ELEMENTARY RUSSIAN... Сегодня в кабинете... Unit 1, Week 4 Language lab (Alphabet and Unit 1)

Здравствуйте, ребята! Как дела? =How's it going, guys?

Уже сентябрь = It's already September... There's a lot of review... Typical for the lab before you turn in portfolios. 

First off, check out this week's Muzyka Monday. Что такое осень?

Now, mark your calendars! Vmeste Club announces its first yummy event this year:

Сегодня на лабе... Today in the lab...

• Print out or grab at the lab our lab хендаут... INCLUDE THIS IN YOUR PORTFOLIO!
• Put on your наушники = your headphones... and do the listening exercise on the sheet (page 2), Addresses. Listening for numbers... FOCUS! Do you know how you get better at understanding Russian? Listening to Russian! (If you want to rehash your numbers 1-20, this page is pretty good!... They're also listed below.)
• THIS WILL HELP YOU ENORMOUSLY with your homework for the portfolio! Look through this PPP on the Prepositional case... Вот что важно... Here's a recap of what's important: [a] Don't forget to remove the ending. We add endings to stems! [b] The ending is usually -e, but when you try to add -e to any noun that ends in -ия, -ие, or -ий, you get -ии as the ending: Германия --> в Германии. [c] And don't forget that Russian treats all foreign toponyms (place names) that end in -о, -у, or -и/-ы as indeclinable, that is, they never change. Я живу в Орландо (NO CHANGE!).
  

Review of SUBJECT PRONOUNS (я, ты, он, она, мы, вы, они). What does it mean "to conjugate" a verb? 

Any single Russian verb has six different conjugation forms in the present tense, which is another way of saying something simple: There are SIX subject pronouns (like I, you, she, they....). In most Indo-European languages (NOT ENGLISH!) there are different verb forms that correspond directly to the subject pronoun.
Think of the English verb “to be”, which has three conjugation forms in the present tense (I am, you are, he/she/it is, we are, you are, they are). The English verb “to do” has only two conjugation forms in the present tense (do and does).

In this unit, we learned some of the conjugation forms of the Russian verb “жить”= to live. See its full conjugation paradigm below

(I) я живу́                                         (we) мы живём           
(you Sg) ты живёшь                        (you Pl) вы живёте
(he/she/it) он/она/оно живёт      (they) они живут

Now, do the written assignment 4 in the handout. Explain where each person lives. Remember to use the prepositional case, and remember that the verb form changes according to the subject! 

Some review....

The cardinal numbers again in Russian

1. один     ("a-deen")
2. два     ("dva")
3. три     ("tree")
4. четыре     ("chye-tir-ye")
5. пять    ("pyat")
6. шесть     ("shest")
7. семь    ("syem")
8. восемь     ("vo-syem")
9. девять   ("dyev-yat")
10. десять   ("dyes-yat")
11. одиннадцать
12. двенадцать
13. тринадцать
14. четырнадцать
15. пятнадцать
16. шестнадцать
17. семнадцать
18. восемнадцать
19. девятнадцать
20. двадцать

Вперед! Forward... MARCH!

Grammatical gender

Russian has three grammatical genders — masculine, feminine, neuter — and two “numbers”, singular and plural.

All nouns and modifiers have gender OR number. (All plurals in Russian are... I guess genderless?)

Nouns

Nothing new here, kids. We’ve always known what nouns are:
A noun is a kind of word (see part of speech) that is usually the name of something such as a person, place, thing, animal, or idea
Nouns have an “inherent” gender, they “always are” a certain gender: студент is always masculine, студентка is always feminine, etc. There are "markers" on most nouns that denote gender:

-а/-я is (almost always) feminine, -о/-ё is (almost always) neuter, -∅ (no ending) is masculine, and -ы/и usually marks the plural. (Recall that Russian "doubles" its vowels, so а and я both denote the same underlying phoneme or sound, /ah/.)

So, look at the words

• студентка (ends in an -a so it's feminine)
• студент  (ends in "nothing" so it's masculine)
• студенты (ends in -ы so it's plural)

Все так просто! Everything is SO EASY!

Some nouns that indicate a MALE are "marked" with a feminine ending... Take for instance папа, dad. Clearly, dad is a guy (well, at least to the Russian mind...). But the word папа is marked with a vowel (a) that indicates feminine. HOWEVER! The modifier "knows" the "real" gender of папа: Это мой папа. (The modifier is masculine!)... This is true for many male nicknames like Лёша, Ваня, Федя, Саша... If it's a boy, these nicknames are masculine and the modifiers would indicate that.  (See below for an explanation of how modifiers reflect the gender of the noun they modify.) 

Modifiers

These words reflect the gender of the noun they modify. You guys know this from basic Spanish: “el nino hermoso” and all that. Nino is masculine + singular, so you must use el. Nino is masculine + singular, so you must use hermoso. Everything reflects the gender/number of the noun. Most Indo-European languages work this way... except English.  

Modifiers: Anything that makes a noun more specific. Not just any car! That car. My car. My blue car. You get the idea. 

We start with simple possessive pronouns, “my car": моя машина. Feminine noun, so feminine form of the possessive. 

• мой 
• моя
• моё
• мои  

Hard and Soft Consonants (Review)

For almost every consonantal sound we have in English, 

Russian has two: a “hard” and a “soft”. Leave aside for a moment the actual phonemic difference: How do you know if a consonant is hard or soft? The default is always hard. That is to say, unless you have information contrariwise, assume that the consonant is “hard.” The consonant is “soft” if it is followed by the “soft sign” (мягкий знак) or if it is followed by a “vowel that induces softness in the preceding consonant” — aka, a “soft vowel.” (Note that the vowel itself isn’t soft—we just call it that because it’s easier than saying “vowel that induces softness in the preceding consonant.”)

Hard consonants +	а          о             у            э              ы
Soft consonants +	я        ё              ю            е              и