Zdravstvujte vsem! I would write in proper (well - as proper as I know how!) Russian, but this computer isn't configured for it yet. I just thought I ought to introduce myself - formality's sake, I suppose. I've been studying Russian for about two years now, and I love it. Russian is a beautiful language, even though it's often described as being "harsh-sounding". I took Russian classes before, but now that they're over, I'm on my own - and I've got questions to which there aren't answers in my old textbooks. Znachit, pridetsya k vam, russkim, obrashchat'sya.
In any case, I found this forum by accident - a lucky one, it seems - and hope to find some willing Russian readers to test my Russian against and
to ask questions of.
Speaking of which, here's my first question, on grammar:
I keep running into this one grammatical construction where feminine nouns and adjectives are given an odd ending in the instrumental case. This ending seems to occur more often in songs and poems than in speech. For example:
1. "ona uzhe sbegala po lestnitse drugoyu storonoj" as opposed to "drugoj storonoj"
2. "nad golovoyu" as opposed to "nad golovoj"
And then there's this "s toboyu" as opposed to "s toboj", which doesn't follow the apparent pattern of strange instrumental endings on only feminine words! If there's a grammar whiz here, please help! This one's really got me.
Thanks!
P.S. - I'm really sorry that I don't have Cyrillic fonts to type this in; transliteration is really awkward. I've got to fix that ASAP.
