"Молоко и хлеб уже на столе."
Translation:The milk and the bread are already on the table.
15 Comments
Russian nouns have several forms. Стол is the Nominative case form, it's used when the noun is a subject (стол мой — [the] table [is] mine). Стол also happens to be the Accusative case form, which is used when he noun is an object (я ви́жу стол — I see [a/the] table).
However, after preposition «на» you need a different case: a Prepositional. Столе́ is the prepositional case of «стол»: на столе — on [the] table.
(Technically, after «на» you can use Accusative case too, but it would change the meaning: на стол — onto the table.)
To see a table of all the possible forms, you can go here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%BB#Russian and then click 'Declension of сто́л'. You'll see a table with different forms of the word «стол». Don't worry if the table looks too complex; you'll learn all those forms as you progress through the course.
That is a great and complete answer. Thank you for the effort! It helps me a lot understanding the cases.
So is it in Russian just like in Latin and (old) Greek that the nominative and accusative case form are the same if the word is of the neutral gender?
recte dicis. The only exception is the pronoun «оно» 'it' — its accusative case form is «его».
Yes, I just reported this. Bizarrely, if you say 'The milk and the bread' it accepts 'are', but if you leave out the articles it insists on 'is', as if it's treating 'milk and bread' as a single dish!
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"The milk and bread are on the table" should be accepted. You don't have to use "the" for everything
Theres this thing called typos on phones, particularly for those of us who dont JUST type in English. Im getting my answers wrong because "bother" autocorrected over "brother," for example. Ill try to be more detailed, but I think you should stop taking off points for what are obviously typos.
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Automatically detecting whether a particular mistake is an obvious typo or not is actually a pretty hard problem, from a programming standpoint.
This is a little tricky. Russian cases can be described in more than one way, and all those descriptions are correct. However, depending on the description you prefer, the terms are used a little differently.
(1) The traditional description of Russian grammar uses 6 cases. In the 6-case system, 'Locative' is the old name of the 'Prepositional' case, and they mean the same thing.
With this interpretation, «о лесе» 'about the forest' and «в лесу» 'in the floor' are two different prepositional-case forms. Some nouns just have 2 different prepositional-case forms. Then, «лесе» is the first prepositional-case form, and «лесу» is the second prepositional-case form.
This is the description taught at Belarusian schools.
(2) In descriptions that allow for more than 6 cases, 'Locative' and 'Prepositional' are different cases: «о лесе» is the prepositional case, and «в лесу» is the locative case.
This way, those are two separate cases that happen to coincide for most nouns, except a few like «лес».
Whatever description you use, for most nouns, those forms coincide (в воде vs. о воде, в поле vs. о поле, в столе vs о столе).
