Learn Hardcore Russian: Стоит нам выйти из дома, как начинается дождь. - As soon as we leave the house, it starts raining.

Word

Стоит нам выйти из дома, как начинается дождь.

Meaning

As soon as we leave the house, it starts raining.

Part of speech

sentence

Pronunciation

Course

Lesson

Breakdown of Стоит нам выйти из дома, как начинается дождь.

What does стоит mean here? It usually means costs or looks like stands.

Here стоит is part of a fixed idiomatic pattern, not the ordinary meaning stands.

The construction is:

стоит + dative + infinitive, как ...

It means something like:

So Стоит нам выйти из дома, как начинается дождь means that the moment we go out, it starts raining.

A very literal way to think of it is:

It only takes our stepping out of the house for the rain to begin.

Why is нам in the dative case?

Because this is an impersonal construction, and in Russian the person involved in that kind of structure is often put in the dative.

So:

нам = to us / for us
стоит нам выйти = literally something like it only takes for us to go out

This is similar to other Russian patterns where the person is in the dative:

So the dative here is normal and expected.