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What case does школы take here, and why? My guess is nominative, since no action is being performed, but I'm not positive.
It is the Genitive singular. A "Nominative" phrase of a noun combined with a numeral uses the noun in different cases depedning on the last word of the numeral:
- 1: Nominative singular. E.g., одна школа; двадцать один дом.
- 2, 3, 4: Genitive singular. E.g., две школы; три дома; двадцать четыре этажа; тридцать три девочки
- 5 and everything else: Genitive plural: пять школ; восемнадцать школ; сто кошек.
There is no deep meaning in this system: it was born as an ad hoc solution when certain word forms disappeared (historically, Slavic languages had the "dual" number). So it "sounds right"—but would have made no sense were the Russian language to be designed from scratch a hundred years ago.
Thanks! I wouldn't say that makes sense, but now I understand at least. It's tough trying to find a way to link certain translations and grammar constructs to english when in some cases there just isn't an english equivalent
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Im confused. Sometimes you use есть in sentences which are translared like "... is in this city", and sometimes not. Why?
Smaller towns (like, 15000–25000) do not really need more. Some have more, some do not.
