Russian · Chapter 18 · Lesson 9 · Grammar primer
Approximation
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification.
The short version
Flip the order and the number goes fuzzy
Desyat minut is exactly ten minutes; minut desyat, the same two words reversed, is about ten minutes. No extra word, no case change, just the order. It is the everyday spoken way to round a number, and in conversation Russians reach for it far more often than okolo.
Ya podozhdu minut desyat.
The case never moves, only the word order does
Pyat takes the genitive plural whichever order it comes in, so minut pyat is still genitive plural, exactly like pyat minut. Approximation is carried entirely by word order in Russian; the case rule underneath stays exactly as the numbers article teaches it.
Tam bylo chelovek pyat.
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 12 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 9 of 13 in this chapter