Thread: Memorization of endings

Привет всем!

I've come a long way since May when I first started learning russian grammatically and vocabulary wise as well. But there's a problem I face. I got this book Russian: A self teaching guide by Kathryn Szcepanska and I've been going it at for weeks. She tells me the noun endings for both singular and plural and the adjectives endings for both singular and plural at the beginning when learning a new case. I've just started dative case today, and it's pretty easy, but I keep confusing some of the endings. Same thing with the prepositional case, I consistently mix up and forget the endings. And the author doesn't even give me excercises where I have to change the nouns into their correct form! I'm going nuts over this, because I'm screwing up my endings. Gah!!!!

For example:

Prepositional case: Большой

I'm likely to say ," Я убил мужчину в большом хате." instead of ,"Я убил мужчину в большой хате."

And I have to spend like 10 minutes trying to decide what ending to use!!!

Is there any awesome ways to fix this?

It's about time to start discriminating genders (grammatical that is ).

"хата" is feminine, therefore "в большой хате"
"дом" is masculine, therefore "в большом доме"

Practice, practice, and maybe practice a bit more. Eventually the correct ending will just sound right, and saying something else just doesn't feel right.

Sounds fun. Whenever I get the chance (Prepping for school), I'll type up a bunch of sentences and do a bunch of excercises on the internet.

Definately practice. I think a good way to do this is to check out something like Graded Russian Readers. It's basically a book that takes famous russian stories like "Hero of our Times" and "The Shot" from writers like Lermentov and Pushkin and dumbs them down by using consistent vocabulary and such.... Also, it's really helpful to pay attention to their use of cases, that's what helped me a lot.

Where do I go to buy this book, it sounds very useful to my ears?

-Matt

Definitely, the more you read, the more familiar you become with endings, genders and all that stuff.

Heres the amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... s&n=507846

If that doesn't work, heres the info on the book:

# Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company (1961)
# Language: English
# ISBN: 0669306762