Breakdown of Моя собака любит убегать в парк.
Questions & Answers about Моя собака любит убегать в парк.
In Russian, possessive pronouns must agree with the grammatical gender (and number, and case) of the noun.
- собака is grammatically feminine (even if the actual dog is male).
- The feminine form of мой is моя.
So:
- мой кот – my (male) cat → кот is masculine
- моя собака – my dog → собака is feminine
- моё окно – my window → окно is neuter
That’s why you say моя собака here.
Собака here is in the nominative singular form.
Nominative is used for the subject of the sentence — the thing that performs the action.
- Моя собака (subject)
- любит (verb)
- убегать в парк (infinitive phrase, what she likes to do)
So собака answers the question кто? (who?) → собака – nominative.
Любит is:
- 3rd person singular
- Present tense
- of the verb любить (to love, to like).
Conjugation of любить in the present tense:
- я люблю – I like / love
- ты любишь – you like
- он / она / оно любит – he / she / it likes
- мы любим – we like
- вы любите – you (pl./formal) like
- они любят – they like
In the sentence, моя собака is она (she/it), so we use любит.
Yes. Russian often uses любить + infinitive to express liking to do something:
- любить читать – to like reading / to like to read
- любить готовить – to like cooking / to like to cook
- любить убегать – to like running away / to like to run away
So моя собака любит убегать literally is my dog likes to run away or my dog likes running away.
They are aspect pairs:
убегать – imperfective
- process, repeated/habitual action
- often translated as to run away (in general, habitually)
убежать – perfective
- one complete action, result, outcome
- to run away (once, to a result)
In the sentence моя собака любит убегать в парк, the dog likes doing this as a regular or general behavior, so the imperfective убегать is used.
If you want to say The dog ran away (and is gone), you’d typically use убежать:
- Собака убежала. – The dog ran away. (completed action)
- бегать = to run around (multi-directional, generally)
- убегать = to run away from somewhere / someone, to escape or run off
The prefix у- adds the meaning of “away, off”.
So:
Моя собака любит бегать в парке.
– My dog likes running in the park. (just running around there)Моя собака любит убегать в парк.
– My dog likes to run off to the park. (escape/go off to that place)
Your sentence suggests the dog runs away, not just runs.
The preposition в can take different cases:
- Accusative: direction / movement into / to
- Prepositional: location in / at (no movement)
In your sentence:
- в парк → accusative: into the park, to the park (movement)
- в парке → prepositional: in the park (location)
Since the dog is running to the park, we talk about direction, so we use в парк (accusative).
Парк is in the accusative singular.
For inanimate masculine nouns ending in a consonant, the accusative form is identical to the nominative:
- Nominative: парк
- Accusative: парк
We know it’s accusative because of the preposition в plus the meaning of movement into something:
- идти в парк – to go to the park (accusative)
- гулять в парке – to walk in the park (prepositional)
Моя собака любит бегать в парк is grammatically possible but sounds odd or unclear.
- бегать focuses on the repeated running as a movement pattern, often not clearly from point A to point B.
- With бегать, Russians more naturally say бегать в парке (run in the park).
Using бегать в парк tends to sound strange, because когда собака бегает, we imagine random running around, not clearly towards the park.
If you mean that the dog habitually runs off to the park, убегать в парк is the natural choice.
No, убегать is not reflexive; it’s just a prefixed motion verb:
- бегать – to run (multi-directional)
- убегать – to run away / run off
Reflexive verbs in Russian typically end in -ся or -сь (e.g., мыться, одеваться). Since убегать ends with -ать and has no -ся, it’s not reflexive.
Grammatically, собака is always feminine, regardless of the real dog’s sex.
- So you say:
- умная собака – a clever dog (умная is feminine)
- моя собака – my dog (моя is feminine).
If you specifically want to emphasize a male dog, you can say:
- кобель – male dog (grammatically masculine)
But in everyday speech, собака is much more common, even for male dogs, and you still treat it as feminine grammatically.
You need to change:
- моя (feminine singular) → мои (plural)
- собака (singular) → собаки (plural)
- любит (3rd singular) → любят (3rd plural)
Result:
- Мои собаки любят убегать в парк.
– My dogs like to run off to the park.
Stresses:
- собака – soбака (on the second syllable)
- любит – любит (on the first syllable)
- убегать – убегать (on the last syllable)
- парк – парк (only one syllable)
Yes, Russian word order is quite flexible. All of these are possible:
- Моя собака любит убегать в парк. – neutral, most common.
- В парк моя собака любит убегать. – emphasizes в парк, maybe contrasting with some other place.
- Моя собака в парк любит убегать. – also possible, with a slight emphasis on в парк.
The basic, default version is the original:
Моя собака любит убегать в парк.
You just add не before the verb любит:
- Моя собака не любит убегать в парк.
– My dog doesn’t like to run off to the park.
Word order with не is straightforward here: не + любит.