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Russian grammar wheels
Grammar Wheels
"I gave my three books to her at the market." — Change any wheels to see how Russian encodes each shift.
Common questions about Russian
What can I toggle on the Russian wheel?
Subject (я, ты, он / она, мы), tense (past, present, future), aspect (perfective vs imperfective), mood (indicative, question, command, subjunctive), polarity, voice, and case marking on the object. Each spin rebuilds the verb in Cyrillic with a transliteration.
How does the perfective / imperfective distinction work?
Russian aspect is binary and lexical — most verbs come in pairs (писать / написать). Switching aspect on the wheel often picks up a different stem entirely. Imperfective forms a present tense; perfective does not, and its 'present' shape is read as future.
Why does the past-tense ending depend on subject gender?
Russian past tense agrees with the subject's gender and number rather than person. Switching the speaker from masculine to feminine takes писал to писала, and plural takes писали.
How does case marking change as I toggle the wheel?
Direct objects take accusative; indirect recipients take dative; some verbs govern genitive or instrumental. Toggling the role of a noun swaps its ending while the noun itself stays in place.
Can I use the wheel without reading Cyrillic?
Each generated sentence shows Cyrillic, a transliteration, a word-by-word gloss, and an English translation. The same letters reappear under each spin so Cyrillic becomes familiar over time.
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.