Learn how to ask where somebody is
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| Привет Всем. С Вами Светлана. Hi everybody! I’m Svetlana. |
| Welcome to RussianPod101.com’s Русский язык за три минуты. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Russian. |
| In the last lesson, we learned how to talk about your nationality. In this lesson we are going to learn how to ask about the location in case you are looking for somebody. By the end of this lesson you will be able to say the things like “Where are you?” and reply "I am in the street" for example. I believe it's very useful! |
| Remember, we learned two forms, formal and informal, to ask where somebody comes from? Today’s question “Where are you?” in Russian is very similar to them. We will use pronouns Вы and Ты to build formal and informal sentences respectively. |
| So, Let’s start with easier and shorter one. Ты где? You already know the pronoun Ты, you simply need to memorise the interrogative где which literally means where. We need neither verbs nor particles, we just say WHERE YOU or YOU WHERE? In fact there is no strict words order in informal Russian sentence, so you can say either Ты где? or Где ты? |
| Let's get down to the formal way to ask the location. We simply substitute the pronoun Ты with Вы and add the word Где. Unlike the informal sentence structure, the formal one is more strict, so you’d better put the word ГДЕ before the pronoun. |
| Где вы? But if you swap them, it will still be understood. |
| To make it even more polite you might add the verb НАХОДИТЕСЬ which is the equivalent to the english verb “to be” conjugated for the pronoun Вы. So we have: |
| Где вы находитесь? |
| [slowly] Где вы находитесь? |
| Answering this question is super easy! You just say Я which means “I”, add the preposition В which stands for IN and, then add the location. Do you wanna try to answer it? |
| Say “I am in the shop”. Я в магазине. |
| [slowly] Я в магазине. |
| The sentence structure itself is very easy. However, there are so many prepositions in Russian to indicate the location. The most common ones are В, “In” in English, На, English “On” and У “At”. The most difficult part is that the nouns which come after these prepositions will change according to the prepositional case. |
| The prepositional case is used to designate the place. The nouns will change their endings to: -e and -и |
| For example: |
| "I am in the park" Я в парке. |
| "I am on the street" Я на улице. |
| "I am at the library" Я у библиотеки. |
| It looks a bit confusing but I am sure it will come to you naturally with the practise. |
| Now it’s time for Svetlana’s tips. |
| As I said there a lot of prepositions in Russian that define the relationships between objects within sentences. But they also affect the spelling of nouns. Luckily most of them have a direct English equivalent. I will come back to the subject of prepositions later in this series. |
| Okay! In this lesson we learned how to talk about your location. Next time we’ll learn how to talk about you age. So do you want to know how to ask somebody’s age? I’ll be waiting for you in our next Русский язык за три минуты lesson. See you soon. Пока пока! |
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