- Forum >
- Topic: Russian >
- "У женщины есть кошки."
59 Comments
I'm giving up! For the last two times in this section "koshki" was marked wrong in the plural - now it is marked wrong in the singular! I've now got eleven successive questions wrong. Destinctly demotivating!!!!!
Just remember: use nominative for something you have and genitive for something you don't.
- Singular: у меня есть кошка - у меня нет кошки
- Plural: у меня есть кошки - у меня нет кошек
"Кошки" may be one cat in genitive or two or more cats in nominative.
*"большое спасибо" would be more correct, if you are saying "thanks a lot" ;))
In your example "У меня нет кошки" you have both, the subject and the object on Genitive?
While in other exmple like: "У девочки есть брат" is only the subject what change to Genitive?
My questions are=
-
why is "девочки " the subject? I notice that there is a formula of " у + GENITIVE + есть" but can anyone explain me why is the girl the subject instead of the cat? In English the girl is the subject and the cat is the predicate (object).
-
if it is a negative "есть" ( у + noun + нет) both become "negative "?
560
To write "The girl has a cat", Russian puts "There is a cat is by the girl" with sentence order "By the girl there is a cat" (У девочки есть кошка). So you can see that "cat" is the subject of the sentence and "girl" is a prepositional object. Objects of у are genitive.
In the negative you have "By the girl there is no cat" (У девочки нет кошки). нет ("there is no") also causes the next word to be genitive, so that's why we have both nouns genitive.
- 1618
"The woman has a cat"
Why it is incorrect if according to the translation кошки also means "a cat"?
I edit, instead of delete, in case someone else makes the same question.
I realized that it's because кошки means "cats" in nominative and "cat" in genitive. To recognize them you have to look at the phrase. In this case, it has a "У" and a "есть" and those words requires a genitive word.
Let's stay motivated, I just realised I can now use the declination tables in my book of russian (for Russians). That book that I had not openend for 1 year because it was so hard. Thank you duo-team ! Having those tables around does make things easier to understand.
Read through the discourse, and I'm still a bit confused so trying to explain it back in how I think I understand it
The subject behind the У requires a genitive case?
While because we're talking about having (есть) then what follows is nominative?
- 560
That's right. What's tricky about these sentences is the Russian word order. If the sentence started with есть as in Есть кошки у женщины - literally: There are cats by the woman - no one would get confused. In that ordering we can clearly see that "cats" is nominative and only "woman" is affected by the preposition to become genitive.
Haha so I'm definitely confused, help me out! so I see the genitive case has us using the same as the plural form for woman... Is this always the case? Does the singular genitive use the form of the nominative plural? Are there any easy ways to remember these rules? Thanks in advance!
- 1618
Well, according to the rules, in nominative, the plural words ends with "ы", "и", "а" and "я". Sadly, mostly singular genitive words, also ends with the same letters, so many times is confusing. Specially with femenine words. The only way to notice the difference, it's looking for "hints". Like in this case, that is the "У" that always requires genitive.
I hope that this helps.
How to distinguish genitive plural vs genitive singular? The woman has vs the women have? Thanks! :)
Would you mind translating what your wrote? I'm still confused.
You wrote: У женщины есть кошки. (singular) - Does this mean: The woman has cats (or?) (when you say singular, are you referring to the woman?)
You wrote: У женщин есть кошки. (plural) - Does this mean: The women have cats (or?) (when you say plural are you referring to the women...or the cats?)
Thanks for your time and clarification!
У женщины есть кошки. (singular) - the woman has cats
У женщин есть кошки. (plural) -the women have cats
The question was how to distinguish between genitive singular and plural. "The woman has vs the women have". I answered that question.
Woman/women женщины/женщин is the genitive. Cats hasn't changed in my examples. The word is always the same, кошки, nominative plural.
У женщины есть кошки. (singular) is the original sentence. The translation is given already by Duo. "The woman has cats." The second sentence is the plural and is the other example that had been asked for. У женщин есть кошки - The women have cats.
- 1497
As an aside: In American English, when some "has kittens (baby cats)", it means that they are upset about something, usually to an unwarranted or undeserved degree. When a child gets very upset because he/she can't have something he/she wants and starts acting badly because of it (crying, whining, stamping feet, being a pest), you could say the child is "having kittens".
It's not the same for adults having cats, though maybe it could be used that way if the context made it clear.
- 560
Feminine nouns usually have the same -ы/и form in the genitive singular and the nominative plural, which can cause some confusion.
- 883
Is it just me or does the audio for 'кошки' sound like it ends with an a? I cannot differentiate between кошки and кошкa.
Yes, the audio is wrong, it says "кошке" (but not "кошка"!) instead "кошки".
Listen to:
https://forvo.com/word/кошка/#ru
https://forvo.com/word/кошки/#ru
https://forvo.com/word/кошке/#ru
- 403
I wrote this and it was counted as correct: У женщину есть кошки. ЖенщинУ! Why did it count it as correct? It should be женщинЫ. Женщину was marked correct in another exercise too!
I do agree. "У женщинУ есть кошки" is a rude mistake. Remove this case, please. p.s. I have a native Russian language.
Why not " A woman has cats". Because in the other sentence with the same structure " A man has a dog" was marked as correct
I still don't get the use of "у" in this sentence. Can anyone help me understand, please?
The verb "have" is conjugated as a compound structure "У owner (genitive) есть object (nominative)". It can, and will, get more complicated when other sentences add pronouns such as "this" and the negative is a bit different than that but "У" will always be present. I'm level 8 in Russian and that's the way I understand it so far. I hope that helps.
it's just the way russians compose this sentences. in the infinite wisdom of rick of rick and morty, "don't think about it". it's not like all sentence structures in english make sense either when you think about them. especially the supposed "simple, common sentences". but as you speak english for years, or maybe even lifetime, you just don't notice the weird constructions anymore. as example, why would there be "welcome" in "you're welcome"? it's not like I got here, but I bet that one doesn't bother you.
- 560
Russians have a verb that means "have" but they have a casual way of avoiding it where instead of saying "The woman has cats" they say what literally translates as "By the woman there are cats". у means by.
I still--STILL--don't understand why sometimes it is cats in the singular and sometimes in the plural. DL really needs to stop using cats as an object, the rules are too arbitrarily confusing. It's very frustrating.
well cats is and can only be plural. the reason word cat sometimes sounds same as cats in russian, is cause of declensions. if i'm not mistaken, russian has 6 different cases. nominative you get answering questions "who" or "what" and it's basically the dictionary form of a noun. that would be "кошка" for singular, and "кошки" for plural.
this lesson is on genitive, which indicates possession, so you get it as answer to questions "to whom it belongs". so if you wanted to say that something belongs to a singular cat, you would say "у кошки естъ". if you meant to say that multiple cats have something, you'd go with "у кошек естъ".
in this particular case, it's not about what cat has, as cat is the object being owned by a woman, so the woman is in genitive, and cat is in nominative.
in fact, the very word "whom" is the remnant of the time long since passed, when english too used cases. my native tongue has 7 cases, and you don't really think which case should be used when, you just learn it as a kid and use it as the only possible way to form a meaningful sentence. despite that, trying to learn russian or german, isn't made any easier, because, cases are never easy when you are learning a language. you just apply rules until you get the feel for it, and after a while, you won't have to think about it, you'll just use proper case cause it's the only one that makes sentence sound normal.
I thought in genitive plural you say кошек. What is the purpose of кошек then and why is кошки going back to nominative?
It might be as plural as singular. one lifehack: If you have a functional part of speach, this one is stealing "Ы" from plural and giving it to singular. У женщин - plural; У женщины - singular. Для мужчин - plural. Для мужчины - singular
Since both "woman" and "cat" are in plural here, I don't quite understand why we can't say that this sentence could also mean "the women have cats." Can anybody help?
- 883
I'm not a Russian expert, but woman is not plural here but possessive. Your sentence would probably be: у женщин есть кошки Welcome to Russian, never ending complexity and exceptions to the myriad of rules
