Thread: Strategy for learning cases... Help!

Thanks Demonic one...

That's a good 'pocket sized' way of remembering which case does what, I'll use that. But like you said, there are exceptions all over the place!

In your last example of 'I am talking to you', I suppose you could put it as 'I am talking with you'... Although to be strictly instrumental, I think it would then be interpreted as ' I am using you as the instrument of my talking', which is just odd... I think I'll just mark that one up as an oddity, and move on...

There is a "with" preposition in Russian, с, which is used with the Instrumental case whenever the noun in instrumental is not actually the means of achieving the goal. Only use the bare instrumental when you could replace "with" with "using". I am smashing the window with / using a hammer = instrumental. I am talking with you, but not using you, so not just bare instrumental.