3.3 Grammar: Accusative Case

The Direct Object Case

Посмотри́те ви́део! О чём мы говори́м? Watch the videos here. What are we talking about?

1. Мо́лли чита́ет тетра́дь.

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2. Мо́лли пи́шет эсэмэ́ску.

[VIDEO]

3. Мо́лли чита́ет ска́зку.

[VIDEO]

Вини́тельный Паде́ж – Accusative Case

Part I. Case Notes

In Unit 1, you learned about the Nominative Case, which is essentially the dictionary case for Russian nouns and adjectives. That is, the dictionary (typically) lists Russian nouns and adjectives in their Nominative Case forms. The Nominative Case, recall, is also typically synonymous with the ‘subject’ of the sentence.

In Unit 2, you learned about the Prepositional Case, which allowed you to describe where things are located – which turns out to be pretty important.

If you don’t, you are like many other English speakers who, for the most part, really just do not need to know what it is. Since you’re now studying Russian, however, you MUST learn what a direct object is:

Take the sentence everyone wants to know how to say in another language, “I love you.” This is a beautiful and prototypical Subject – Verb – (Direct) Object sentence. The subject is “I” because “I” is the person (or thing) doing the action. The verb “love” agrees with the subject. Remember subject and verb ALWAYS agree. Finally, the object of the verb “love”, is the person (or thing) that receives the action of the verb (ick…that description takes all the fun out of it, doesn’t it?). The object is “you” in this example.

What about that other example, “Did you watch Game of Thrones last night?” This is another good example of an SVO sentence (although it does have a bit of extra information in it, too). What is the subject of the sentence? Who or what is doing the action? You are correct if you think that “YOU” is the subject. “You” are doing the watching. The verb is “watch”. What is the object of “watch”? What is the person or thing being watched? If you think the object is “Game of Thrones”, you are correct.

In Russian, things are not exactly like English, and THIS is when having all those case endings comes in really handy. It turns out, Russian has what is known as ‘free word order’. This is essentially what it sounds like. Objects can be first in the sentence and subjects can be last. The case endings tell us what’s what.

Let’s consider the Russian version of “I love you,” which is:

All permutations are possible and all mean ‘I love you.’ Compare to English. We would probably not ever say, “you I love,” or “love you I” – EVER. In Russian, although there are usually reasons for using one order over another, what you need to remember now is that free word order is possible in Russian and it’s not at all out of the ordinary to switch the order of words in a sentence.

If, by chance, you are thinking that Spanish does a similar thing with “I love you,” you are right (Te quiero), but in Spanish this order is restricted to pronouns, whereas in Russian, all words can potentially move within a sentence.  Again, there is usually a reason to do so, and we will touch on the why question a bit later. For the present know that free word order is possible in Russian and overt case markings (on nouns and adjectives) help make this possible.

А. INANIMATE Masculine nouns

Inanimate masculine nouns refer to objects and NOT living beings. In the Accusative Case their endings are identical to Nominative case endings. Be grateful for this.

Б. ANIMATE Masculine

Animate MASCULINE nouns refer to masculine (gender) people and animals. These ‘guys’ behave differently. That is, there’s another ending that I will keep hidden from you for the until next unit. Just know that I am doing this for a reason and that you’ll learn it VERY soon.

В. Feminine nouns (NEW RULES!!!)

Г. Neuter nouns

In the Accusative case neuter endings look exactly like the Nominative case endings. There is no change and nothing new to learn for neuter nouns.

Д. Plural nouns

If a noun is INANIMATE and plural, there is no change from Nominative to Accusative ending. If the noun is plural and ANIMATE, however, things get a little more interesting, but we are going to hold off until next unit before getting into the nitty gritty of that particular topic. We are going to intentionally avoid plural animate nouns in the Accusative case for now.

Например:

	Он пи́шет пи́сьма. ‘He is writing / writes letters.’
	Я люблю́ э́ти джи́нсы. ‘I love these jeans.’
	В па́рке де́ти чита́ют кни́ги. ‘In the park children read books.’

Е. Personal Pronouns.

Finally, you will, of course, learn the Accusative Case forms for all those pronouns (personal, possessive, and demonstrative). Below are the PERSONAL PRONOUNS in Accusative Case.