Russian grammar · the case system
The accusative case in Russian
The accusative marks the direct object: the thing the action lands on. It also marks direction after в and на, and it hides the famous animacy twist: animate nouns borrow their genitive form in the accusative.
Aurélien CuvelierAug 10, 2026The endings, with a declined example per ending
Masculine
= nom / = gen*
стол · музей · словарь
Feminine
-у / -ю
сестру · неделю
Neuter
= nom
окно · море
Plural
= nom / = gen*
столы · словари · окна
The personal pronouns in this case
When to use it
The direct object
читать книгу (read a book), видеть друга (see a friend): друг is animate, so its accusative looks like the genitive.
Direction with в and на
Movement into or onto takes the accusative: иду в школу (I am going to school), едем на море (we are going to the sea).
Time expressions
каждый день (every day), всю ночь (all night): stretches and repetitions of time stand in the accusative.
In a real sentence
Watch out
Two traps live here. Animacy: masculine animate nouns borrow the genitive form as their accusative, so you see a table (вижу стол) but you see a brother (вижу брата). And direction versus location: в Москву (accusative) means to Moscow, while в Москве (prepositional) means in Moscow; the case is the only thing telling motion from position.
The other cases
- The nominative case in Russian
- The genitive case in Russian
- The dative case in Russian
- The instrumental case in Russian
- The prepositional case in Russian
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Aurélien Cuvelier Founder, NuanceDeck
Aurélien Cuvelier builds NuanceDeck: the app, and the verification pipeline behind its dictionary. Every entry is grounded in the official TORFL lexical minimum and a 20,000-word frequency corpus, and every example sentence passes a certification review before it ships.
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