Learn Russian in 30 Minutes - Russian Grammar Basics For Beginners. Part 1

Всем привет! And welcome back! Today I prepared a very special video and this video is for total beginners. Well, you should know the alphabet to be able to understand everything. But still, I will show you the very basics of the Russian grammar. The main idea is that by the end of this video you will know enough to start having simple conversations in Russian. How does it sound? But if you want to get the most out of this video, please write your own examples and maybe even short stories using the grammar and the vocabulary you will see in this video. So, поехали! Let's start with personal pronouns. Она, оно, мы, вы, plural, они. Here we have a full list. So, я, ты or вы, он, она, оно, мы, вы, они. The next what we should learn is gender. In Russian, it's very important to know the gender and later you will see why. We have masculine, feminine and neutral. Masculine nouns end in a or yeah. We also have nouns ended in soft sign. So, they can be either masculine or feminine. We should memorize this. There is a little tip that might help you to memorize the endings. So, let's have a look at the personal pronouns. Он, masculine and он ends in н. Н is a consonant. Она, it ends in а and it's feminine. Оно ends in о, so it's neutral. Let's see some examples. Masculine, фильм because м is a consonant. Журнал, л is a consonant. Книга, it ends in а, so it's feminine. Музыка also ends in а, so it's also a feminine. And the last one, видео, it ends in о, so it's neutral. Now we are ready to learn how to form the past tense. It's pretty important because if your goal is to speak Russian with other people, then it's better to start with this tense. I guess most of the time when we talk to people, we talk about some past activities. We share what we did yesterday, last week or at the weekend. I have a question for you. Что они делали вчера? What did they do yesterday? Она читала книгу. She read a book. Он читал книгу. He read a book. Они читали книгу. They read a book. Maybe you've just noticed something, so let's have a closer look. Let's see these examples. He read. Она читала. She read. Оно читало. It read. Мы, вы, они читали книгу. We, you, plural, they. So in the past tense, we change verbs based on gender and number. Now let's see how to form the past tense. I chose a very common verb, работать, and this is a basic form. So to be able to make the past tense, first we need to remove Т and soft sign. Now we have работа and we just add an appropriate ending. So for example, a man can say я работал. A woman can say я работала. Or if it's a group of people, they can say мы работали. Now I have a list of very basic verbs. Работать, отдыхать, делать, читать, смотреть, завтракать, обедать и ужинать. And now I can describe what I did yesterday. So вчера я, and I'm a woman, завтракала, работала, обедала, читала, ужинала и смотрела фильм. And my husband can say вчера я делал много. Я работал и не отдыхал. So you can see the difference. In the first one, the speaker is a woman, so we use the ending ля. And in the second one, the speaker is a man, so we use the ending ля. So what about you? Что вы делали вчера? And here I'm using you, we as a singular formal. Now we can add some more information and for example, tell what your family members or pets, if you have any, did yesterday. But for that, we need to learn how to say I have. To be able to say I have or you have, we have special phrases. For this video, I chose an informal version because I think it's the most common one. So now let's have a look at two, three examples. First one. У меня есть папа. Вчера он завтракал, гулял, смотрел фильм, обедал, не работал. Он пенсионер. Ужинал. И у меня есть муж. Вчера он не завтракал. Он много работал и не отдыхал. Обедал, смотрел фильм, ужинал, читал. So what about you? У тебя есть муж. У тебя есть жена. У тебя есть собака. У тебя есть кошка. Что они делали вчера? If you are writing your Russian text, then you can pause the video and write similar phrases about your family members, pets, friends. Now we need two more verbs. So in Russian, to eat is есть and to drink is пить. Let's have a look at their past forms. Please pay attention that есть is a regular verb. You can see we don't have s in the past form. Пить. Он пил. Она пила. Они пили. Normally, when we use these verbs, to eat and to drink, but also to watch or to read, we add some extra information like what we drank, ate, watched or read. And to be able to do this properly in Russian, we need to learn the accusative case. But first, do you remember about genders? We have three genders, masculine, feminine, neutral, right? And I hope you remember that. And now I have some words. Пицца, кола, фильм, сериал, бургер, паста, яйцо, музыка, сэндвич, суп, журнал, авокадо и книга. Please pause this video and try to put them into the column based on their gender. Now let's see the correct answer. Masculine nouns are фильм, сериал, бургер, сэндвич, суп, журнал. As you can see, all these nouns are ended in a consonant. Feminine nouns, пицца, кола, музыка, паста, книга, they're all ended in a. So they're feminine. And neutral, яйцо, авокадо. Yes, they are ended in a. So they're neutral. And now I want to show you some examples. Вчера я завтракала. Я ела сэндвич и пила чай. Я обедала. Я ела суп. Here, сэндвич, чай и суп are direct objects. So they answer the question what. What did I eat? Что я ела? Я ела сэндвич. What did I drink? Что я пила? Я пила чай. And in this situation, we need to use the accusative case. But you can see that here there are no difference between the basic form and the accusative case. For another example. Вчера мой муж не завтракал. Он обедал. Он не ел авокадо. Он ел яйцо. Again, the same thing. Here we use the accusative case because авокадо and яйцо are direct objects in these phrases. But you can see that there are no difference between the basic form and the accusative case form. And the last one. Вчера мы ужинали. Мы ели пасту. Потом я читала книгу. Муж слушал музыку. And here we can see some changes. Паста, книга и музыка are feminine, if you remember. Let's see the rule. For the feminine nouns, we have special endings. If a word ends in а, we should change it into у. Книга, но я читала книгу. Музыка, но я слушала музыку. If a word ends in я, then we should use the ending у. For example, информация, я читала информацию. Here's a short formula to remember the rule. Я ела, as an example, пицца, бургер, авокадо. Я ела пиццу, бургер и авокадо. So what about you? Что вы пили вчера? Что вы ели вчера? Что вы смотрели? И что вы читали? Don't forget, we have to use the accusative case after all these verbs. Now we are ready to learn about the present tense. But here we have a difference. So if you remember, to be able to make the past tense, we changed verbs based on gender and number. But in the present tense, a Russian verb has six forms. One for each of the subject pronouns. So я, ты, он, она, мы, вы и они. But today we are going to learn only three forms. Я, ты, он, она. Because as a beginner, you use these forms all the time. For the present tense, we divide verbs into two main groups. Verbs ended in АТЬ or ЯТЬ. And another group, verbs ended in ИТЬ. Let's have a look at one verb, изучАТЬ, which means to study. And this verb ends in АТЬ, so it belongs to the first group. And let's check the endings for this group. So я, the ending is ю, ты, ешь, он, она, ет. ИзучАТЬ, it's the basic form, infinitive. First, again, we should remove the last two letters. We have изучА. And now we only should add an appropriate ending. For example, я изучАю. I study. Я изучАю русский. How will you say you study? Ты изучАешь. Another verb, работАть. So я работАю, ты работАешь, он, она работАет. Now let's have a look at the verbs ended in ЯТЬ. For example, гулять, to walk. Again, we should remove the last two letters. We have гуля. And add an appropriate ending. Я гуляю. How will you say she walks? Она гуляет. Говорить, to speak. This verb ends in ИТЬ and belongs to the second group. Endings for this group are ю, ишь, and ИТЬ. So говорИть, again, it's infinitive. And now we have to remove, attention, three letters. So we have говор. But now, again, we simply add an appropriate ending. Я говорю. So how will you say you speak? Ты говоришь. Here you can see a table with all the endings that we need to know. ИзучАть, я изучАю, ты изучАешь, он изучАет. Гулять, я гуляю, ты гуляешь, он гуляет. Говорить, я говорю, ты говоришь, он говорит. So what am I doing right now? То я делаю сейчас. Сейчас я работаю, я читаю текст, говорю по-русски и по-английски, делаю видео, слушаю музыку. And also you can see here an example of the accusative case. What about you? Что ты сейчас делаешь? Please pay attention that the present tense has a lot of different spelling rules and some kind of exceptions. But today, we are working with the basic forms, like mostly with the regular basic forms. So if you master them, then different exceptions won't be a big deal. Now we need the future tense. And for that, I have a few examples. Завтра, which means tomorrow. Завтра я буду работать, буду читать и не буду отдыхать. Завтра ты будешь работать, будешь читать, не будешь отдыхать. Завтра он или она будет работать, будет читать, не будет отдыхать. I guess you noticed something. As you can see, to be able to create the future tense, we need буду, будешь и будет, plus infinitive. Что ты будешь делать завтра? Oh my God, it's incredible. But we can say a lot of things about our daily routine, right? So now I want to use all the tenses in one short story. Сегодня утром я принимала душ и завтракала. Я ела сэндвич и пила кофе. Потом смотрела видео. Сейчас я работаю. Я делаю видео. Читаю презентацию и много говорю. Потом я буду обедать. У меня есть обед. Я буду есть суп. Потом буду работать. Вечером я буду ужинать. Я буду есть пиццу. Потом я буду смотреть футбол или читать книгу. The next step is to talk about locations, to add where we are. And for that, we need to learn about the prepositional case. But before we do that, we should learn some prepositions of place. Because in Russian, it's not so simple. We have two most common prepositions. We use В with enclosed spaces, buildings, countries, cities or towns. And we use на with open spaces and events. For example, В plus офис, школа, супермаркет. На plus улица, which means street, работа or концерт. And now we are ready to learn about the prepositional case. I'm going to give you three locations, Москва, Будапешт и комната, which means room. As you can see, I use the preposition В because Москва is a city, Будапешт is a city, and комната is an enclosed space. But we also have here different endings. And even though Москва and комната are feminine and Будапешт is masculine, we use the same ending here. These are the most common endings, but we also have like other ones, and definitely we have some exceptions. But still, what about you? Где вы сейчас? Now we are ready to learn about adjectives. So we can describe those locations, for example. Adjectives always agree in gender, number and case with the nouns to which they refer. And in Russian, we have two main variants of adjective endings, hard and soft. Today, we are going to learn the hard variant because probably 90% of the adjectives you need right now belong to the hard variant. The basic form of the adjectives you can always find in a dictionary, and it is masculine and singular. Two main endings are for example, Now let's see how it works. We see two examples here. The feminine version is an "-ая ending". And neutral. The ending is "-ое". I will tell you one short example. But there is one very important spelling rule. After the letters we can't write the letter. Instead, we should write the letter. That's why we can see that we write or because the consonant before the ending is So after we should write This doesn't put these adjectives into the soft category because feminine and neutral forms are regular, normal. Another very short practice. У меня есть книга, и сейчас я читаю книгу. Книга интересная и большая. And the last one. It is so common that we want to say I went somewhere or I will go, and for that we need to learn some special verbs. Even though the concept of verbs of motion in Russian language is pretty complicated, today we are going to learn the most basic forms so that you can use them right away. And these forms will cover maybe 80% of the situations when you need to use them. The first pair of verbs is ИТИ ХОДИТЬ, which means to go by foot or to walk. Now we use these verbs when we get somewhere by foot, obviously. If you want to talk about the past, so you want to say you went somewhere yesterday, two days ago, last weekend, use the verb ХОДИТЬ. Я ходил в кафе, она ходила в кафе, мы ходили в кафе. Now the present tense. So if you want to say that you go somewhere regularly, again use the verb ХОДИТЬ. For example, каждый день, every day. Я хожу в кафе. Please pay attention that the conjugation here is not regular. Ты ходишь в кафе, она ходит. If you want to talk about your plans, like I will go somewhere, use the verb ИТИ. So let's say tomorrow, завтра. Я иду в кафе. Ты идёшь в кафе, она идёт в кафе. Let's see some more examples. Вчера я ходила в супермаркет. Я не хожу в супермаркет каждый день, но завтра я опять иду в супермаркет. You can see here that I used the preposition В because супермаркет is a building, it's an enclosed space, but I didn't change anything in the word itself. Another example. Вчера муж ходил на работу, сегодня он не идёт на работу. Here we can see that I used the preposition НА because РАБОТА is kind of an event. And I said that НА РАБОТУ, so I changed the basic form because the basic form is РАБОТА and it's feminine. Maybe you recognize this form because we already used the accusative case. With verbs of motion, we should use the accusative case. How it works? ИТИ or ХОДИТЬ plus an appropriate preposition В or НА plus LOCATION. So if location is masculine, then no changes. If it's feminine, then У or Ю and if it's neutral, then no changes. We have three locations. РЕСТОРАН masculine, РАБОТА feminine and КАФЕ. Вчера я ходила в ресторан. No changes because ресторан is masculine. НА РАБОТУ because РАБОТА is feminine. И В КАФЕ. No changes. What about you? КУДА ВЫ ХОДИЛИ ВЧЕРА? КУДА ТЫ ХОДИШЬ КАЖДЫЙ ДЕНЬ? КУДА ТЫ ИДЁШЬ ЗАВТРА? And another pair of verbs we use when we go by transport somewhere. So normally, we use it when we want to talk about our trips. When we use these verbs, it means that we used a car or a train or a bus. If you want to talk about the past, so you went somewhere, use the verb ЕЗДИТЬ. ОН ЕЗДИЛ В БУДАПЕШТ. ОНА ЕЗДИЛА В БУДАПЕШТ. МЫ ЕЗДИЛИ В БУДАПЕШТ. If you want to say about regular activities in the present, use the verb ЕЗДИТЬ. Again, Я ЕЖУ В БУДАПЕШТ. You can see that this conjugation is very irregular. ТЫ ЕЗДИШЬ В БУДАПЕШТ И ОНА ЕЗДИТ В БУДАПЕШТ. And the last one, FUTURE. If you want to talk about your plans, use the verb ЕХАТЬ. For example, tomorrow, ЗАВТРА Я ЕДУ В БУДАПЕШТ. Again, this form is irregular. ТЫ ЕДИШЬ В БУДАПЕШТ И ОНА ЕДИТ В БУДАПЕШТ. Let's see one small example. So, what about you? And that's it. So, these are the basics that you need if you want to speak Russian from the very, very beginning. I hope it was useful and see you in the next video. Пока!