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Basic grammar

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mendeleyev:
The unstressed O rule:

So, when is an O an O? Sometimes it's "ah" and sometimes it's more like an "uh."

Here is a great link explaining in simple terms how this concept works: http://www.russian.ucla.edu/beginnersrussian/student/CH2/GSGCh1-2R.pdf

mendeleyev:
There are some great phrases and verbs here: http://www.learnalanguage.com/learn-russian/

el_guero:

--- Quote ---  So, when is an O an O? Sometimes it's "ah" and sometimes it's more like an "uh."

.... explaining in simple terms how this concept works 
--- End quote ---

Just like English, phonetic spelling just went out the window!

 :ROFL:

Back to rote memorization...

mendeleyev:
Today's Basic Grammar lesson is taken from the blog "How To Learn Russian."
http://howtolearnrussian.wordpress.com

Every noun in Russian has a gender. Unlike the Latin languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, Catalonian etc.) which have just masculine and feminine, Russian has three genders. The extra is called neuter, a bit like German which has these three. Another thing that should be mentioned is that there is no word for the. That’s right, none of that confusing el or la or la or le stuff. So really, this won’t be too hard to remember.

The Main Rules

Masculine nouns: These all end in consonants.

Feminine nouns: These end in either -а or -я. This is easy to remember as they have that “ah” sound at the end.

Neuter  nouns: -о or -е. If there are any foreign cognates, for example меню, then the word is most likely neuter as well.

One last thing before we move onto the nominative is that if the noun is ending in ь, then it is either masculine or feminine.



The Nominative Case

If I was to say “the boy kicked the ball”, in Russian “the boy” will be in the nominative case because it is the subject of the sentence. The nominative is merely the subject of the sentence. You don’t need to learn nominative case endings as they are just what you find in a dictionary, and are the same as what’s listed in the gender section. What you do need to know is how to make them plural.

For both masculine and feminine nouns: Add an -i sound at the end. As Randy says, we’ll look into morphology a little later.

Neuter nouns: These need an -a sound at the end. Again, we’ll learn the specific ending when we get into morphology.


Here are pronouns in the nominative form:

Я – I
Ты – You (informal)
Он (m)/ Она (f)/ Оно (n) – he / she / it
Вы – you (polite/ plural)
Мы – we
Они – they


Adjectives

Masculine adjectives have an -iy sound as their ending.

Feminine has an -aya sound.

Neuter nouns have either -ое or -ее

Plurals have an -iye sound

mendeleyev:
A nice link, including video, to Russian pronouns: http://www.russianlanguageguide.com/grammar/pronouns.asp

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