Da li večera počinje u sedam sati?

Does dinner start at seven o'clock?

Breakdown of Da li večera počinje u sedam sati?

• da li: do
• večera: dinner
• počinjati: to start
• u: at

Questions & Answers about Da li večera počinje u sedam sati?

What does da li do in this sentence?

Da li is a very common way to mark a yes/no question in Serbian. It does not translate word-for-word very neatly into English; it functions more like a question marker.

So:

Da li večera počinje u sedam sati?
= Does dinner start at seven o’clock? / Is dinner starting at seven?

Why doesn’t Serbian use English-style word order, like putting the verb before the subject?

Because Serbian does not need the same kind of inversion that English does.

In English, you say:

Dinner starts at seven.
but
Does dinner start at seven?

In Serbian, one very common pattern is:

Večera počinje u sedam sati.
Da li večera počinje u sedam sati?

So after da li, the sentence can keep a fairly normal statement-like order.

What does večera mean here?

Here večera means dinner or supper, the evening meal.

A useful thing to know is that večera can also look like a verb form from večerati (to eat dinner), but in this sentence it is clearly a noun, because the main verb is počinje.

So here:

večera = dinner
počinje = starts / begins