Lesson 11 coming your way! 10 lessons down, and many, many, many more to go! This is going to be a long, long, long series of lessons. I can guarantee you that!
| I. Cardinal Numbers |
We’re finally going to learn numbers. We’ll start with numbers 1-10. The reason why we’re only focusing on the first 10, is because there exist some peculiarities with numbers 1 and 2.
| один | one |
| два | two |
| три | three |
| четыре | four |
| пять | five |
| шесть | six |
| семь | seven |
| восемь | eight |
| девять | nine |
| десять | ten |
Now you can count from 1-10 in Russian. 🙂 There is actually something I should mention, hmmm… no. We’ll save that for another lesson.
| The numbers один and два agree in gender with the noun they follow. |
For один, I have prepared a table covering all its endings.
| Masc. | Fem. | Neut. | Plur. |
|---|---|---|---|
| один | одна | одно | одни |
Thus, we get the following:
| один мальчик [one boy] | одна девочка [one girl] | одно море [one sea] | одни часы [one watch] |
| The noun часы [watch, clock] is always plural in Russian, even though in English we use singular and plural forms. |
Not too bad. Notice that the endings look similar to adjectival endings. That should help you remember things a little more easily.
| In addition to meaning one, один can also mean alone, by oneself. |
| Я один. I’m alone. [male person] |
| Ты одна. You’re alone. [female person] |
Remember this key construction. Russians use it quite a bit.
| Один мой друг знает русский язык. One of my friends [or: a friend of mine] knows Russian. |
| Одна моя подруга знает русский язык. One of my friends [or: a friend of mine] knows Russian. |
| For два, things are a little weird. This has two forms, because the masculine and neuter forms coincide. |
| masc. | neut. | feminine |
|---|---|
| два | две |
Thus, we get the following:
| два мальчика [two boys] | две девочки [two girls] | два моря [two seas] |
| Unlike in English, Russian doesn’t use the plural after plural numbers [anything above 1]. Instead, it uses the genitive singular for numbers 2-4 and the genitive plural for numbers 5 and up. Do you see in the examples that the nouns are in the genitive case? |
| У меня есть две книги. I have two books. |
| У меня есть два сына. I have two sons. |
We will cover the genitive plural [it’s tricky] in a later post.
| II. Expressing had, will have |
We’ll learn a little bit about the past and future tenses in this 2nd part of today’s lesson.
We’ll be looking at the tenses of the verb быть [to be]. There exist only 3 tenses in Russian: present, past and future.
We’re actually not going to learn verb conjugations until lesson 16, but we can explore a little bit of this topic here in this section.
…
| We learned in a previous lesson how to express to have. We saw it used in the section above. But, for further clarity, if needed, expressing to have was explained here. |
To express had, will have, you need to know how to conjugate быть in the past and future. Luckily, its conjugations in present are easy overall. Once you know the past and present tense conjugations, you just replace them with есть.
For the present tense, only one conjugation exists. Super easy! For the future, the conjugation depends on whether or not the noun is singular or plural. Easy! But for the past tense, the conjugation depends on the gender and number of the noun. Thus, there are four conjugations.
Look at this table:
| – | past | present | future |
|---|---|---|---|
| у меня … у тебя … у него … у неё … у нас … у вас … у них … | был была было были | есть | будет будут |
Look at some example sentences utilizing the nouns муж [husband], жена [wife] and кольцо [ring]. The plural is also thrown into the second sentence for each gender. Notice that муж and жена are slightly irregular in the plural. Honestly, when would you need to say husbands or wives? Probably not too often. I’ll be throwing irregular plurals at you occasionally.
| masculine |
| У неё был муж. У неё есть муж. У неё будет муж. She had a husband. She has a husband. She will have a husband. |
| У неё были мужья. У неё есть мужья. У неё будут мужья. She had husbands. She has husbands. She will have husbands. |
| feminine |
| У меня была жена. У меня есть жена. У меня будет жена. I had a wife. I have a wife. I will have a wife. |
| У меня были жёны. У меня есть жёны. У меня будут жёны. I had wives. I have wives. I will have wives. |
| neuter |
| У него было кольцо. У него есть кольцо. У него будут кольца. He had a ring. He has a ring. He will have a ring. |
| У него были кольца. У него есть кольца. У него будут кольца. He had rings. He has rings. He will have rings. |
Look at that! You easily express had and will have now! And since we learned how to conjugate быть, we can express something like:
| Там будет ресторан. A restaurant will be there. |
| Здесь был телефон. A phone was here. |
This lesson was kind of loaded with grammar. We’ll stop here. See you in lesson 12!
| Last Edit: 11/29/2025. |
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