A quick note on Russian grammar cases

One of the nightmarish topics for almost any student of Russian (at least for ones whose first language is not a Slavic one), is Russian grammar cases. Here I would like to share with you the tips I wrote for  my students in order to give you some hints on where and how each case may be used. So, the upcoming series of posts will be entirely devoted to grammar cases. This is not intended to substitute a grammar book, though - likely you will need one (or at least some knowledge about the case system). My main intention is to give you a sort of feeling of how to use the cases and how to learn them more effectively.

So, let's start from the beginning, which means - from nouns. As you may already know, a noun in a sentence may be in one of the following six cases:  nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional, or in Russian - именительный, родительный, дательный, винительный, творительный, предложный (there are some additional ones, see Wikipedia, if curious). What are they for? In simple words, they are to show how one word is related to the other, what role it plays in a sentence. While in English they are mainly prepositions (sometimes also word order etc.) which are responsible for this, in Russian we may change the case of a noun or use a preposition with a noun in one of the cases (we will see how it works later). So, every time a noun follows a preposition, a verb or another noun, we need to use the noun in some particular case, which practically means that we need to change its ending.

The first case is the nominative, the easiest one. You see nouns in this case when you open your dictionary. Outside dictionaries, nouns in the nominative are used as the subjects or predicates of sentences. These are their main functions. So please check if your noun is either the subject or a [part of] the predicate of a sentence (for example, "я художник", "мой любимый фрукт - манго", "Волга - это самая длинная река в Европе"). If yes, just use a noun-from-the-dictionary (please remember: only the subject is always in the nominative). If not... wait for the next post! :)