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Here's the theory: the various Indo-European languages, which include, among others, English and Russian, include three different options to indicate what role a given noun in a sentence takes over. Cases (from the Latin word casus) are one option: by changing the word grammatically the role is defined. English only does that in pronouns such as he -> him -> his and when it uses its genitive form as in "my father's house".Originally Posted by grafrich
The second option is using prepositions, which English does a lot. "My father's" can be expressed as "of my father", and likewise English uses pronouns exclusively where other languages use grammatical inflection. English says "with a hammer" where Russian uses the Instrumental case: молот -> молотом. You can think of the ending as a kind of appended "with". In fact, most languages of this family use a mixture of these and combine cases with prepositions for further roles. Finnish, which the Dummies excerpt mentions, might have fifteen cases, but they are very regular and there are no or only few prepositions, as far as I know (which in the case of Finnish isn't very far). I've been told that you could just as well perceive these cases as prepositions glued onto the word endings. Like if you had cases in English giving you "tableon, tableunder" instead of "on the table, under the table".
The third option is position in the sentence. When you look at the English sentence "the dog bites the man" you know who bites and who is bitten because of the position of the nouns. You cannot have the nouns swap the position without changing the meaning: "the man bites the dog" is not the same thing. In languages which distinguish nominative and accusative cases you can swap the words around: собака откусывает мужчину / мужчину откусывает собака both mean the same thing because -у is the accusative ending and -а the nominative ending. Swap the endings on the nouns, and only then, regardless of the position of the words, does the man bite the dog.
There is a certain historical problem here. The words we use for the cases and for many other grammatical features of languages in general are of Latin origin. This is because the Romans actually thought about the inner workings of their language. Afterwards, Christianization and its suppression of scientifical thinking created a kind of inferiority complex. Only during the age of Humanism and Enlightenment did people begin to think about languages other than Latin as being actually worthwhile to look at and to analyze the grammar of. Still, Latin was at first seen as the model of a perfect language, from which all other languages more or less deviate because of "devolution". So with only Latin grammar books at hand as a model people used the grammatical terms from them to describe their own languages, and in some cases even tried to change the rules they observed in these languages to better fit the Latin model. You may have heard of the silly rule that English sentences should not end in prepositions (because Latin sentences don't), which, as is often contributed to Churchill, is something up with which we should not put.One stumbling block for me is why are the cases called what they are called? Why is the genitive case called genitive case? Would the word 'genitive' tell me anything helpful if I understood why it is used? to me, genitive suggests "concerned with the origin of..." Is this correct in any way?
The irony in this is that even the Romans had a similar inferiority complex towards Greek, for which grammar books and language philosphy existed long before the Romans began to think about such things. A language which contains a separate declension for pairs of things (dual between singular and plural) clearly is superior... :P So actually even the Romans modelled their rules of grammar, as they perceived them, after the Greek model, and sometimes used terms which even then did not really fit the reality of their language. It's like a hand-me-down: The words fit ancient Greek well, are a bit tight around the hips in Latin, much too tight for most modern European languages and practically the wrong sex for English.
For example, we learned in school (in German lessons) that "if you don't know what category the word is, lump it into adverbs". The tense we stubbornly call Imperfekt in German is the absolute opposite of anything imperfect, it's as finished as can be. And the list goes on. Essentially, grammar books use terms which you have to learn because you cannot understand them. Sometimes knowing that "accusative" means "the case with which I accuse" may help, for example in German and Russian, but not in English, where you use what we would call dative (I saw him). That comes from Latin "dare", to give", and in "I give him the book" "him" does fulfil the intended role of dative.
If you ask me, rules alone aren't going to get you very far. You should use them as tools to analyze what you see and talk about it, but you really need to do what every child does: learn the language by example. The rules do not pre-exist the language, so to speak, they are created by observing the language at work (with sometimes weird results, as explained above). As I wrote elsewhere on this forum recently, they are the map but not the territory. You can't get from A to B by just looking at the map, you need to walk the distance.I really don't want to have to learn by rote; I need to get through this by thinking and applying rules, not remembering every possible permutation of subject and object.
You should use the language in real-life contexts, use it here, read Russian, talk in Russian to yourself and (more important) to others, listen to Russian and see how the language is being used. The real-life context is very important into goading your brain, which is by definition a very lazy organ, into accepting this as something of real importance. The brain likes to store only useful information, and learning in a clinical environment (exercises, textbooks, vocabulary lists and so on) tends to be weak learning because the brain then does not learn for life but for "school". And you may remember from school how much you learned only in order to pass the test and conveniently forgot immediately after. I have seen so many students who were able to figure out the most complex English if-clauses on exercise sheets because they recognized patterns and followed mutational rules, but never managed to form a single correct if-clause when actually talking English because they never really understood what the slippery buggers were for.
Never be afraid of making mistakes. You learn much more from mistakes (if corrected by someone who knows better) than from rules. And you learn from successes, too. If you write a longer text and you find many corrections, don't forget to look at what you apparently got right as well. Learning a language is never complete, it will always go on unless you give up. But each little step you take makes you more proficient in it.
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