Struggling with Russian cases? 🇷🇺 🤔

We’ve made it simple! ✨ Clear visual sheets 📄, easy words 🗣, and practical examples – everything you need to finally understand how Russian cases work, not just memorize them. 🧠✅

Perfect for beginners 🌱 and anyone who feels stuck.

Russian cases are tough 😫 and what makes them even tougher.... is when they're partly invisible! I have lots of photos on this topic, so let's start with this one. Decoding a Russian phrase aka the thought process of a language learner This cup (which contained a smoothie) simply reads "an orange mood". But wait - it's not in the nominative form оранжевое настроение. It's clearly in some other case*. Why? 🤔 It must be part of a longer phrase. And the first part must be merely implied, probably something really obvious to native speakers. *the genitive case Luckily this one isn't too difficult once you've heard the ubiquitous хорошего дня! that every cashier says 100 times a day. Because they say it 100 times a day, they drop the first part: желаю вам хорошего дня, I wish you a nice day. All that's left is хорошего дня, which is in the genitive case. We have the same kind of ellipsis in English. I hope you have a nice day becomes Have a nice day. Things are a little simpler here since English isn't case heavy like Russian is. Anyway, seeing two lonely words in the genitive case was a big clue that the missing part of the phrase was probably something like желаем вам. Желаем вам оранжевого настроения, We wish you an orange mood. The problem now is simply a vocab one. What exactly is an orange mood? 😅 I don't exactly know. I asked a couple of friends. They couldn't say it was really a specific thing, but it probably implied a cheerful and positive mood.

Here is a comprehensive table of the noun endings in the Genitive case.

I’ve made 2 posts about Instrumental already, but that was just the top of the iceberg since there are too many functions of it. Today I’ll tell you about one more!

Not only we use Instrumental to talk about the instruments we used to do something (sign with a pen/подписать ручкой), but also to say that something is done by somebody/something. Деревня была разрушена ураганом - the village was destroyed by the hurricane. So the hurricane is the one that did it, so we write it in Instrumental case in Russian (ураган (N) - ураганом (I)). “Воскресение” было написано Львом Толстым в 1899 году - “Resurrection” was written by Leo Tolstoy in 1899. In names or word combinations (like  philarmonic orchestra) we have to change all of the words. Ребёнок был успокоен учителем - The child was comforted by the teacher. В 2018 году компанией было заработано 3 миллиарда долларов. - In 2018 3 billion dollars were made by the company.

Of course, you can say “the hurricane destroyed the village” and in this case hurricane is Nominative, but in cases where you express the idea with “by“, 90% are written in Instrumental. 

Nom- naming things/subject (что/кто/это)

Prep- where/about (где/о чём)

Gen- possession/of, where from (откуда)

Acc- direct object, direction after verbs of motion (where to [куда])

Dat- indirect object (кому)

Instr- instrument that performs action/with (с кем)