Russian · Chapter 21 · Lesson 18 · Grammar primer
Numbers and case
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
Every Russian number picks the noun's case
One agrees with its noun like an adjective, two to four take the genitive singular, and five and up take the genitive plural. So year goes god, goda, let across the three groups. Drill that one row out loud until it is a rhythm rather than a sum, because it is the whole rule in miniature.
Odin god, dva goda, pyat let.
Twenty-one years is singular in Russian
In a compound number only the last word decides the noun's case. Twenty-one ends in one, so the noun stays singular nominative; twenty-two ends in two, so it takes the genitive singular. The teens are the exception: eleven to nineteen are single words and always take the genitive plural.
Dvadtsat odin god, dvadtsat pyat let.
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 28 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 18 of 19 in this chapter