"Кошка ест курицу."
Translation:The cat is eating a chicken.
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That distinction may work for some of these units, but it will not work when you take your Russian a little further.
Ест is he/she eats, but the infinitive form of the verb is есть, so the addition of the soft sign doesn't necessarily mean that there is a different verb.
The other есть is not quite "to have", although for an English speaker, it sometimes functions that way. It doesn't mean "to do" - the nearest equivalent in Russian is the verb делать/сделать - although you might imagine that from questions like "Do you have any?", but here "do" is just an auxiliary verb required for some types of English question, and I don't know of any other language that uses this construction (certainly not Russian).
Think of an Accusative form as of an English noun used as an object without any preposition: "I bought a car", "I killed a dragon", "I will send a reply shortly", "I cook salads", "I write books". This will not match Russian all the time but it will give you an idea. A so-called "direct" object of an action uses Accusative. However, this does not help you much because you cannot know beforehand which verbs have direct objects—you'd have to be a native speaker of a language to do that.
Still, "simple" verbs like "eat", "drink", "make", "write", "want", "see", "buy", "sell", "take" WILL interpret the object they operate on as a "direct" object, i.e. something seriously and directly affected by the action.
If you look at the list again, you might notice that "want" and "see" do not really belong there because their object is perceived by and agent but not actually affected by the action. Sadly, this is true; also, this is the reason verbs like "to like", "to listen" etc. may or may not take Accusative, and you cannot predict it. The use does not match up across different languages, and different verbs of the same language (with close meanings) may use different government.
On a brighter note, verbs like "to want", "to read", "to see", "to hear", "to know" DO take Accusative objects (such verbs are called transitive), and somehow this behaviour is quite common across languages—at least, European ones (but not only them, because they get similar treatment in Japanese).
Y is accusative it makes it the object of the sentence Without it, both are subjects. So either the cat is eating the chicken or the chicken is eating the cat. So y is very important to show the chicken is being eaten. Also in Russian курица is generally used to mean chicken as in the food regardless of male vs female
есть as "is/am/are" is mainly used in statements of existence (e.g., «Здесь есть вода»,«Выход есть» or, as an extension «У меня есть хлеб»).
In statements equating something with something else we omit or, in certain contexts, use это (e.g., «Мой папа — программист» , «Это Нью-Йорк», «Вода — это жизнь»). You can sometimes use есть and even суть to sound dramatic but it is generally rare in texts and speech.
Another есть is an infinitive of "to eat". As such, it cannot be used as the main verb in a sentence. I mean, it is the same as using "be" where you need is, am or are (which is correct in AAVE but not, say, in the standard American English).
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The cat is eating the hen. я перевожу это так " эта кошка ест живую, не ощипанную курицу", потому что hen это живая курица, а chicken - это мясо курицы =) как то scary