Russian · Chapter 7 · Lesson 6 · Grammar primer
Conjunctions
Prescribed by the Edexcel specification.
The short version
Comparing two things? That and is a, not i
I adds one thing to another. A sets two different things side by side to contrast them, so mama doma, a papa na rabote needs a: Mum is at home and Dad is at work. With i it sounds like two unconnected facts. And after a negative, not X but Y, the but is always a: eto ne kofe, a chay.
Ya lyublyu chay, a ona lyubit kofe.
Whether is li, never yesli
English uses if for a condition and for whether. Russian splits them: yesli is only the condition, and whether is the particle li, placed straight after the verb. Ya ne znayu, yesli on pridyot is a word-for-word copy of English that Russian cannot use.
Ya ne znayu, pridyot li on.
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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One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 19 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 6 of 12 in this chapter