Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to name the six Russian cases and their core functions, and explain the role of the nominative case.

Lesson Explanation

This lesson introduces the single most defining feature of Russian grammar: the case system, previewed throughout Part 1 (in the numbers lesson’s genitive requirement and the note that adjectives change by case). Russian has six grammatical cases, and every noun, pronoun, and adjective changes its ending depending on which case is required by its role in the sentence — genuinely replacing much of what fixed word order and prepositions do in English.

The six cases and their core roles, previewed here and covered one per lesson through the rest of Part 2 and all of Part 3: nominative (subject — this lesson), accusative (direct object — Part 2, Lesson 3), genitive (possession/absence — Part 3, Lesson 1), dative (indirect object — Part 3, Lesson 2), instrumental (means/accompaniment — Part 3, Lesson 3), prepositional (location, after certain prepositions — Part 2, Lesson 4).

The nominative case is the “dictionary form” of a noun — the form used for the subject of a sentence, and the form you’d look up in a dictionary: Студент читает. (The student reads — “студент” in the nominative, since it’s the subject.) The nominative is also used for the predicate noun in the verbless “to be” sentences from Part 1, Lesson 5: Она врач. (She is a doctor — “врач” stays nominative.)

A genuinely important reassurance for a system that can feel overwhelming at first: the nominative is always the “default” form — every noun you’ve learned so far in this course has been in the nominative, so nothing already learned needs to change; only new grammatical roles introduced from this lesson forward will require different case endings.

Practice Questions