Lesson 9 | Russian Sentence Structure: Subject, Object & Predicate #russianforbeginners

Привет, это Наташа. Hi, welcome to my channel. My name is Natasha and I'm here to help you to learn the Russian language and to know more about the Russian culture and mentality. Давайте начнем. When it's time to make a sentence in Russian, the question you might have is what is the word order or what is the structure of the sentence. The usual structure of the Russian sentence is like in English. Subject, verb, object. This is the usual one but we can easily change it depending on which word we want to emphasize and which emotion to express. Now I want you to look at the sentence. A cat sees a bird. A cat is a subject, sees is a verb, a bird is an object. In Russian this sentence sounds like кошка видит птицу. Now let's try to change the word order in both sentences. A bird sees a cat. Have we just changed the meaning? Yes, now a bird is a subject and the cat is an object. Let's do the same to the Russian sentence. Now the structure is object, verb, subject but a cat is still a subject and the bird is still an object. We can change a sentence in Russian because we have cases. A case shows us which function a noun has in the sentence or in other words which type of relation a noun has in respect to other words in the sentence. The subject is always in the nominative. In a basic case all Russian nouns are given in dictionaries in the nominative. This is the so-called first form of a noun. In our sentence it's кошка. No matter what the position of this word in the sentence, at the beginning, in the middle or at the end, it's in nominative and it's a subject. Now let's talk about the object. An object can be either direct or indirect. The direct object denotes a person or a thing which receives an action. It's a primary object. The indirect object denotes a person or a thing which is affected by the action. It's an additional object not the main one. In our sentence we have a direct object. Птицу. Птицу is in the accusative case. The nominative is Птица and the accusative is Птицу. So, for now what you need to know about the Russian sentence structure is that the typical structure is subject, verb, object. Subject is expressed by the noun in the nominative case. The direct object is expressed by the accusative case without preposition and the indirect object is expressed by other cases genitive, dative, instrumental, prepositional and the accusative with a preposition. In my next video I'm going to explain how to make the accusative case of a noun. Stay tuned. Thank you for watching this video till the end. If you liked it please support me with your likes and if you want to see more lessons from me don't forget to subscribe to my channel. See you next time. Увидимся. Пока-пока.