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[bellezzarubata.livejournal.com]

I'm unclear as to when I should use certain cases.  This is my current understanding:


Accusative is used when you're talking about something/direct object, such as:

я хочу собаку
я вижу его


Genitive is used when you're talking about ownership, such as:

это его книгы
Is ownership (with special modifiers or more?) also applied to "зовут"? -- Её зовут _____.


And how does Dative apply to age if it's purpose is to explain an indirect object? I'm not making the corellation, sorry.

Comments

[kunaifusu.livejournal.com]

The truth about cases is that they are an artificial tool to describe various language patterns, they are secondary to patterns and don't make much sense by themselves. If you ask a native speaker what case has been used for a certain word in a sentence he or she would have to replace that word with a question word and figure the case from it (assuming they know what a "case" is at all). This works by transforming the question with the same pattern, for example "Ему 20 лет" is a pattern "<Кому?> <Сколько?> лет" and in this pattern "Ему" answers to "кому?" hence it's in Dative case. However your books don't lie, "ему" is indeed an indirect object here because this pattern has been made from "<Сколько?> лет исполнилось <Кому?>" and thus you could say "20 лет исполнилось ему" or better "Ему исполнилось 20(лет)" because we are really talking about him, not 20 years.

In short - try to memorize patterns themselves because cases are there only to describe the patterns.

[bellezzarubata.livejournal.com]

Thank you, that makes a lot of sense.