Russian · Chapter 4 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer

The prepositional case

The only case with no other job: it follows в, на or о, which makes it the easiest of the six.

The short version

Ask where or where to before you pick an ending

V and na take the prepositional when they answer gde (where?) and the accusative when they answer kuda (where to?). English uses where for both, so ask yourself which question the sentence answers. That one test settles almost every in-or-into decision.

Gde ty? V shkole. Kuda ty idyosh? V shkolu.

Where are you? At school. Where are you going? To school.

At work is na, not v

Na covers surfaces, open spaces and events, plus a list of places English gives you no clue about: na rabote (at work), na ulitse (outside), na vecherinke (at the party). Learn each place with its preposition as one unit, because the logic only explains some of them.

Ona na rabote, a on v ofise.

She is at work, and he is at the office.

That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.

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10-question session

One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 16 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.

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Lesson 8 of 22 in this chapter

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