Nouns and the Gender Gap

The reason adjectives and verbs find nouns so agreeable is that they also have gender and declension class, and it is these adjectives and verbs must agree with. All adjectives and verbs in the past tense must agree with nouns as to masculine, feminine, neuter, or plural. Well, let's begin at the beginning.

To prevent the simplicity of the Russian language from getting out of control, Russians do not maintain a one-to-one match between gender, the four declension classes, and the four agreement endings. Rather, as we have seen, agreement is based upon a rather sophisticated algorithm. There are four agreement categories with the nominally sexy names just mentioned: masculine, feminine, neuter and plural. Each predicate adjective and past tense verb must have an ending that reflects one of these categories which it finds in the subject noun. The agreement endings are given just below in Table 1. Remember, the agreement categories do not correspond one-one with natural gender or the declension classes—Declension I nouns may be either masculine (стол) or neuter (окно) and both Declension II (книга) and Declension III nouns (дверь) are feminine (gender relations are never simple). Of course, if the noun refers to a male or female animal, that takes precedence over declensional agreement.

Aside from the agreement algorithm, he following consistencies should also help you learn the agreement patterns:

• if the word ends on a hard consonant, so will the adjective;
• if the word ends on o or e (depending on whether the consonant before it is hard or soft) so will the adjective,
• if the noun ends on a or я, the adjective will, too, and
• if it ends on ы or и, so will the adjective.