"У девочки нет воды."
Translation:The girl does not have water.
76 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
189
I don't like the way some people explain it around here. Basically you can curate a list of words where the next word has to be in genitive case. That list includes у and нет, as well as words like из, много, возле.
1452
Именительный - вода, родительный - воды, винительный - воду, дательный - воду, творительный - водой, предложный - о воде.
In my opinion, the lessons jumped in to the Genitive case too early. The singular and plurals are pretty straightforward, generally speaking. Learning the Nominative Case, the Accusative Case, the Dative case, and the Locative case are also straightforward. I would recommend just using the hints and getting through the Genitive case as quickly as possible so you can move on in the lessons, then actually come back to try and learn the Genitive case once you are much further along in Russian.
1227
According to the rules on the Genitive case page, words that end in -а should end in -ы, but девочка here ends in и. Is девочка is special case, or does it vary?
The explanation says that the object should get the genitive case, it does not mention the subject. So my question would still be why do both get the genitive case. It does not seem to make sense. I get the воды, but not the девочки.
From the notes on Basics 2:
" У A есть X ~ by A there is an X → A has an X
The owner [i.e. subject] is in the Genitive case "
And bear in mind нет is the 'opposite' of есть. For completeness, from the notes on Genitive 1:
" use «нет» to say that there is "no" something or you do not have it, the object is always in Genitive
У меня́ есть я́блоко → У меня́ нет я́блока "
1227
вода is whenever you're talking about water in the Nominative case (when it's the subject of the sentence, grammatically speaking). воды is the genitive version.
Btw, you can look up all forms of the word with wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B0#Russian). It's what I'm using!
1459
Can anyone direct me to a good online resource that summarizes the different cases and when to use them?
189
That sentence doesn't make sense in English. If you meant "The girls do not have water" then that translates as "У девочек нет воды".
189
Russian vowels come in pairs. ы and и both are roughly i sounds but ы sounds a bit different, the tongue is a bit further back which makes it sound sort of a cross between i and uh.
Because ы and и are pairs, ы is used after normal (hard) consonants, whereas и is used when the base form of a verb ends with -ь or another soft vowel (-я, -е, -ё, -ю), or with a consonant where it is hard to pronounce an ы after it (к, г, х, ш, щ, ж, ч).
189
Russian people have decided that it's too difficult to say ы after those letters Kundoo listed so they use и instead.
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So, it doesn't accept "they have no water" instead of "they do not have water", but it suggest "the girl has no water" instead of "the girl does not have water"