Red Kalinka Forum

HI.

I’m new to all this. I have a question. According to OXFORD RUSSIAN GRAMMAR AND VERBS, 2002, by Terence Wade, masculine animate nouns have the accusative singular ending identical to the genitive singular ending. Thus, if I understand it correctly, “I see the man” would be “Я вижу человека”. My question is – does this apply to adjectives as well. In other words, would “I see the big man” be
“Я вижу большого человека “ or “Я вижу большой человека “

спасибо

Hi George,
first of all, it would be better to translate the sentence "I see the man" as "Я вижу этого человека". The word "этого" emphasizes the specificity expressed by "the". This specificity may also be implied from the context, and therefore the translation “Я вижу человека” may take place, however without any context it is better to use the adjective "этого". Note that one would translate the sentence "I see this man" as "Я вижу этого человека" as well because Russian does not differentiate between "the" and "this".

As for Russian adjectives, each of them always has the same number (singular or plural), gender and case as the noun the adjective is refering to. For this reason we say “Я вижу большого человека“ since here "человека“ is a singular masculine accusative noun.