Questions & Answers about Да, у меня есть билеты.
Why does the sentence use у меня instead of я to say "I have"?
Russian doesn't use a direct verb like "to have" for everyday possession. Instead, it uses a construction that literally translates to "by me there is". The preposition у means "by" or "at", and it requires the following word to be in the Genitive case. The word меня is the Genitive form of я (I).
If меня means "me", what is the grammatical subject of this sentence?
The subject is actually билеты (tickets). In Russian, the thing that is owned is the main subject of the sentence doing the "existing". The literal structure is "By me, tickets exist." This is why билеты is in the Nominative (dictionary) case.
Since билеты is plural ("tickets"), why doesn't the word есть change to a plural form?
In this specific "having" construction, есть stays exactly the same whether you own one thing or many things. It acts like a fixed word meaning "exists" or "there is/are", so you don't need to conjugate it to match plural nouns.
How did we make the word билеты plural?
The singular word for "ticket" is билет. Since it is a masculine noun ending in a standard hard consonant (the letter т), we simply add the vowel -ы to the end to make it plural.