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Comments for Lesson 1


Absence of the present tense of "to be" and articles

a) In Russian language, the present tense of "to be" (am, is, are) is not usually used.

Examples:

Я Джон Браун. – I am John Brown.

Вы из Канады. – You are from Canada.

Это Александр. – This is Alexander.

b) In English, there are articles "the" and "a". In Russian, there are no articles.

Examples:

Я из США. - I am from the USA.

Это билет. - This is a ticket.

So, building phrases in Russian, you can just omit all articles and the present tense of "to be".


Gender

All Russian nouns have gender: masculine, feminine or neuter. It is an important grammatical category in Russian and it is impossible to build a correct phrase in Russian without knowing the gender of nouns. One of the difficulties with gender of nouns consists in the fact that in a phrase the form of adjectives, pronouns, some numbers and some verb tenses will depend of the related noun’s gender.

For example, if you want to say "interesting book" in Russian, first of all you should know the gender of the Russian noun "книга" (book) and then choose a correct form of the adjective "интересный" from the three forms: "интересный" for masculine, "интересная" for feminine and "интересное" for neuter. The noun "книга" belongs to the feminine, so the correct translation for "interesting book" is "интересная книга".

Some more examples:

мой паспорт
моя виза
моё такси

один час
одна минута
одно здание

However, if the form of adjective, pronoun etc. is not correctly chosen and does not correspond to the noun’s gender, the phrase may be not correct, but still understandable for Russian people in most cases.

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