Slovak Grammar - The Number 1

Just to give you a small taste of what we are experiencing right now, I'd like to show you a few examples of Slovak grammar.

For today, we will look at the nominative (or subject) use of the number 1. Here are some Slovak sentences:

Tam je jeden malý chlapec. Tá jedna izba je svetlá. V triede je jedna tabul'a a jedno umývadlo. Na stole stojí jedna váza. V izbe je jedno moderné kreslo. Jeden zahraničný študent študuje slovenčinu.

There are three different uses of the word one (1). If you are referring to a masculine subject it is jeden. If you are referring to a feminine subject it is jedna. Finally, if you are referring to a neuter subject it is jedno. So as you can probably guess, it is very important to know which gender the word is. If you get it wrong you will get the number wrong, and subsequently the adjectives as well.

And remember, this is only the nominative case! If you have one strawberry you would say, "Mám jednu jahodu." This is accusative feminine case, so the "jedna" from nominative changes to "jednu".

Speaking Slovak requires not only the vocabulary to speak, but also a working knowledge of all the cases so you can easily and quickly switch the word endings as needed. Later we will look at how nouns, even names, change in the sentence.