Thread: Cases and Sentence Construction

Hello All,

It is possibly easier if I start by outlining the problems and what I see as being the mistakes I have made along the way.

When I started to get taught cases I thought that the concept of cases was simply about how the nouns ended in a particular case,

i.e. with milk = с молоком

However, as time has progressed I have realised that sentence construction must also included the pronouns in their respectivce case, so in summary my focus was only on the end of the sentence rather than the whole of the sentence, which prepositions are used in which case etc.

Whilst I think I may be getting close to cracking the problem (by virtue of thinking I understand the problem) I would really appreciate some help on a word by word basis with possible explanations of the "whys" everything work together.

To try to avoid me listing all of what I see the issues to be and if I have not made myself clear, perhaps someone could post a few sentences that I could the ask questions about.

PS If we could start with simple constructs it may make it easier for other beginers to understand, progressivly getting harder.

Many thanks.

It is still very unclear and very general.

We can not produce a learning course here at forum. You can find a textbook and follow it and if something is unclear in particular example, or in particular paragraph, ask here.

I assume that your native is English and the very concept of cases is new for you. What you need if you like to get it theoretically is a syntax analysis which is much like in English. That is you should be able to discriminate subjects, predicates, objects and attributives and their subordination. All subjects and objects (which are mainly nouns or personal pronouns) are divided into several groups according to the particular situation in the sentence and each should take corresponding case. All attributives should agree in case with corresponding object or subject. That is the base.

Alan, an important class of sentences has impersonal constructions. In impersonal constructions the nominative subject (pronoun) in English becomes dative in Russian. Study impersonal sentences!

Вам удалось? = Were you successful?

Мне нравится это. Note that you can alter the word order.

Им пришлось выходить немедленно.