Я добавляю немного масла в суп.

I

Breakdown of Я добавляю немного масла в суп.

• в: to
• суп: the soup
• добавлять: to add

Questions & Answers about Я добавляю немного масла в суп.

Why is масло in the genitive case (as in немного масла) rather than accusative?

Because words like немного, мало, много, сколько take a noun in the partitive genitive to express “some of” or “a little of.” Even though масло is normally nominative or accusative when it’s the subject or direct object, after немного it switches to genitive (масла) to show you’re adding “a bit of oil,” not the whole oil.

Why is суп in the accusative case after в (в суп)?

The preposition в can govern either the prepositional case (location: “in/at”) or the accusative case (direction/motion: “into”). Here you are putting oil into the soup, so you use в + accusative (в суп). If you wanted to say “the spoon is in the soup,” you’d use в супе (prepositional).

Why do we say немного масла instead of несколько масла?

Несколько is used only with countable nouns (e.g., несколько яблок, несколько книг). Масло is an uncountable (mass) noun—“oil” you can’t count in pieces—so you use немного (or мало/много) + genitive to talk about an indefinite quantity: немного масла.

What is the aspect and grammatical person/number of добавляю? What would be its perfective form?