Thread: Хватать - Хватить

The word денег is plural but as I noticed Хватать/хватить in all cases is used in third person.
How is explained this grammatically? Why third person?

"Деньги" is an uncountable noun.

You can see a similar problem here. As you know the English construction "I have a car" sounds in Russian like "У меня есть машина". That's because in this grammatical pattern we replace a subject (I = я) with an object (car = машина). So, if in the English phrase the subject is "I", in the Russian variant the subject is "машина". For the English-speaking people it looks like magic, but it's simple. Just a different word order: "У меня есть машина" = "Машина есть у меня" = "A car is belonging to me". The subject is a "car", thus "у меня" is only an object.

The similar situation with "хватать".
"Я хватаю деньги". Here "Я" is a subject, "деньги" is an object in accusative. "I grab money."
"Мне хватает денег" = "Денег хватает мне". "Money is enough for me" = "It's enough money for me." It's a so-called "impersonal sentence", when one describes a situation or a state of someting. It's like a passive event, where something occurs, but you can't determine a subject (for example, when you talk about a natural phenomenon) or just suspect it. A subject must exist in an English sentence, even if it's formal.
For example: "It's raining today" = "Сегодня дождливо" (we describe a situation with the weather). In the English sentence the subject "it" is obligatory. In the Russian one it is not. That's why English-speaking beginners make the very same mistake, for example: "Это дождливо сегодня". They think an every sentence must have the subject and simply add it. Of course, "Это" is not necessary here. And it's not just redundant, it's grammatically incorrect.
In Russian we often omit subjects (by the different grammatical patterns) and use a lot of impersonal sentences. You should understand how it works, because you can't speak fluently without that.

Originally Posted by Paul G.

"Деньги" is an uncountable noun.

You can see a similar problem here. As you know the English construction "I have a car" sounds in Russian like "У меня есть машина". That's because in this grammatical pattern we replace a subject (I = я) with an object (car = машина). So, if in the English phrase the subject is "I", in the Russian variant the subject is "машина". For the English-speaking people it looks like magic, but it's simple. Just a different word order: "У меня есть машина" = "Машина есть у меня" = "A car is belonging to me". The subject is a "car", thus "у меня" is only an object.

The similar situation with "хватать".
"Я хватаю деньги". Here "Я" is a subject, "деньги" is an object in accusative. "I grab money."
"Мне хватает денег" = "Денег хватает мне". "Money is enough for me" = "It's enough money for me." It's a so-called "impersonal sentence", when one describes a situation or a state of someting. It's like a passive event, where something occurs, but you can't determine a subject (for example, when you talk about a natural phenomenon) or just suspect it. A subject must exist in an English sentence, even if it's formal.
For example: "It's raining today" = "Сегодня дождливо" (we describe a situation with the weather). In the English sentence the subject "it" is obligatory. In the Russian one it is not. That's why English-speaking beginners make the very same mistake, for example: "Это дождливо сегодня". They think an every sentence must have the subject and simply add it. Of course, "Это" is not necessary here. And it's not just redundant, it's grammatically incorrect.
In Russian we often omit subjects (by the different grammatical patterns) and use a lot of impersonal sentences. You should understand how it works, because you can't speak fluently without that.

I will need sometime to understand this is. I understood why we used roditelnyi padezh.