Russian · Chapter 6 · Lesson 21 · Themed review
Mama, papa, semya
The family and the people around it. Russian gives every relative a gender you can hear, and has two words for mother that are not interchangeable.
Practise this lesson
20-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
Mama, papa, semya: the Russian family, and why there are two mothers
is family, and the words inside it are some of the most regular nouns in the language, with two exceptions worth knowing about from the start.
Two mothers, two fathers
and both mean mother. is what you call her, and what you say about her in ordinary speech. is the formal word: the one on a form, in a news report, in a proverb, or in an argument. Saying to your own mother sounds cold. The same split holds for and .
Notice that and both end in -а, the usual feminine ending, and is still masculine. Any adjective describing him is masculine too. Meaning beats the ending.
and , daughter, are the two exceptions. Both grow an extra -ер- in every case except the nominative and accusative singular: , . Every learner meets it and wonders where it came from. It was always there; the two short forms lost it.
is a parent, and you will mostly see it in the plural, .
Pairs
| Male | Female | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| | son, daughter |
| | brother, sister |
| | husband, wife |
| | man, woman |
| | boy, girl |
| | young man, young woman |
is another masculine noun in -а, like , and sits inside it. is a young woman, roughly from late teens upwards, and also a girlfriend. is a girl who is still a child. Mixing them up is not a small error.
is a lad, a guy, and also a boyfriend. is uncle, and it is what children call any adult man, rather as English children once said mister.
The child
is a child, and its plural is not built from it at all: children are . It is the most irregular plural in the language and one of the most common, so it is worth learning as two separate words from day one.