Basic Russian Lesson #1

If you are an English speaking person you may find that learning Russian is a very difficult task - this language has many forms that do not exist in English. For example, many words that signify not live objects have word gender.

For example, "chair" in Russian is masculine but "stool" - feminine. Bedazzling, isn't it? It is quite common though in Russian that if a word ends with sound "-Ah" - it will be feminine and if a word ends with a consonant - then it is masculine.

However, this rule is not always true. Besides, to make things even messier, there is so called "middle" gender, non-masculine of feminine. For example, window and sun are of middle gender. How can you remember all this mess?

In many cases you have to memorize it by heart and only fall back for the rule described above if you don't know for sure what is the gender of this or that word.