Accusative Case

The accusative (винительный падеж) marks the direct object , the person or thing the action lands on. It answers кого? (whom?) and что? (what?). If the nominative is the noun doing, the accusative is the noun being done to.

Most transitive verbs (читать, любить, видеть, покупать, делать) push their object straight into the accusative. It's the second case you meet after the nominative, and the one you'll use most.

The accusative ending depends on two things: gender and animacy (is the noun alive or not?). The good news: only one gender has a brand-new ending. The rest borrow from cases you already know.

The accusative shows up in three everyday situations.

1. The direct object: the target of a transitive verb (as in §01).
2. Direction: with в and на answering куда? (to where?): в школу, на работу.
3. Duration & set times: how long, or "every…": всю неделю (all week), каждый день (every day).

The accusative is easiest to feel against the cases it sits between. Watch книга (book) move from subject to object:

For animate masculine nouns the accusative borrows the genitive form, so Я вижу брата and у брата look the same, but the role is different: one is the object, the other is possession. Once this clicks, the natural next stop is the genitive; the cases overview maps out all six.

Forgetting animacy. Saying Я вижу студент instead of студента is the classic slip. Animate masculine objects must take the genitive form, both in the singular and the plural (вижу студентов).

Using -а for feminine objects. The feminine accusative is -у/-ю, not -а: say читаю книгу, never читаю книга.

Mixing up direction and location. в/на + accusative means movement toward (иду в школу); the same prepositions with the prepositional mean being there (я в школе). Don't leave a feminine noun in -е when you mean direction.