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Questions & Answers about To je knjiga.
How can I tell what gender knjiga is just by looking at it?
You can usually tell a noun's gender by its ending! In Croatian, regular nouns that end in -a in their base dictionary form (the nominative case) are feminine. Because knjiga ends in -a, it is a feminine noun.
If knjiga is feminine, why do we use to (which is neuter) instead of the feminine ta?
When you are generally pointing something out or identifying it for the first time by saying "That is a...", Croatian uses the fixed neuter pronoun to. In this specific structure, you don't need to match the word "that" to the gender of the noun you are pointing at.
Why is knjiga in the nominative case in this sentence?
The nominative case is the basic "naming" case, which is the form you will find in a dictionary. We use the nominative here because knjiga comes right after the verb je (is) to simply identify what the object is.
I see the words for "That", "is", and "book". Where is the word for "a"?
Croatian doesn't have articles like "a", "an", or "the". The single word knjiga can mean "a book" or "the book" depending entirely on the context of your conversation.