatian accusative (čekati nekoga, no preposition at all). There is no algorithm that converts the English frame into the Croatian one. The only reliable strategy is to store the case with the verb the way you store its meaning — to learn not "pomoći = help" but "pomoći + dative = help".

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Government (rekcija) is the verb's built-in demand for a specific case and sometimes a preposition. It is a lexical property, not predictable from English.
• The default is the accusative (vidjeti, imati, čitati, čekati). Reach for it when nothing signals otherwise.
• Frequent departures: genitive (bojati se, sjećati se, riješiti se), dative (pomoći, vjerovati, smetati, nedostajati), instrumental (baviti se, ponositi se, oženiti se).
• A whole class binds to a fixed preposition + case (misliti na, brinuti se o, sastojati se od) — covered on the prepositional-verbs page.
• Memorise each verb as lemma + government, exactly the way you memorise its meaning.