Breakdown of В парке много опасных собак.
парк
park
собака
dog
много
a lot
в
in / to (direction)
опасный
dangerous
Questions & Answers about В парке много опасных собак.
Why is опасных used here instead of опасные?
опасных is the genitive plural form of the adjective опасный (dangerous). We use the genitive plural because of the word много (many). Words of quantity like много require the following adjectives and nouns to be in the genitive case. Since there are many dogs, we use the plural form.
The adjective опасных gets the -ых ending, so why doesn't the noun собак get an ending?
Nouns and adjectives have different rules for the genitive plural. While adjectives usually take -ых or -их, most feminine nouns that end in -а (like собака) form the genitive plural by dropping their final vowel entirely. That leaves you with just the bare stem: собак.
How do I know when to use -ых and when to use -их for genitive plural adjectives?
You generally use -ых, which matches the hard stem of a word like опасный to make опасных. However, because of the 7-letter spelling rule, you can never write the letter ы after г, к, х, ж, ч, ш, or щ. If an adjective's stem ends in one of those letters, you must use -их instead (for example, диких for 'wild').
Why doesn't the Russian sentence include words for 'there are'?
Russian doesn't use a direct translation for phrases like 'there is' or 'there are'. To say 'There are [things] in [a place]', Russian simply puts the location first (В парке), followed by what is there (много опасных собак). The present-tense verb 'to be' is simply left out and understood from context.
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