Past Passive Participles
In English, we often use the past participle of a verb as an adjective to describe a noun: a written article, a saved file, a broken chair. In Russian, this is called a past passive participle.
They are created from perfective verbs and describe an object that has had an action performed on it in the past. In a sentence, they act exactly like regular adjectives, agreeing with the noun they modify in gender, number, and case.
Most past passive participles are formed by taking the verb stem and adding a suffix with a double -нн-, followed by standard adjective endings (-ый, -ая, -ое, -ые).
- For verbs ending in -ать or -ять, the suffix becomes -анный or -янный (e.g., написать -> написанный).
- For verbs ending in -ить or -еть, the suffix usually becomes -енный or -ённый (e.g., сохранить -> сохранённый).
A smaller group of verbs forms the past passive participle using the suffix -т- instead of -нн-. This includes verbs ending in -нуть, -оть, -ереть, and many short verbs ending in -ыть or -ить (like открыть -> открытый, забыть -> забытый, разбить -> разбитый).
Declension: Changing by Case
Because full-form participles behave exactly like standard adjectives, they decline to match the case of the noun they describe.
Notice how in the last example, деньги is plural (спрятанные), and сейф is in the Prepositional case (запертом). As long as you know your standard adjective endings, you already know how to decline full-form participles!