How to distinguish accusative from genitive: all about the difficulties of cases in Russian

The grammar of the Russian language is incredibly extensive and at the same time extremely complex. However, if you properly understand the topic that represents the problem for you, eventually everything will fall into place.

In this article, we will talk about how to distinguish between the accusative case and the genitive, and a few more difficulties in declining nouns and pronouns. And we start with the basic concepts and rules.

Importance of cases in Russian

For the connection of words in sentences, all independent parts of speech can take the necessary form: verbs vary in time, number, person and pledge, and nouns, numerals, adjectives, participles and pronouns - by numbers and cases. So they carry out their syntactic role in the proposals, but for this it is necessary to incline them correctly.

In Russian there are only 6 cases, each of them has auxiliary questions and own endings. However, when choosing the latter, it is strictly necessary to take into account the declension of nouns. Plus, all adjectives associated with the words of this part of the speech, participles and numerals also depend on it. Thus, in order to learn how to change all these morphological units by case, you first need to study this category in detail.

Declination

Permanent signs of nouns as part of speech include gender (female, masculine, middle), declension (1 st, 2 nd, 3 rd, indeclinable and different words). Also it is necessary to distinguish between nouns animate and inanimate, nominal and own. And it is from the second category that the change in cases depends, or rather the addition of the necessary ending.

It is necessary to know that the first declension includes nouns of both masculine and feminine gender with the endings "-a" and "-y", for example, a rainbow, a fox, a man. In the second - a masculine gender with a zero ending (son-in-law, genius, yogurt) and all the words of the middle kind (window, grief, bed), and in the third - only those words of the feminine gender that end in "b" (mother, night, lynx ). However, to change the case of declension of nouns is significant only in the singular, because in the plural all the words of a given part of the speech have the same endings ("-y / -i, -a / -y"), for example, foxes, yogurt, mother, Shore, anchors.

The role of case

Each of the six cases in Russian has its own meaning and purpose in the text. So, with their help, words fulfill their syntactic role, forming a connection with in word-combinations.

Also from the case it is possible to determine to which sentence member the given noun refers: if it is in the nominative case, it is the subject, if in the prepositional and answers the question "Where?", In the genitive ("from where?") Or in the accusative (" Where? ") - this circumstance, in other cases - addition.

With regard to adjectives and participles, they, regardless of case, are definitions, like ordinal numerals. But the quantitative ones are always circumstances with the meaning of measure and degree and answer the question "how much?".

Not subject to change by case

Special attention should be paid to the nouns that are not stolen and differently sung. The first of these are words, mostly borrowed from foreign languages. For example, casinos, eskimo, muffins, pots, coffee, etc. Their form is unchanged, that is, they can not be declined by case, since their ending will remain the same. In this regard, the problem of how to distinguish between the accusative case and the genitive, or which ending to choose when writing, does not apply to this category of words, and therefore they are easy to use in the text.

IP: in the cup what? - tasty coffee

RP: no what? - delicious coffee

D.P .: add to what? - to a delicious coffee

V. p .: want what? - tasty coffee

TP: smells like what? - Delicious coffee

P. p .: think about what? - about tasty coffee

Change in cases outside the declination rules

However, a significant difficulty is represented by words that are different from each other, there are only 11 of them (path + 10 to "-ya": seed, udder, burden, crown, stirrup, tribe, time, name, flame, banner). When they change by case, they take the end of different declensions. In addition, only a noun in the accusative or nominative of a series of words for "-me" does not require the addition of the suffix "-en" when declining in the singular. In other cases, it is necessary.

However, it is for this reason that the question of how to distinguish between the accusative case and the genitive case does not apply to the different nouns being undeclared, since their form is. Etc. is identical and. Etc. In the plural of the genitive case, the suffixes "-one" ("names, tribes") and "-yans" ("stirrups, seeds") are added to them. It's easier to memorize it visually: on the attached photo "table of cases of differently spelling nouns".

The main difficulty

To learn how to cope with the task, how to distinguish the accusative from the genitive, it is necessary to learn how to correctly ask questions to words and determine the morphological characteristics of nouns. This will help to take advantage of a little cunning by replacing difficult words with those that clearly differ in these two cases, that is, in any example of the 1st declension.

So, if you see in the text an animate noun in the plural, then instead of it one should mentally use inanimate in the same form. For example, "I see whom? -the people" ("I see what? -books" -because it is not a subject, then it is not, and so on, so we choose in....), "No one-people" ( "There is nothing" - books "- r. P.).

If the problem is the animate name of the masculine noun of the 2nd declension, substitute the "mother" for it, and then ask questions of the accusative case and the genitive with the auxiliary words. For example, I see whom? - oslA (see who? - Mom - v. N.), No one? - ass (there is no one? - mom - r. P.). Similar cunning should be used to distinguish between the accusative and genitive case of pronouns (personal and return), and declining possessive should be guided by the nouns associated with them.