"Я не хочу хлеб."

Translation: I do not want bread.

[wush11]

Хочу - bless you!

[DorianWebs]

I know right, haha

[tylerblankenship]

Doesn't хотеть usually need the genitive after it? Or is that something to do with countable/uncountable nouns?

[deactivated user]

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.

[Theron126]

Does "я не хочу хлеба" work as well as "я не хочу хлеб"?

[deactivated user]

Yes, both sound OK.

[Theron126]

That's what I thought. Good to have it confirmed :-)

[johnny_MMX]

Genitive in your examples is the latter. The former is accusative.

[deactivated user]

Yes, I contrast genitive to accusative to show the difference in meaning.

[Dore.m]

Why Я не хочу... and Я не вижу... but У меня нет...?
Does не mean "do not" in those cases, whereras нет mean "not"?

[deactivated user]

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’

[Ste941]

why is bread in nominative?

[Bistra191770]

It's accusative, but I prefer genitive - Я не хочу хлеба.

[localyokel501]

хочу does not sound the way I expected it to. the o sounds a lot like у (or u in english). is the TTS version of it correct?

[deactivated user]

In хочу́, stress is on the second syllable. In unstressed syllables, «о» and «а» are pronounced the same (in a manner similar to the English u in 'but').

[Nuept]

It sounds okay, a bit mechanical, but still correct :)

[johnny_MMX]

Remember, in Russian, the letter "O", when not stressed, sounds as "A".

[sppottsam]

I though negative accusative takes genitive? So the noun should be in the genitive?