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Russian phrases, by meaning
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Common questions about Russian
What's covered on this Russian page?
Thirty-four functional categories of meaning with Russian examples: the six cases (Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Instrumental, Prepositional), aspect pairs (читать/прочитать, писать/написать), tense (present is imperfective only; past and future come in both aspects), modality (мочь, должен, надо, хотеть), negation, motion verbs with their direction-of-motion split, comparison, and 26 others. Glossed with case labels.
Why does Russian have six cases, and what do they do?
Each case marks a different role. Nominative for the subject, Accusative for the direct object, Genitive for possession or absence, Dative for the recipient, Instrumental for the means or accompaniment, Prepositional always after certain prepositions for location and topic. Every noun, adjective, and pronoun shifts shape (with three genders × three numbers × six cases). The page labels every example with the case so the pattern is learnable.
What does perfective versus imperfective actually mean?
It's about whether the action is presented as complete-with-a-result or as a process. Я писал письмо 'I was writing a letter' (imperfective, ongoing) versus Я написал письмо 'I wrote the letter' (perfective, finished). Most Russian verbs come in pairs that share a meaning but differ in aspect. Aspect choice precedes tense choice; once you've picked aspect, you can put it in past, present (only for imperfective), or future.
Why does the Russian past tense agree with gender?
Because the past tense is historically a participle, and participles agree with whatever they describe. Я читал 'I read' (M speaker), я читала 'I read' (F speaker), они читали 'they read' (PL). Person disappears in the past — only gender and number remain. Examples on the page label the gender and number of the past form so you can see the agreement target.
How do Russian motion verbs work?
Motion verbs come in determinate-indeterminate pairs: идти (going one specific direction now) versus ходить (going generally, repeatedly, or both ways). ехать versus ездить for vehicle motion, бежать versus бегать for running. Adding directional prefixes (при-, у-, в-, вы-, под-, от-) layers another grid of meaning on top. Examples in Time and Aspect surface the pair distinction in everyday phrases.
Sources for Russian
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Wade, Terence (2011). A Comprehensive Russian Grammar, 3rd ed. Wiley-Blackwell.
- Timberlake, Alan (2004). A Reference Grammar of Russian. Cambridge University Press.
- Comrie, Bernard; Stone, Gerald & Polinsky, Maria (1996). The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press.
- Sussex, Roland & Cubberley, Paul (2006). The Slavic Languages. Cambridge University Press.