Russian · Chapter 11 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
Genitive case
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
Absence is a case in Russian
U menya yest kniga makes the book the subject: at me there is a book. Negate it and the book stops being a subject at all, so it drops into the genitive: u menya net knigi. Anything that is not there, not at home or not available goes into the genitive after net.
U menya net vremeni.
The owner comes second, not first
Russian has no apostrophe-s. Put the thing first and the owner after it in the genitive: mashina ottsa is father's car, literally the car of father. Putting the owner in front, the English way, sounds like poetry or a mistake.
Eto mashina ottsa.
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.
Read the full article · 10 min readPractice
Practise this lesson
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 20 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 14 of 17 in this chapter