Thread: How many variations of one word?

A Russian word has to be inflected according to case, tense, and plural. How many variations do that amount to? I mean, if each case has variations in different tenses which also is inflected when in plural, then doesn't that create an almost unmangeable ammount of variations?

Originally Posted by Plotin

A Russian word has to be inflected according to case, tense, and plural. How many variations do that amount to? I mean, if each case has variations in different tenses which also is inflected when in plural, then doesn't that create an almost unmangeable ammount of variations?

The same word can't have both tense AND case, so it's not quite that bad .

nouns have gender, number, and case
verbs have gender, number, and tense

any given noun would have about ten singular and plural forms.
any given verb would have about 30 (pure guess,counting all the participles).