Thread: How do I learn vocabulary?

Originally Posted by impulse

Why do you advice learning the nominative and genitive singular at the same time? How does that help predicting the other forms of the verbs? I am still a newbie at Russian and if that really helps I would like to review all the nouns I know up to this learning technique.

Best.

Nominative and genitive are cases for nouns, it has nothing to do with verbs. At first you may think that declensions are just bizarre, but in fact they are nicely arranged into a system. Otherwise, noone would be able to learn the language!
So there are types of declensions, and if you know genitive - you know the type of declension - you know all other cases. This works not only for Russian students - when I studied Latin we had to memorize nominative and genitive at once too.

Originally Posted by bublinka

Nominative and genitive are cases for nouns, it has nothing to do with verbs. At first you may think that declensions are just bizarre, but in fact they are nicely arranged into a system. Otherwise, noone would be able to learn the language!
So there are types of declensions, and if you know genitive - you know the type of declension - you know all other cases. This works not only for Russian students - when I studied Latin we had to memorize nominative and genitive at once too.

I started to review all the nouns I know. I wrote them down in an excel sheet and it makes over 300 nouns so far. So I need to write the genitive singular and plural for all these nouns and add in the other nouns usining the same method as I learn them.

While I was writing down the genitive plurals of the nouns, I realized that I can distinguish the gender of the nouns ending with a sof sign. This is a new discovery for me and infact really makes it very easy to remmeber the gender. I really do not know the other benefits of this yet. I do not know how the genitive singular and plural of a nouns affects the form of the noun in other cases. I will onde day discover that I think.

Best