Word
Без прав нельзя водить машину.
Meaning
You can’t drive a car without a driver’s license.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Lesson
Breakdown of Без прав нельзя водить машину.
машина
the car
без
without
нельзя
cannot
права
the driver's license
Questions & Answers about Без прав нельзя водить машину.
Why is прав in the plural? Isn’t a driver’s license just one thing?
In Russian, права is a very common everyday word meaning driver’s license. Even though it refers to one document in English, in Russian it is grammatically a plural-only noun in this meaning.
So:
- права = driver’s license
- без прав = without a driver’s license
This comes from the broader noun право meaning right, and права literally means rights, but in everyday Russian it also means license.
Why is it без прав, not без права or без права́?
Because the preposition без always requires the genitive case.
The noun here is права (driver’s license), and its genitive plural form is прав.
So:
- права = driver’s license
- без прав = without a driver’s license
This is a fixed and very common phrase.
What exactly does нельзя mean here?