Breakdown of У неё немного подписчиков, но каждый подписчик пишет тёплые комментарии.
Questions & Answers about У неё немного подписчиков, но каждый подписчик пишет тёплые комментарии.
Russian normally expresses “to have” with the construction у + [genitive pronoun/noun], not with a verb like иметь in everyday speech.
- У неё немного подписчиков literally: “At her (there are) a few subscribers.”
- у = “at / by”
- неё = genitive of она (“she”) → “of her / at her”
The verb иметь (“to have”) exists but in conversational Russian it sounds formal, bookish, or technical, and it often implies “possess/own” rather than simply “have”.
So:
- Natural: У неё немного подписчиков.
- Unnatural in everyday speech: Она имеет немного подписчиков. (grammatical, but stylistically odd here)
Quantifiers like немного (“a few”, “not many”) normally require the genitive plural:
- немного подписчиков – “a few subscribers”
- подписчиков = genitive plural of подписчик
This is a standard pattern after many quantity words:
- много друзей – many friends
- мало денег – little money
- несколько книг – several books
- немного подписчиков – a few subscribers
Using немного подписчики is ungrammatical; the quantifier must be followed by genitive plural here.
Both use genitive plural, but the nuance is different:
- немного подписчиков – a few subscribers, relatively neutral or even slightly positive: she has some.
- мало подписчиков – few subscribers, usually negative: not enough, disappointingly few.
So:
- У неё немного подписчиков can sound like: “She doesn’t have many, but she does have some.”
- У неё мало подписчиков suggests: “She has too few / not enough subscribers.”
Каждый means “each / every” and always takes a singular noun and singular verb, even though it refers to a group as a collection of individuals:
- каждый подписчик пишет – each (individual) subscriber writes
- каждый – every/each
- подписчик – subscriber (singular)
- пишет – writes (3rd person singular)
This is just like English:
- “Every subscriber writes warm comments.” (not “every subscribers write”)
In Russian you cannot say:
- ✗ каждые подписчики пишут – ungrammatical in this meaning
They are in different cases because they play different grammatical roles:
У неё немного подписчиков
- подписчиков – genitive plural after немного
- role: object of the quantity (“a few of subscribers”)
каждый подписчик пишет
- подписчик – nominative singular (dictionary form)
- role: the subject of the verb пишет
So it changes because:
- the first is governed by a quantity word (немного → genitive plural),
- the second is the subject after каждый (→ nominative singular).
тёплые комментарии here are accusative plural, functioning as the direct object of пишет (“writes”).
- Verb: пишет – “writes” (3rd person singular)
- Object: тёплые комментарии – “warm comments”
For inanimate masculine nouns like комментарий, the accusative plural looks the same as the nominative plural:
- nominative plural: комментарии
- accusative plural (inanimate): комментарии
The adjective тёплые is also in the accusative plural (same form as nominative plural for inanimate objects), agreeing with комментарии in gender, number, and case.
Тёплые literally means “warm”, but here it’s figurative, just like in English.
- тёплый – warm (temperature)
- тёплый человек – a warm (kind) person
- тёплые слова – warm words
- тёплые комментарии – warm, kind, heartfelt comments
So in this sentence, тёплые комментарии means kind / friendly / heart-warming comments, not comments that are physically warm.
Пишет is the imperfective form of писать and is used for:
- regular, repeated actions
- general facts or habits
In this sentence, we’re describing what generally happens:
- каждый подписчик пишет тёплые комментарии
→ “each subscriber writes warm comments (as a rule / habit).”
The perfective написать (future напишет, past написал) focuses on a completed action:
- каждый подписчик написал тёплый комментарий
“each subscriber wrote a (single) warm comment” (completed event) - каждый подписчик напишет тёплый комментарий
“each subscriber will write a (single) warm comment” (one-time future event)
Here we want a description of ongoing, typical behavior, so пишет is correct.
Yes, У неё есть немного подписчиков is grammatically correct, but the nuance changes slightly.
У неё немного подписчиков.
Often sounds like a neutral description of quantity (“She has few subscribers.”)У неё есть немного подписчиков.
Emphasizes the existence: “She does have some subscribers (at least)”, often in contrast to having none.
In many contexts, Russian omits есть when the focus is on how many rather than on whether something exists at all. That’s why У неё немного подписчиков without есть is very natural here.
Yes, Russian word order is flexible, as long as the grammar (cases, agreement) stays correct. All of these are possible:
Каждый подписчик пишет тёплые комментарии.
– Neutral, standard word order.Каждый подписчик тёплые комментарии пишет.
– Slight emphasis on тёплые комментарии or on the action itself (“writes warm comments”).Тёплые комментарии пишет каждый подписчик.
– Stronger emphasis on тёплые комментарии (these are specifically what they write).Тёплые комментарии каждый подписчик пишет.
– Also emphasizes тёплые комментарии, but sounds a bit more colloquial/emotional.
The meaning stays basically the same; only the emphasis shifts.
Approximate stress and pronunciation (stressed syllables in caps, Latin letters very rough):
- у неё – u nee-YÓ
- немного – nem-NO-ga (немнОго)
- подписчиков – pad-PÍ-schee-kaf (подпи́счиков)
- каждый – KÁZH-dy
- подписчик – pad-PÍ-shchik (подпи́счик)
- пишет – PÍ-shet
- тёплые – TYOP-ly-ye (ТЁ-плы-е, often [TYO-plɨ-je])
- комментарии – ka-men-TÁ-ree-ee (коммента́рии)
Correct stress is important in Russian; changing the stress can make a word sound wrong or even change its meaning.