My Slavic Studies

The nominative case, known in Russian as именительный падеж, is the first of the six cases that currently exist in the modern language.

Each case in Russian has a function. The nominative’s is to indicate who or what the subject in a sentence is.

This case is crucial to know for the following reason:

It is the base form of all Russian nouns.

That means that whenever you look up words in a dictionary, they’ll be in the nominative case. The same happens in textbooks. Vocabulary lists will have the words in the nominative in order not to confuse the learner. Because whenever you learn a new word in Russian, you should learn it in the base form always!

As stated above, the nominative case is crucial to know, because in order to form the other cases, change their endings appropriately based on their function in a sentence [declension], we need to understand gender first.

In Russian there are three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Luckily, determining gender in Russian is far easier than in other languages. There are fewer exceptions and once you learn the rules, you’ll be just about set.

In this first post on the nominative, we’ll only be looking at masculine nouns. In the next one, we’ll look at feminine nouns, and in the final – neuter nouns.

What does a masculine noun look like in Russian? Let’s take a look below.

That’s all for this post; see you in the next!