Russian · Chapter 22 · Lesson 5 · Grammar primer

Dates months years

Prescribed by the Edexcel specification - revisited.

The short version

A Russian date is neuter because chislo is neuter

Pervoye sentyabrya uses the neuter ordinal because it agrees with an unstated word, chislo, a date. The month always follows in the genitive and never changes; only the ordinal moves, into the genitive for on a date: pervogo sentyabrya.

Segodnya pervoye sentyabrya.

Today is the 1st of September.

Pervyy etazh is the ground floor, not the first floor up

Russian floor numbering matches American English, not British: pervyy etazh is the floor you walk in on. Na plus the prepositional case carries the ordinal and etazh together, so both endings change at once.

Biblioteka na pervom etazhe.

The library is on the ground floor.

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.

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Practice

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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 13 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.

Lesson 5 of 7 in this chapter

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