Russian · Chapter 18 · Lesson 4 · Grammar primer
Indefinite pronouns
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification.
The short version
-nibud for the unknown, -to for the unnamed
Kto-nibud asks whether anyone at all did something; kto-to says someone definitely did, you just do not know who. Questions and requests lean -nibud; statements about something that already happened lean -to.
Kto-to zvonil, poka ty spal.
Vsyo, chto needs no noun in front of it
Kotoryy always needs an already-named noun to describe. Vsyo, chto and to, chto need none at all: they build their own noun out of the whole clause, which is why they can open a sentence on their own.
Rasskazhi mne vsyo, chto ty pomnish.
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 · 7 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 16 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 4 of 13 in this chapter