19 Comments
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, both sound OK.
Yes, I contrast genitive to accusative to show the difference in meaning.
401
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’
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?
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').
I though negative accusative takes genitive? So the noun should be in the genitive?
