Accusative affective states (strah me je)

Getting behind the wheel for the first time can be nerve-wracking. When talking about intense feelings like fear or shame, Croatian often uses a completely different sentence structure than English.

Fear and Shame as "Things"

In English, you say "I am afraid" or "I am ashamed," using an adjective to describe yourself. In Croatian, feelings like fear (strah) and shame (sram) act as nouns that "happen" to you.

The construction looks like this: Emotion noun + Accusative pronoun + je (is)

Literally, you are saying "Fear is me" or "Shame is me." For the first person ("I"), use the short accusative pronoun me:

• strah me je (I am afraid)
• sram me je (I am ashamed)

Let's see this in action when talking about taking a driving exam (polagati ispit):

Notice that polagati means to take an exam. When you successfully finish it, you use the completed action verb položiti (to pass an exam).

Expressing Other People's Feelings

To describe how other people are feeling, simply swap the accusative pronoun me for the person experiencing the emotion.

Here are the accusative clitic pronouns for other people:

• ga (him / it)
• ju / je (her)
• nas (us)
• vas (you, formal/plural)
• ih (them)

If the driving instructor (instruktor) or the examiner (ispitivač) gets nervous, you use their matching pronouns, like ga (him) or ih (them).

In the Driving School

As you navigate the driving school (autoškola), you will need to keep track of the pedestrians on the road and handle the car's controls, like the rearview mirror (retrovizor), turn signal (žmigavac), and gearbox (mjenjač).