Cases....

[slu4ajnaya.livejournal.com]

Hi!

I am Russian speaking and I have a question for you - hope you can give an advice.... What is the best way to explain Russian cases (Nominative, Dative, etc) to a foreign (English) person? For me it seems complitely impossible.....

Thanks in advance

Comments

[dekarmi.livejournal.com]

Don't waste your time and efforts. Unless born and grown up in Russia, no person can comprehend the Great Mystery of the Russian cases...

[slu4ajnaya.livejournal.com]

oh no ))))) we are still trying... hoping my 'pupil' will start to feel it one day =)
still wondering if there is any method how to learn the cases...

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

Look at how well are writing a few members of the community: http://upthera44.livejournal.com/, http://olydiagron.livejournal.com/. Give them some more time.

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

Practice!

[pigmeich.livejournal.com]

Yours are quite OK for foreign, too.

[kehlen-crow.livejournal.com]

Oh, come off it. It is very well possible not to make too obvious mistakes if you try hard enough. And then you may start to 'feel' which one to put where :P .

[dekarmi.livejournal.com]

(That was a joke :))

[kehlen-crow.livejournal.com]

I know. But sometimes I also feel this way about English, with all the phrasal verbes and endless synonyms, and often about French, with all the articles. But I -know- that it is doable. Some time, after years and years and years ;-)

[dekarmi.livejournal.com]

Yes, Russian language is much easier to speak (you just open your mouth and speak) than English though the English grammar is much more primitive. But "all the phrasal verbes and endless synonyms, and all the articles"... Doable? Ok. Thank you for inspiring hope in me! :)

[oryx_and_crake]

search the community, there was a post about cases quite recently

[slu4ajnaya.livejournal.com]

am trying......haven't found yet.... would be grateful for a link.....

[oryx_and_crake]

use yandex blog search?

[oryx_and_crake]

P.S. this one is right on the second page of the community http://community.livejournal.com/learn_russian/840405.html

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

You probably should begin with this simple example:
The tiger ate the hunter. <-> Тигр съел охотника. = Охотника съел тигр.
The hunter ate the tiger. <-> Охотник съел тигра. = Тигра съел охотник.
You give the idea that in Russian the object role is in the word's form and not word's position in the sentence. This is the simplest case.

You go on with another example (adding the dative):
I gave him the book. <-> Я дал ему книгу = Я дал книгу ему = Я ему дал книгу = Ему дал книгу я = Ему я дал книгу = ...
Here you should focus on the typical word order though, as some word orders may emphasize different facts in the sentence (Ему дал книгу я emphasizes on the fact that it was you who gave the book to him).

Then you go into details on when the cases are used and how the case-specific word endings are formed. Speakers of English will have a lot of difficulties because the cases affect nouns, adjectives, pronouns, participles and there're also genders to deal with. What you should do here is to present this info in the most logical way (give for every case a table of declinations as a function of word's gender, count, (in)animateness, ending). The key after that is to have a lot of practice. Some people seem to get it extremely slow and that's either because of the lack of practice or because of lack of a clear explanation (or should I better say an algorithm?) or both. Variate all parameters and do exercises both ways (analysis, synthesis, translation from and to Russian).

But first of all, get yourself a good grammar reference explaining the cases. It should be a book written for those who study or teach Russian as a foreign language. Our questions кто/что?, кого/чего?, кому/чему?, кого/что?, кем/чем?, о ком/чём? make exactly zero sense to people not knowing Russian already. There's definitely a big difference in how we formally learn the cases of our native language (which we already know and speak) at school and how people learn them for the first time. The book should give you some ideas on how to explain the stuff.

[slu4ajnaya.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for this detailed explanation. I will use your examples.

Yes, it is really difficult to explain cases to English - they do not have anything simular....I am trying to give as many simple examples as possible. But it is still hard..

'There's definitely a big difference in how we formally learn the cases of our native language (which we already know and speak) at school and how people learn them for the first time.' - this is soooo true!

I will definately buy the book Russian as a foreign lang.

Thank you for your help!

[slu4ajnaya.livejournal.com]

thank you for that....I'll try to explain by he, him, and his... But what about other 3 cases? )))) it would be better to explain to German person as their grammar almost the same with regards to cases.

[slu4ajnaya.livejournal.com]

thanks this is really helpful.

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

Well, per this logic, the dative is still in there, it's just the same as accusative: I(nominative) gave him(dative) the book(accusative). These objects are functionally different and you see this difference clearly in languages such as Russian and Spanish, in which the dative isn't so much reduced to the accusative. Anyhow, the remnants of the case system in English are virtually non-existent. You only see them in the pronouns (he/him/his) and possessive adjectives (his) and there's the 's thingy (e.g.: dad's(possessive) car).
You can also say that there're complex verb conjugations in English by merely looking at the verb to be: be/was/were/been/am/is/are/being. ;)

[slu4ajnaya.livejournal.com]

:-)

[khathi.livejournal.com]

Russian has it easy, with its three declensions, which differs by the nominative. In Latin there are FOUR declensions, and their nominatives are all the same, the difference is in the genitive...

[jim-24601.livejournal.com]

Well, not quite. In Latin it's really only the 2nd and 4th declensions that collide, although there are a few 3rd declension neuter nouns in -us, which muddies the water a bit.

What's the genitive of постель? Автомобиль? Then you have partitive genitive, locative, irregular plurals in -а, irregular plurals in -ья, weird stress shifts and the genitive plural...

No offence meant, of course. I love Russian. But its case system isn't exactly what you'd call simple ... even though I learned Latin at school, so I already know perfectly well what cases are for ;)

[khathi.livejournal.com]

Actually, all three declensions in Russian are well defined and I couldn't remember any exception on the spot that doesn't fit into that paradigm. As for genitive plural difficulties in Russian -- well, they're exagerrated. And, anyway, you've chosen wrong examples. ;) Genitive plural for "постель" and "автомобиль" would be "постелей" and "автомобилей", which is rather straightforward. Classical example for this case would be "кочерга", as it has somewhat obscure paradigm. However, the rule for this word DOES indeed exist, and its genitive plural would be "кочерёг". Well, I've never intended for anyone to think that case system in Russian is simple -- it's a wonderfully complex and extremely expressive grammar mechanism. But it is, in my opinion, much more logical and defined than case system in Latin. I'm not very good in Latin, just dabble with it a bit for fun, but its case system always struck me as something out of this world. Just like Japanese writing. ;)

[khathi.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm consciously excluding obsolete and incomplete cases here, just for note.
They're not entirely relevant, and you CAN do without them. You could sound somewhat academic, but still fine.

[ryururu.livejournal.com]

try to learn sanskrit and then breath easy coz u are learning russian.
:)

[crimeanelf.livejournal.com]

Is there anything that prevents you from taking any Russian textbook and looking at how it's done there?

[slu4ajnaya.livejournal.com]

I was trying, believe me.... We saw a lot of sources but explanations there are horrible... Maybe we did not find a proper book yet.

[jim-24601.livejournal.com]

Have you tried consulting a Latin text-book? Latin has a case system very similar to Russian, and used to be routinely taught in English schools, though it's quite rare these days. As I recall, the style was very different--my Russian textbooks introduce the cases gradually, one by one, whereas when I learned Latin I was memorising noun declensions from the get-go...

[wordchick.livejournal.com]

I learned on 'Live from Moscow' and I think it worked out pretty well. I would suggest starting with the nominative (the subject of the sentence) and the accusative (the direct object). It's true that many English speakers have a limited knowledge of their own grammar, but those two are pretty easy to understand. From there, go to the basic uses of the prepositional case (maybe you call this locative? предложный)- the prepositional case is very comforting for new learners, because it seems constant (the masculine and feminine forms are the same) and predicting when to use it is easy.

Good luck! If your pupil really wants to learn, it shouldn't be too hard. I saw someone figure out the case system for Ancient Greek within two weeks.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

>prepositional case (maybe you call this locative? предложный

Actually, locative and prepositional case are two different cases, though high school grammar makes them one (prepositional.) But they are disctinctively different, though the use of locative is much less wide (в снегу, в углу, в пути etc.)
There is also a few other obscure cases in Russian that high school grammar ignores, because their use is very limited (like two vocatives, old -- Боже, человече, сыне, отче -- and new, or short vocative: Машк! Дядь! Петь!).

[wordchick.livejournal.com]

Wait, there are locative and prepositional cases in Russian? I only said that because different native speakers have referred to предложный using both names. I always assumed that formations like в углу and во рту were just exceptions, not an entirely different case. Russian becomes more interesting all the time.

As for the vocative, my understanding is that the modern version is optional, and the old one appears almost entirely in religious speech? Or at least, while mentioning a religious figure?

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

Yes, местный падеж (or локатив) does exist in Russian, though you will not find it in high school grammar textbooks. It is only mentioned in high-level academic works on Russian grammar, because its use is limited. For all lower-level purposes (incuding, alas, teaching of Russian as foreign) locative is regarded as a variation of prepositional case (therefore its other name, второй предложный падеж).
How limited is the use of locative?

It only works with a group of nouns (quite a large group, though,) of the 2nd declension. Its distinction from the prepositional case form stems from the fact that in ancient Russian, just like in Old Slavonic, there were four declensions, not three, so this case inherits the form of Old Slavonic 4th declension locative (while the prepositional inherits the form of Old Slavonic 2nd declension locative): в лесУ — о лЕсе, в снегУ — о снЕге, в раЮ — о рАе. The singular locative form is the same as the singular dative form, except that the stress is always on the last syllable: dat. к лЕсу — loc. в лесУ. In plural, the locative case form is the same as the prepositional case form.
Another very narrow field when locative applies if the stressed -и ending in 3rd declension nouns: loc. на дверИ - prep. о двЕри.

Unlike Old Slavonic (and ancient Russian) locative, the modern Russian locative (which I would rather call rudimental locative) is used only with two prepositions (в & на) and only with a narrow list of certain place-and-time circumstances (на дверИ, в углУ, в снегУ, etc.), sometimes in set expressions, like in "работать на домУ".

Now to the vocatives. The new, or short, locative, is not "optional": its use is just very narrow, and almost exclusively limited to colloquial speech. The old locative is, in fact, not limited to "religious speech" (what is religious speech, anyway?). Yes, due to extensive use in Church Slavonic, the vocative case is widely used in religious (and, more specifically speaking, Orthodox Christian) context, but also in all kinds of stylizations, jokes, etc. For example:
- Человече, где тебя носило?
- За водкой ходил. Водку, отче, будешь?

(Man, where roamest thou? - Been buying booze -- shalst thou have some, o father?)

[bartoli.livejournal.com]

See A Living Russian Grammar

[archaicos.livejournal.com]

While at it... I've looked up my Russian Grammar by Natalia Lusin (http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Grammar-Natalia-Lusin/dp/0812049020/) and it seems to be a decent reference. Not only it explains how the words are declined according to the cases, but also it lists a number of case triggers, if you will, prepositions and words (adjectives and verbs) helping you to choose the right case. I think for the most of the basic stuff this reference will suffice. It also has a very good treatment of verbs of motion and perfective and imperfective verbs (another problematic area for the students). For something more advanced you probably want a thick hardcover book as you can't fit all quirks in a pocket-size book. :) Begin somewhere.

[lishend.livejournal.com]

My teacher did a pretty good job by showing the class some charts she made... It's been a year though, so don't expect me to remember.