Russian · Chapter 16 · Lesson 4 · Grammar primer
Intensifiers
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
Ochen, dovolno and slishkom never change form
All three sit directly in front of the adjective or adverb they strengthen and never agree with anything: ochen (very) is neutral, dovolno (quite) leans positive, slishkom (too) signals a problem. Do not confuse dovolno with dovolnyy, a completely separate adjective meaning satisfied.
Eto slishkom dorogo.
ne- glued on flips an adjective to its opposite
Stick ne- straight onto the front of an adjective, no space, and you get its opposite: bolshoy (big) gives nebolshoy (small). Keep it as one word when you mean the plain opposite; split it into ne plus the adjective only when you are directly denying a specific claim.
Eto nebolshoy gorod.
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 · 8 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 15 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 4 of 17 in this chapter