Just for fun:
As we learn a language, we begin to practice it in a conversation every day. We read, speak, write – we communicate. But what happens when you are taken out of your everyday usual communication practice and submerge into a foreign language. Well, I have been experiencing this since I 1994, when I moved to the U.S. It is interesting to watch how my language skills sort of cross with one another. Sometimes it is complementary, and sometimes, I wish I did not open my mouth… I find it that sometimes I can not fully express myself to my friends in English and realize that my thoughts in Russian are also have difficulty coming out in an appropriate form. So I thought to myself, I need to use my social media outlets and blog on my site about it.
What also motivated me to do this was a conversation with my coworker today. She was also bilingual. It was interesting to notice how our brain worked and we could almost finish each other sentences and understand each other half way through the conversation, yet our conversations was full of “you know” “like” “umm” “aaa” etc. But what buggled my mind was the fact that all of the sudden I could not remember the definitions of cases in Russian language. So, I decided to find a definition online and in Russian, and then translate it to English with the help of some free online translators and some editing i think my definitions came out decent and readable in English.
So, here is a definition translated by me from Russian sources:
Падеж (Padezh, Rus.) – Case, in inflectional language (synthetic language) or [agglutinating system], is a word category (usually a name), that shows its syntactic role in a sentence and connects separate words of that sentence together.
In other words, cases help connect the words together into a sentence. For Russians it is often hard to comprehend the fact that there are no cases in English language. There are 6 cases in Russian language… LOL yeah… that is a huge change from six to none!
In Russian language nouns, adjectives, numerals, and pronouns declinate (they change their cases). Declination is expressed by the ending of a word (the word ends differently in a different case).
Here are six main cases:
Nominative case – Именительный (Imenitel’ni)
Genitive case – Родительный (Roditel’ni)
Dative case – Дательный (Datel-ni)
Accusative case – Винительный (Vinitel’ni)
Instrumental case – Творительный (Tvoritel’ni)
Prepositive case – Предложный (Predlojni)
To my surprise, however, I discovered that there are several secondary cases besides the ones I learned in school. Those cases, as well, I’ve used many of times in my communication, but never thought of them as separate cases from the main six:
Vocative case (Zvatel’ni) – (exists in Slavic languages) Name Anna, in Vocative case I’d address to her as An’! or in other words, english translation would be “hey, Ann!” For Mikhail it would be, Mik!
Partitive case (Kolichestvenno-otdelitel’ni) – (or secondary Genitive case) that is used to define a whole of something as a part of. For example head of garlic – Golovka chesnok[a] or chesnok[u].
Locative case (Mestni) – or secondary Prepositive case – where noun means of a place of happening for example: Stoiat v sneg[u] – stand in a snow. but Prepositive case in the sentence of Dumat’ o sneg[e] – think of a snow. Stoiat v vode – stand in a water and dumat’ o vod’e – think of water have the same ending [ea].
Ablative case (Iskhodn’i) – where noun means a place that is a beginning from point A to point B it would be point A – for example: vishel iz less[u]- came out of the woods. This case differentiates from Locative case by the accent on the IZ (out of).
Boy, russian language is beautiful! Things that we use on an everyday basis and don’t even think about how they are processed by our brain automatically.
And then it hit me! This is why I have a hard time using a of the on out of, etc. So, when you hear me say “I came out from the closet, i really mean – I came out of the closet” or “I am at snow to the knee” I really mean “I am in snow up to my knees” 
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed my humor
SOURCES:
Bogoroditsky V.A. General Course of Russian Grammar (from university readings). 6 edition. — p. 167—167, 311.
Wikipedia in Russian
