When describing an event so extreme that it causes a specific consequence—like weather so severe it shuts down a city—Croatian uses consecutive (result) clauses.
Toliko ... da (So / So much ... that)
To express "so [adjective/adverb] that" or "so much that", use the correlative pair toliko ... da. The word toliko comes in the main clause to emphasize the intensity of the action or state, and the conjunction da introduces the result.
You can place toliko directly before an adjective to emphasize a state:
| The wind was so strong that it uprooted the tree in the yard. | Vjetar je bio toliko jak da je iščupao stablo u dvorištu. |
| The storm was so strong that it uprooted roofs. | Oluja je bila toliko snažna da je iščupala krovove. |
You can also use it before an adverb to emphasize how an action was performed:
| The thunderbolts rumbled across the city so loudly that the children got scared. | Gromovi su toliko glasno tutnjali po gradu da su se djeca uplašila. |
| The rain fell for so long that it flooded the streets across the village. | Kiša je padala toliko dugo da je poplavila ulice po selu. |
Using Toliko with Verbs
When you want to say an action happened "so much that" it caused a result, use toliko to modify the verb. This is very common when talking about the severe physical impacts of natural disasters.
| The hurricane ravaged the island so much that people lost everything. | Uragan je toliko poharao otok da su ljudi izgubili sve. |
| The snow drifts paralyzed the traffic so much that we did not go to work. | Snježni nanosi su toliko paralizirali promet da nismo išli na posao. |
| The lake froze so much that we can walk on the ice. | Jezero se toliko smrznulo da možemo hodati po ledu. |
Tako da (So / Therefore)
If you simply want to state a logical result without emphasizing the extreme intensity of the cause, you can use the phrase tako da (so / therefore) at the beginning of the second clause. In this case, you drop toliko from the first clause.
| The hurricane rumbled for hours, so we did not sleep. | Uragan je tutnjao satima, tako da nismo spavali. |
| The water flooded the basement, so we don't have heating. | Voda je poplavila podrum, tako da nemamo grijanje. |