Quote Originally Posted by Throbert McGee View Post
Викисловарь says that креветка is animate -- and therefore the accusative plural is креветок, like the genitive.

But it seems to me there might be a complication: because of their small size, I would tend to guess that shrimp are treated as a "mass noun" (like изюм, "a pile of raisins"), rather than a "count noun" (like арбуз, "a watermelon"). And from Googling, it seems that LIVE shrimp are "count," but COOKED shrimp are "mass". Thus, in the context of eating in a seafood restaurant:
It is indeed complicated.
But the explanation was perfect.
I just thought that from the time shrimps were cooked they cannot be considered any more animate, for this reason we say "В ресторане я покушал креветки" and not креветок, but as you correctly pointed: "it's a "genitive singular" that expresses a partitive meaning."
Throbert McGee if you are not Russian, I cannot believe that you learned Russian so well as a foreigner.
It is impossible!