Whether you are taking daily medication, calculating hourly wages, or checking your car's fuel consumption, you often need to express rates and frequencies. In English, we typically use words like "a," "an," or "per" (e.g., "twice a day," "ten euros an hour").
In Croatian, this is done using the preposition na followed by the unit of measurement or time in the accusative case.
Frequency: Routines and Doses
To say how often something happens in a day (dan) or week (tjedan), use na plus the accusative. Because dan and tjedan are masculine inanimate nouns, their accusative forms look exactly the same as their dictionary forms, giving us na dan and na tjedan.
Rates: Speed and Wages
This exact same structure is used to talk about speed or hourly rates. For masculine inanimate time periods like an hour (sat) or a month (mjesec), the accusative again remains unchanged (na sat, na mjesec).
However, if the unit is feminine, such as a second (sekunda), remember to apply the standard feminine accusative ending, changing the final -a to -u to make na sekundu.
Proportions and Distances
The preposition na is not limited to time. You can also pair it with distances or other units to describe rates of consumption or broader proportions, such as "per a hundred kilometers."