94 Common Phrases

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This chapter should give you most common phrases, i.e. constructions which have a special, unexpected meaning.

First, we start with phrases where certain nouns are used as ‘places’, sometimes used both as locations and destinations, but the meaning is not a place, but some other attribute.

Strictly speaking, expressions like na ručku could be understood as phrases too, but they also involve being somewhere to have a lunch, and such activities are quite predictable and easy to understand.

Some ‘places’ are harder to understand. One of the most common is red, which was already introduced in 55 More Prepositions; to recap:

Ti si na redu. It’s your turn.

Nisam još došla na red. My turn didn’t come yet. {f}

When used with u¨, the meaning changes completely to OK, alright; sometimes, it’s used as a destination, it corresponds to English put into order and similar phrases.

This table summarizes the most common ‘places’:

prep. ‘place’ loc. dest. meaning (be...)
u¨ forma + + physically fit
u¨ igra + + involved
u¨ obzir (+) + in play, in consideration
u¨ povoj, pl povoji + in early stages, in infancy
u¨ red + (+) OK
na¨ konj + (+) on to a good thing
home free
na¨ red + + someone’s turn

Then, there are phrases which look like origins, but actually express how something happened; common ones are:

  iz vedra neba completely unexpectedly, out of the blue

  iz čista mira completely unprovoked

As you can see, adjectives in these phrases have a bit strange genitive forms. These are a bit archaic, so-called indefinite forms; they will be further explained in 99 Aorist Tense and Other Marginal Features. Usual forms are used too, as you can see from the statistics on the .hr domain by Google™, in thousands:

iz čista mira 61
iz čistog mira 10

Then, there are many phrases when you further describe something – some action or state – using comparison with some term, for example:

  On je glup kao stup. He’s dumb as a stump. (i.e. extremely stupid)

This table lists common adjective + kao + noun phrases:

phrase meaning
kao ... ...

The rest is coming soon :)

5 Easy Croatian: 94 Common Phrases N A  DL  G 24 I V This chapter should give you most common phrases , i.e. constructions which have a special, unexpected meaning...

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