Урок первый

Recently I have seen something like I want to offer you for those who study English. And I think it can be interesting for Russian language learners too. The goal of this course is to learn to read in Russian and it begins from reading. I don’t want to teach you Russian pronunciation or to teach you to speak in Russian – just reading. We will start reading a real Russian tale from the lesson 3. I will give as much grammar as you will need to understand the text and a lot of exercises to remember words and grammar. We will not learn it in a system as generally, we will learn it as it need for text understanding, but the system will come later.

To start this course you need only to know how to read letters (and words) in Russian, it is no need to read perfectly. You need only to read Russian word as you want.

Новые слова

Урок	lesson	Новый урок, первый урок
Новый	new	Новое приключение, новый друг
Слово	word	Новое слово, первое слово
Грамматика	grammar	Новая грамматика, первая грамматика
Приключение	adventure	Новое приключение, первое приключение
Незнайка		The name of a main character
и	and	Урок и слово, незнайка и друг
его	his	Его слово, его друг
друзья	friends	Новые друзья, первые друзья
первый	first	Первое приключение, новое приключение
Друг	friend	Первый друг, новый друг

Новая грамматика

Roots, suffixes and endings.

Russian words consist of some parts: prefix (sometimes), root (always), suffix(sometimes) and ending(always if the word can be chaged). Root is the main part of the word – it contain the main meaning of the word, suffix and prefix contain the additional meanings and ending contain the grammar meaning of the word. The are not a lot of endings in Russian – may be about 100. The group of suffixes and prefixes is bigger and the group of roots is very big (something like a group of all words in English). It is very important to see roots, suffixes and endings in Russian word to understand them and to understand Russian grammar. So we will try to do it. Look for our new words – here are this parts:

1. урок – root урок and zero ending (it means that it isn’t convey as any letter or sound, but it has it own meaning.

новый – нов+ый (root+ending).
слово – слов+о (root + ending)
Незнайка – не + знай + к + а (prefix+root+suffix+ending)
и – root
его – его (root+ zero ending)
приключение – при + ключ + ен + ия (prexix+root+suffix+ending)
друг – друг + zero ending
друзья – друзь + я (root + ending)
первый – перв + ый (root + ending)

As you see 2 words have similar meaning, but not the same root, this is because the letter Я can’t stand after Г in Russian, the letter Г changed into ЗЬ.

Later we will practice with all this endings and changes, now I want you only to know about this feature of Russian language.

Gender

All Russian nouns have gender, it isn’t the gender as man and woman, it is just grammar gender. Of course the girl (девочка) will be feminine gender and the boy (мальчик) will be masculine. But what gender will be table (стол) or pen (ручка). And here we need endings. Look at the words девочк-а and ручк-а – they have the same ending… and they have the same gender – feminine.

Look at the table with genders and their endings.

Faminine	Masculine	Neuter
-а, -я	-zero (with consonant before it), or it can be –а(-я) if it addressed to a man	-о, -е
грамматика	урок	слово
	Незнайка	приключение
	папа (father)

Also the noun can ends the letter –ь (it isn’t an ending – it is just the last letter), and what a pity you must remember what gender these words are. For today we have now such words.

Exercise 1.

Fix the gender of words (it is no need to look them in the dictionary)

аллея

берег

бульвар

василёк

город

дом

колокольчик

кора

лес

лодочка

маргаритка

огурец

одуванчик

он

река

ромашка

рост

ручей

улица

цветок

Adjectives also have gender in Russian language – the same as the noun they concerned. And they have the endings for these genders.

Faminine	Masculine	Neuter
-ая	-ый	-ое
Новая	Новый	Новое
Старая	Старый	Старое

These aren’t all the endings, but these are what we need now.

Exercise 2.

Make the proper adjective for these words:

Аллея – новая (the same to all words)