Questions & Answers about Я живу в большом городе.
Why do we say в большом городе instead of в большой город?
We use the Prepositional case to talk about location (where something is happening). The preposition в (in) requires the noun and its matching adjective to change. The masculine noun город takes the ending -е to become городе, and the adjective большой changes to its masculine Prepositional form, большом.
I learned a spelling rule for the letter ш. Shouldn't the adjective ending be -ем instead of -ом?
You are thinking of the 5-letter spelling rule! After the 'hushing' consonants (ж, ш, ч, щ) and ц, we write о if that vowel is stressed, and е if it is unstressed. Because the stress in большом falls on the last syllable, we use -ом. For a word where the stress is not on the ending, like хороший (good), you would use -ем (в хорошем).
Is the ending -ом only used for masculine adjectives in the Prepositional case?
It is used for both masculine and neuter adjectives. If the sentence was about a neuter noun, like окно (window), you would use the exact same ending: в большом окне (in the big window). Feminine adjectives get a completely different ending (-ой or -ей).
Why is the verb живу and not just жию from the infinitive жить?
The verb жить (to live) is a bit irregular. In the present tense, its stem changes and a в appears before the endings. That is why я (I) takes the form живу, and ты (you) takes живёшь.
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