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Notes: Basic information about cases

In Russian, the form of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numbers may change depending on their role in the sentence or for some other reasons. Such word form changes usually manifest themselves in the word's ending alteration. For example, we can see in the phrase above, that nouns forms given in the dictionary (on the right) and nouns following the preposition из from have different endings. At the same time, there are some nouns, including abbreviations (for example, США USA), that do not change and always have the same form.

Such changes of word forms are closely related to the concept of cases in Russian. A case is a set of word forms that is used to perform certain functions in a sentence or phrase. For example, nouns forms that are given in the dictionary usually play the role of the subject in a sentence. These forms are called nominative case forms. In other words, the nominative case is used to indicate the subject of the sentence.

For more info, see the page Russian Cases

Notes: Basic info about grammatical gender

All Russian nouns have gender, masculine, feminine or neuter, without regard what they mean, a person or an object. In the majority of instances, you can determine the grammatical gender of a noun based on its ending of the dictionary form. Thus, feminine nouns usually end in а/я, masculine nouns usually end in a hard consonant or й, neuter nouns usually end in о or е.

Notes: Personal pronouns

Personal pronouns are words used in place of a noun or another pronoun to indicate the speaker (first person, in English the pronouns "I", "we"), the person or persons to whom one is speaking (second person, in English the pronoun "You"), and persons and objects spoken about (third person, in English the pronouns "he", "she", "it", "they").

You already know Russian first person personal pronouns я I and second person ты you (informal), вы (or Вы)you (plural or formal).

In singular, Russian third person pronouns он and она may refer not only to people, but also to animals and objects, depending on the grammatical gender of the nouns they are related to.