Russian · Chapter 21 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Negation
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.
The short version
Nobody, nothing and never all need a ne
Every Russian word for nobody, nothing or never begins with ni-, and none of them negates anything on its own: the verb still needs ne in front of it. Nikto ne znayet is literally nobody not knows, and it is the only correct way to say it. Read the ni-word as any and the double negative stops looking strange.
Ya nichego ne vizhu.
Ne negates a word; net means there is none
Ne goes directly in front of the word it negates, usually the verb. Net is a word of its own: it is the answer no, and it means there is no, with the missing thing in the genitive. In the past it becomes ne bylo, frozen in the neuter whatever is missing, because the missing thing is not the subject.
U menya net vremeni.
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 · 9 min readPractice
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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 18 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 3 of 19 in this chapter