Breakdown of Nije izgubila torbu.
torba
bag
nisam
am not (nisi, nije, nismo, niste, nisu)
izgubiti
to lose
Questions & Answers about Nije izgubila torbu.
Where is the word for "she" in this sentence?
In Croatian, you often drop the pronoun (like ona for "she") because the verb already shows who is doing the action. Here, the feminine ending -la on izgubila (lost) tells us that a female subject did the action.
Why does the word for bag end in -u (torbu) instead of -a (torba)?
Torba is a feminine noun. Because the bag is the direct object of the sentence (the thing being lost), it must take the accusative case. For feminine nouns ending in -a, the accusative ending changes to -u.
How would I say "She didn't lose it" using the pronouns from this lesson?
Because torba is a feminine noun, you replace it with a feminine accusative pronoun ("her/it"). The short clitic forms are je or ju. To say "She didn't lose it", you would say Nije ju izgubila. (We usually prefer ju next to words ending in -je like nije, just to avoid repeating the exact same sound).
Why do we use nije here instead of just ne to say "didn't"?
In Croatian, the past tense is made using a helper verb (forms of "to be") plus the main action verb. To make the past tense negative, you don't just add ne; you use the special negative helper verbs (nisam, nisi, nije, etc.). Nije combined with izgubila makes the negative past tense "she didn't lose".
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