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How Russian packages meaning
Russian grammar at a glance
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Common questions about Russian
What are Russian's six cases?
Russian nouns take one of six case endings: nominative (subject), accusative (direct object), genitive (possession, negation), dative (recipient), instrumental (means), prepositional (location, after certain prepositions). Adjectives and pronouns agree with the noun in case, gender, and number. Word order is flexible because case endings carry the role.
What is verb aspect in Russian and why does every verb have a pair?
Every Russian verb has a pair: imperfective (ongoing, habitual) and perfective (completed). писать / написать both mean 'to write' but signal different things. Imperfective conjugates in past, present, and future. Perfective only conjugates in past and future — there's no perfective present, because something completed can't also be in progress. Choosing aspect is grammatically required.
Does Russian have grammatical gender?
Three genders — masculine, feminine, neuter. Adjectives, pronouns, demonstratives, and past-tense verbs all agree with the noun in gender. Most masculine nouns end in a consonant (стол 'table'), feminine in -а/-я (книга 'book'), neuter in -о/-е (окно 'window'). Plural drops gender distinctions: all three genders share the same plural endings.
Does Russian have articles like 'the' or 'a'?
No articles at all. Russian relies on context, word order, and demonstratives (этот 'this', тот 'that') to convey definiteness. книга can mean 'a book', 'the book', or just 'books' depending on what surrounds it. Putting the noun before the verb often signals 'the'; after the verb, often 'a'. But articles are never grammatically required.
Why does Russian past tense agree with gender, but present doesn't?
Historical accident. The Russian past tense developed from an old Slavic past participle, which was an adjective and inherited adjective-style gender agreement. The present and future, by contrast, were always finite verbs that agreed with person and number instead. So 'я писал' / 'я писала' (I wrote, m./f.) — the gender shows because past-tense verbs are technically frozen participles.
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.