This is not really day 1, but it might well be the first day which you could consider “really trying”. The height of my experience so far has mostly been in just curious searching of words which I have seen, e.g. in song titles, as well as some basics which you’ll see in the first few lessons of Duolingo, such as “где”, “когда”, etc. So, this is my first serious look at its grammar in particular.

Before Russian, I have learnt German to quite a high standard. A question many will have is “why Russian?”. For the most part, because it’s a challenge. Russian is also beautiful sounding in my view, and there is a lot of classic Russian literature which I would like to enjoy in the original language. It’s exciting.

Russian grammar: information overload

Reading Reddit posts attempting to encompass the whole Russian grammar, or delving straight into a grammar book, are useful… if you are already at an intermediate level. It is also useless to frivol about ignoring grammar. In the long-term this can only hurt, especially in heavily declined languages like Russian; you seriously cannot ignore it.

I am not going to claim that others should do the same as me. I am writing this as I learn — this is in essence a blog. Not everybody can put up with intensive grammar study. But that is my approach, and I document it as well as other aspects in this blog series.

To counter the “information overload” of delving directly into grammar resources, I take what are essentially case studies. I grab a few nouns, verbs, whatever it may be, and learn how to decline them. That way, I get a better idea about how things look in practice, and I can learn the “why” later.

But to start: soft-stem? hard-stem?

Honestly, this section was written after the others, but it logically should come first.

There is a lot of confusing stuff online about this, and ChatGPT is utterly hopeless for it. Basically, a noun determined as hard or soft depending on how its stem ends.

For the majority of cases, the following will suffice:

  • If the stem ends in a vowel, then it is hard if а, о, у, э, ы and soft if я, ё, ю, е, и, ь.
  • If the stem ends in a consonant, assume it is hard.

Exercise (src: https://youtu.be/KajR4YqTe8o?si=kk51VTV3FIpcG2Ro):

  • газета : hard
  • профессор : hard
  • идея : soft
  • чемодан : hard
  • кресло : hard
  • музей : soft (й also indicates soft)
  • мобильник : hard
  • планшет : hard
  • ремень : soft
  • пиво : hard
  • телевизор : hard
  • Англия : soft
  • кофе : soft
  • тетрадь : soft

ChatGPT is very bad at this. It told me that папа was a good soft-stemmed word, which led to create confusion.

Some Russian nouns to start with: Человек, город

Человек

A little irregular, but quite a common word, so why not. I created a template in note-taking application, filled out:

Singular
--------
Nominative: Чeловек
Accusative: Человека
Dative: Человеку
Genitive: Человека
Instrumental: Человеком
Prepositional: Человеке

Plural
--------
Nominative: люди
Accusative: людей
Dative: людям
Genitive: людей
Instrumental: людьми
Prepositional: людях

It’s masculine, it’s animate. Some other forms appeared, but I decided to just focus on learning at least one form for each case for now — there’s no reason to get overwhelmed on details.

As a next noun, I was considering глаз (eye), but apparently this has some archaic forms which might be nasty to learn at this point. I’m trying to find some consistent patterns which I can reapply.

Importantly, the other plural form with the человек cannot be ignored, because there appears to be different rules for when a particular form is used for the plural. I’ll look into that another day.

город

Next, I looked at город (city) — masculine once more, but inanimate, and with no particular irregularities in sight. Also, heard that Russian declension can vary depending on whether the noun is animate or inanimate, particularly as it pertains to masculine nouns:

Let’s learn. Singular:

Singular
--------
Nominative: город
Accusative: город
Dative: городу
Genitive: города
Instrumental: городом
Prepositional: городе

Just as a comment: this looks almost exactly the same as for человек, except for the accusative. It’s exactly as mentioned in the previous quote: “same as the nominative in inanimates and the genitive in animates” for masculine. We should see the same pattern in the accusative plural, although this pattern should be present even for nouns which are not masculine.

And now, for plural:

Plural
--------
Nominative: города
Accusative: города
Dative: городам
Genitive: городов
Instrumental: городом
Prepositional: городах

Ok, so this is a bit weird — this is not entirely what you would expect given the declension for человек. However, it does conform to the observation of nominative plural and accusative plural matching.

ChatGPT reckons this is because человек is highly irregular. That’s of course obvious when using the люд- root in the plural, but even when the человек root is used in the plural, it still does not match the expected pattern.

Yet another inanimate masculine noun for practice: стол

Singular
--------
Nominative: стол
Accusative: стол
Dative: столу
Genitive: cтола
Instrumental: столом
Prepositional: столе

Plural
--------
Nominative: столы
Accusative: столы
Dative: cтолам
Genitive: столов
Instrumental: столами
Prepositional: столах

… and an animate masculine noun for practice: cтудент

Singular
--------
Nominative: студент
Accusative: студента
Dative: студенту
Genitive: студента
Instrumental: студентом
Prepositional: студенте

Plural
--------
Nominative: студенты
Accusative: студентов
Dative:  студентам
Genitive: студентов
Instrumental: студентами
Prepositional: студентах

Now, the pattern opens up a bit.

Beginning with Russian pronouns: Я и ты

Personal pronouns are honestly a shitshow in Russian. The pattern is not consistent across cases; that is, you cannot rely on one person being the same as another across every case.

For now, let’s look at я and ты.

"I"
-----
Nominative: я
Accusative: меня
Dative: мне
Genitive: меня
Instrumental: миой
Prepositional: мне

"You"
-----
Nominative: ты
Accusative: тебя
Dative: тебе
Genitive: тебя
Instrumental: тобой
Prepositional: тебе

A verb: мочь (to want)

For now, I just consider the present tense.

Я могу
Ты можешь
Он/она можешь
Мы можем
Вы можете
Они могут

Some prepositions: в (во), с, из, у

в or во

В means “in”, and it looks to be used similarly to German “in”, but with different cases. German uses accusative to indicate motion in this context, and dative to indicate some stationary entity “inside”. In Russian, the accusative is kept (and likewise means “into” as in German, the movement variant), yet instead of using dative for the stationary indication, the prepositional case is used.

The accusative can be used to answer questions with “куда” (where to) while the prepositional variant can be used to answer questions with “где” (where).

с

С indicates “with” (e.g. “with a friend” = с другом) when used in the prepositional case, and has a couple of meanings when used in the genitive case.

In the genitive it can mean a few things, but they can broadly be separated into temporal and spacial meanings.

  • Temporally, it can mean “from” or “since”, e.g. “I’ll start from the beginning”, “It has been raining since this morning” = Начну с начала; С утра идет дождь.
  • Spatially, it can mean “off” or “along”, e.g. “Take the hat off your head”, “To go down the hill” = Снимите шляпу с головы; Идти с горы.

из

This one is relatively simple, indicating origin. It only takes one case: genitive.

  • Origin or source: “из города” (from the city).
  • Material or substance: “из ткани” (made of fabric).
  • Part of a whole: “из друзей” (one of the friends).

у

Very simple — indicates possession or something like “beside”.

It’s always used in the genitive case.

In Russian, the verb “to have” does not really exist, but you rather tend to use У to indicate possession of something. For example: “I have my bag” = У меня есть рюкзак / У меня рюкзак.