merge|Russian Grammar Noun Cases

Russian has six cases. Cases are suffixes (word endings) that tell you the context of word. English has almost no cases. However, sometimes we make up cases in English. For example, my friend refers to her dog as a "doggie," his paws as "pawsies," his ears as "earsies," his bed as his "beddie," etc. So when she says, "Your earsies are filthy!" I know that she's talking about the dog's ears, not mine.

The nominative case indicates the subject of a sentence. The other five cases indicate the object of the sentence. E.g., for the sentence "I washed my dog," "I" is the subject and "dog is the object. The subject and object are always nouns or pronouns.

Cases affect nouns, adjectives modifying the nouns, and possessive pronouns ("my," "your," etc.). Going back to the doggie example, my friend might say that her dog has "cutesy pawsies." She modifies the adjective to match the noun. Remember that possessive pronouns, adjectives, and nouns are used together ("My stinky dog"). In contrast, pronouns are used with verbs ("I walk…).

Adjective endings agree with the nouns they modify in gender and case. They also agree in number, but I think of plural as a fourth gender, to make things simpler. Russian has six cases and four genders (including plural), so adjectives have, in theory, 24 possible endings! Luckily there's overlap between the cases, so there are less than 24 actual endings for you to learn.

Signal words often precede a case.

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Nominative case

The nominative case is used for a sentence's subject. In "Bob eats lunch," Bob is the subject. This is the case you find in dictionaries.

• Nominative case nouns, adjectives, and personal pronouns

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Accusative case

The accusative case is used for a sentence's direct object. In "Bob eats lunch," "lunch" is the direct object. In English we use word order to indicate subject and object (subject is first, object last). In English, "Bob eats lunch" and "Lunch eats Bob" have different meanings. But in Russian, a suffix indicates whether a word is the subject or object. If English indicated the direct object by adding "oo," we could say "Bob eats lunchoo" or "Lunchoo eats Bob" and either way it would clear that Bob was doing the eating.

• Accusative case nouns, adjectives, and personal pronouns

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Prepositional case

The prepositional case is used for a sentence's object to indicate that a sentence's object is a location or an activity.

• Prepositional case nouns, adjectives, and personal pronouns

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Genitive case

The genitive case is used for a sentence's object to indicate the following contexts:

• Negation, e.g., "I don't have a car." The genitive case is preceded by нет ("no," actually a contraction of не есть, or "not there is").
• Possession, e.g., "I have a car."
• Numbers. E.g., "I have six chairs" is plural in English but not plural in Russian! The genitive case is preceded by a number.
• Part of something, or "some," or "any." E.g., "My house has a red roof" ("red roof" is genitive). The genitive case is preceded by любой (any). "Some" doesn't have a word in Russian, it's expressed by putting words into genitive case.
• "Of," e.g., the house of the teacher ("teacher" is genitive). "Of" doesn't have a word in Russian, it's expressed by putting words into genitive case.

• Genitive case nouns, adjectives, and personal pronouns

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Dative case

The Dative case is used in cases of indirect objects. As in English, sentences do not always have indirect objects. Indirect objects indicate "to whom", or "to what" an action is done.

• Dative case nouns, adjectives, and personal pronouns

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Instrumental case

The instrumental case is used with the preposition with, such as in: I rode with Jane.

It is also used with the preposition with to indicate by what means an action was performed - such as in: I wrote with the pen.

• Instrumental case nouns, adjectives, and personal pronouns