Questions & Answers about Наш врач очень молодой.
Since this lesson is about expressing age with the Dative case, why aren't we using the Dative case here?
The Dative case is used when stating exactly how old someone is with a number (literally "to him are 20 years"). However, when you are simply describing someone with an adjective like молодой (young) or старый (old), you just use the standard Nominative case, exactly like you do in English.
Where is the word for "is" in this sentence?
In Russian, the present tense of the verb "to be" is almost always skipped. The sentence literally translates to "Our doctor very young." You just pause slightly where "is" would normally be.
If our doctor is a woman, do we still use the masculine words наш and молодой?
Why does the adjective молодой end in -ой instead of the usual -ый?
Most masculine adjectives end in -ый (like старый - old) or -ий. But whenever the spoken stress falls on that final ending, Russian spells it as -ой. In молодой, the heavy emphasis is on the very last syllable (ma-la-DOY), so it gets the -ой ending.
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