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Welcome To Our Course!: - Verb-Object. "Old" Information (The Things You Tell About) Is Normally Closer

This document introduces a Russian language course, noting it will teach standard Russian as spoken in Moscow and St. Petersburg using American English. It discusses how Russian is an inflected language with 6 cases that change noun forms and allows more flexible word order than English. Vowels are reduced in unstressed syllables, becoming indistinguishable in some cases, differing from the stronger-weaker syllable alternation in English. The document provides examples of cases and their typical uses.

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Horia Banciu
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24 views

Welcome To Our Course!: - Verb-Object. "Old" Information (The Things You Tell About) Is Normally Closer

This document introduces a Russian language course, noting it will teach standard Russian as spoken in Moscow and St. Petersburg using American English. It discusses how Russian is an inflected language with 6 cases that change noun forms and allows more flexible word order than English. Vowels are reduced in unstressed syllables, becoming indistinguishable in some cases, differing from the stronger-weaker syllable alternation in English. The document provides examples of cases and their typical uses.

Uploaded by

Horia Banciu
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

WELCOME TO OUR COURSE!

Now you are ready to proceed to the main part of the tree!

We are happy that you have chosen our Russian course. Just to make it clear, we are
using American English in this coursebut don't worry, we will accept all versions of
English where appropriate. Just be careful around expressions like "bathroom" or "1st
floor", because these may mean different things than what you are used to.

As for Russian, we teach the standard language, which is based on the variation spoken
around Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and we stick to the usage typical of these cities.
Do not worry, though: for more than one reason Russian is rather uniform over the
territory of Russian (still, there is some variation in pronunciation and a few items of
everyday vocabulary). We try to stay neutral in style, with occasional trips into formal
and informal language.

CASES AND WORD ORDER


Russian is an inflected language, so the forms of nouns and modifying adjectives
correspond to their role in the sentence.

These forms are called cases. Russian has 6 cases: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive,
Prepositional, Dative and Instrumental. The Nominative is the dictionary form; as for the
others, we are going to cover them gradually, one by one.

This allows for a more loose word order. But not random! A typical word order
is subjectverbobject. Old information (the things you tell about) is normally closer
to the beginning of the sentence which is probably why pronouns are often found closer
to the beginning of a sentence than a noun would be :

I know him. .
I know Maria. .
That includes words like here, in this way, then and so on.

Unlike English, adverbs are NOT universally grouped at the end. So pay attention to the
typical positions for the expressions of time, place and manner. Eg. very much is
typically in the end-position in English, but in Russian it is just before the thing that is
"very" or very much:

She likes to read very much =


Good luck!

VOWEL REDUCTION
Like in English, vowel letters aren't all pronounced just like in the alphabet. In Russian,
unstressed syllables have vowels reduced:

and become the same uh-sound


and () become the same sound similar to "i" in "hit"
actually becomes an i-like sound, not an uh-like (except in a few words). This also
affects "" after ,,, or in many words (sadly, not all).
So, when a vowel is not stressed, it becomes weaker, somewhat shorter, and also some
vowels become indistinguishable.

The unstressed syllable is strongest just before the stress. In all other places it is even
weaker than that (though, some long words, especially compounds, may acquire a
secondary stress). This makes the system different from the English one, where stronger
and weaker syllables tend to alternate.

MORE ON THE CASE SYSTEM


For now, we only study simple sentences that either use the dictionary form,
the Nominative case, or use the Accusative (direct object of an action), which has the
same form for many classes of nouns.

The case is defined by its use. Nevertheless, these forms have names, usually calques
from Latin that reflect some typical use (but not the only one):

Nominative (subject)
Accusative (direct object)
Genitive ("of" something)
Prepositional (place or topic)
Dative (recipient, "indirect" object)
Instrumental (means of action)
As you can see, these names are of little use until you know what sentence, verb or
preposition requires that you use that particular form.

some nouns of foreign origin are indeclinable, i.e. all their forms are the same. This
includes words like , or .

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