Questions & Answers about Pojedem cijeli ručak prije podneva.
Why use pojedem instead of jedem?
Pojedem is a perfective verb, which focuses on completing an action. It means to finish eating or to eat up completely. If you used the imperfective verb jedem, it would just mean you are in the process of eating your lunch before noon, rather than necessarily finishing the whole meal.
Cijeli ručak is the direct object, so why doesn't its ending change?
It actually is in the accusative case, but the ending doesn't change from the dictionary form! In Croatian, masculine nouns that are inanimate (objects, not living beings) have an accusative form that looks exactly like their nominative form. Both the adjective cijeli and the noun ručak follow this rule.
Why is the word for noon written as podneva instead of just podne?
The preposition prije (before) requires the noun that follows it to be in the genitive case. The neuter noun podne (noon) is slightly irregular: when it takes the genitive case, it adds an extra -v- before the normal -a ending, becoming podneva.
If I wanted to talk about eating the whole dinner, would I still use cijeli?
No, you would need to change the adjective to match the gender of the new noun. Because večera (dinner) is feminine, its accusative form is večeru, and the adjective must match it by becoming cijelu večeru. For breakfast (doručak, which is masculine), it works just like in this sentence: cijeli doručak.
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