Russian Word of the Day

The adverb часто means frequently. Since it tells how often something happens, we can more specifically call it an adverb of frequency. It's often used much the same way as its English equivalent:

Часто is what we call the the "positive form" of the adverb; adverbs often have a "comparative form" as well, and in this case that form is чаще.

You may remember from yesterday that the case forms of год are:

Today we need to discuss the genitive singular forms. The modern version of the genitive singular is года, but there is an older form that arose as a consequence of the u-stem genitives which nowadays only appears in stock phrases. So you will occasionally find phrases like:

For instance:

There is a tendency in language to make the things that are irregular more regular. Thus the older plural ‘brethren’ in English has been mostly replaced by ‘brothers.’ Similarly nowadays it is much more common in Russian to say «год от года» than «год от году». It is still more common to find «без году неделя» than «без года неделя», but that ratio will most likely eventually change in favor of года.

Language changes. For instance, as I was growing up, I never heard anyone say “You want to come with?” for “Do you want to come with us?” I remember the first time I heard it. I thought “No native speaker of English could possibly ever say that!” I was wrong. All sorts of US native speakers say it nowadays, and nowadays it almost doesn't sound strange to me. This should teach us a lesson. No native speaker ever knows the entirety of his language. And if we find that Russian speakers occasionally give us contradictory language about their native language, this is also normal. In such situations, you need to ask multiple native speakers about your language issue, and then draw a rule of thumb from their responses.

The case forms of год are:

Note the two nominative plural forms. Dictionaries list both, but truth to tell you almost never see the года version for the plural.

Note the two forms for the genitive plural. The form лет is used after numbers and а few other words like много, мало, сколько and несколько. Годов is used everywhere else:

Note the two forms of the prepositional case. The form in -у is used to say "in such and such a year", and the -е form is used as the prepositional case form in other contexts:

We will address the alternative genitive forms tomorrow.

We previously mentioned that if a Russian number phrase is the subject of a verb, except when the number ends in one, it induces neuter singular verb agreement in the past:

There is another exception. If the number is preceded by an adjective in the nominative plural, then the verb shows plural agreement in the past:

Curses. On Saturday I again proposed to Luludya. She insists, despite our five sons, that she can never marry a man who is not Roma. This insistence nonetheless leads me to a certain point of view in this posting. What if Luludya had agreed to marry me? I could have produced many of following sentences.

Let's assume that Luludya and I have been married for more than a year. The first anniversary has passed. In that case, I may freely say:

Interestingly enough, if we use an ordinal number instead of a cardinal number, then we get a different meaning:

The use of the ordinal number indicates that the first year has not yet ended. The same thing happens with other years. If our second anniversary has already passed, I can say:

But if our second anniversary hasn't passed yet, we will say:

Let's say you are working at a company. The fifth anniversary of your employment has already passed. You can say either «Я здесь работаю уже пять лет» or «Я здесь работаю уже шестой год». Both sentences say essentially the same thing, but one uses the word пять, and the other uses the word шестой.

And now to return to reality...