Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to form and use the genitive case to express possession, absence, and quantity.

Lesson Explanation

The genitive case, previewed in Part 1, Lesson 2’s number rules and Part 2, Lesson 6’s time-telling, has three core everyday functions: possession, absence/negation (covered fully in Part 5, Lesson 3), and quantity.

Possession, genuinely simpler than English’s “‘s” or French/Italian’s prepositional constructions: the possessed noun comes first, followed by the possessor in the genitive, with no linking word at all: книга студента (the student’s book — literally “book of-student”).

Masculine nouns take -а in the genitive: студент → студента. Feminine nouns ending in -а take -ы (or -и after г, к, х, ж, ч, ш, щ, following the spelling rule from Part 1, Lesson 6): книга → книги. Neuter nouns take -а: окно → окна.

Quantity, as previewed in the numbers lesson: много (a lot of), мало (a little/few), and any number two and above (Part 1, Lesson 2) all require the following noun in the genitive: много книг (a lot of books — genitive plural), два студента (two students — genitive singular, per the special “два/три/четыре” rule already introduced).

A genuinely important connecting structure covered fully in Part 3, Lesson 2: possession of a person (rather than an object belonging to someone) is expressed with a different construction entirely, using у plus the genitive of the possessor plus есть (from Part 1, Lesson 5): У меня есть книга. (I have a book.)

Practice Questions