"Я не хочу хлеб."
Translation:I do not want bread.
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1176
Doesn't хотеть usually need the genitive after it? Or is that something to do with countable/uncountable nouns?
You can use genitive with uncountable nouns to convey a partitive meaning:
- Я хочу́ хлеб. 'I want [the] bread.'
- Я хочу́ хле́ба. 'I want some bread.'
The meaning difference is pretty subtle, they are often interchangeable.
Yes, I contrast genitive to accusative to show the difference in meaning.
55
Why Я не хочу... and Я не вижу... but У меня нет...? Does не mean "do not" in those cases, whereras нет mean "not"?
Russian expresses ‘having’ differently from English. In Russian, we don’t say ‘I have’ or ‘I don’t have’. We say, «у меня есть» ‘at my [possession], there_is’ or «у меня нет» ‘at my [possession], there_is_no’.
So, this construction is similar to other sentences about the existence:
- У меня́ нет воды́. ‘I don‘t have water.’ (=‘at my [possession], there-is-no water)
- В буты́лке нет воды. ‘There is no water in the bottle.’ (=‘in the bottle, there-is-no water’)
- У ма́мы есть маши́на. ‘Mum has a car’ (=‘at mum’s [possession] there-is car’)
- В гараже́ е́сть маши́на. ‘There is a car in the garage.’
In ‘there is’ sentences, you use «есть» ‘there is/are’ in positive sentences and «нет» ‘there is/are no’ in negative sentences.
But «ви́жу» and «хочу́» are normal verbs, and they use the usual negation — «не»:
- Я не ви́жу маши́ны. ‘I don’t see [a/the] car’
- Я не хочу́ зна́ть. ‘I don’t want to know’
1165
I notice you are/were also learning Polish which is probably where you're getting that from (I thought the same). It doesn't seem to work the same way in Russian with accusative becoming genitive in the negative, but from what I gather so far in this course and from previous comments is that this sentence could have the genetive хлеба which would imply that it's "some bread."
Although correct me if I'm wrong, this is just what I'm understanding so far