Thread: Frustrated with Russian cases...

Yep.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I could learn how to place these cases? (Excluding ways that would bore me to no extent...)

Originally Posted by Nichole.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I could learn how to place these cases? (Excluding ways that would bore me to no extent...)

There are basically two methods to learn foreign language for an adult person.
1) Boring one. Few hours per day do some exercises, follow some course, read and speak. Normally theory will help you in this method, because theoretical rules anyway are much simpler than the language as it is.
2) Adventurous one. Come to the corresponding country, communicate much, and try to survive without using any language but local. Here you can avoid most formal rules etc. and get even better result than for the first method. If survived.

Few encouraging facts. 1)Russian is NOT the world most difficult language. (Many people say that Japanese is the most difficult.) 2) English and Russian are languages of the same family so they are much closer than many others. 3) Russian perfectly correct literary speech is not mastered even by many (most?) Russians, so perfection is not so necessary. 4)Normally in a private conversation Russians would not mind if you confuse few cases and would be pleased by the very fact of your speaking Russian (if your speech is intelligible of course).

Originally Posted by Nichole.

Yep.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I could learn how to place these cases? (Excluding ways that would bore me to no extent...)

Read/listen (whatever you understand better) material with correct case usage. I doubt that one can learn how to actually use anything by drilling manual/grammar books. For questions like 'why is it used that way?' - i.e. reference manual, yes.

Hi Nichole


I can really understand your frustration. I'm a native German speaker and I'm learning Russian since ..8 month I guess, and even for me cases are not that easy. Even though, it's a huge advantage to be a German speaker, cause we have 4 cases in German (Nom, Acc, Dat, Gen) and they behave pretty similar like in russian.
To take Misha Tals example with "помочь/помогать". It's "Helfen" in German. Ich helfe dir (I help you). Dir is dativ. So it's very often exactly like in russian. Even though it's not always like that. For example, "Я тебя поздравляю" is accusative while in german, we use Dative here. But anyway, it's from big help to have even 4 cases already. I can really understand your problems as you are coming from English, cause I can most of the time think like I'm doing it in German and then I already know how it has to be in Russian. But of course I still have to learn all those exceptions and it's not always like in German.

2. Whoever created Russian seriously overdid themselves when it comes to grammar. Why does everything have to agree with everything else?

Actually..Russian does sound soooo awesome because words nearly always agree with each other...they kind of rhyme, for example the adjectives with the substantives. I asked myself the same "Why the hell is Russians grammar that complex?" but then again....it makes Russians sound as it is and gosh, I wouldn't like to miss it.
But yeah I have to agree, Russian is soooooo difficult to learn as a foreigner. I've never heard someone not from Russia/Ukraine speaking it good, but I'm sure that in the masterrussians community are a lot of people that mastered it and I have such a huge respect of them. When I started with Russian...I was listening to people in the internet who said, that russian isn't harder than languages like Spanish, French and so on...but gosh they were wrong. Maybe, on paper, it isn't harder..because it's a pretty logical language and doesn't has more exceptions than...German for example...even less than we have in German...but it's soooo confusing with all those different endings and stuff.
I don't want to frustrate you, but have you already seen those "Perfective and imperfective" aspects of verbs? For me, they are even more confusing than the cases. But maybe they will be easier for you cause the tenses are more like in English. I've never understood the English cases...there are soooooo many and I will probably never get used to them.

And I can tell you....since I'm learning russian...my knowledge of the German grammar has been increased greatly....and I've a girlfriend from the Ukraine and she is studying German....she askes me alot about German cases and I have to tell her all the time, that I never have to think about it...I'm doing it instinctively..I don't have to think which case I'm using, I just doing it right as I'm speaking and hearing that language since my birth. So it must be the same in Russian and any other language too. It's a veeeeeery long process and it's not done just with learning the basics and grammar, you have to use it, you have to repeat it and practise it over years.

Sorry for my bad English

Originally Posted by decsis

I don't want to frustrate you, but have you already seen those "Perfective and imperfective" aspects of verbs? For me, they are even more confusing than the cases. But maybe they will be easier for you cause the tenses are more like in English. I've never understood the English cases...there are soooooo many and I will probably never get used to them.

You mean tenses

I can assure you, perfective vs. imperfective is still pretty damn difficult/confusing for English speakers too. Although the fact that they have some correlation with our tenses helps somewhat.