Word
На конкурсе я пёк торт час, а победитель испёк его за тридцать минут.
Meaning
At the competition I baked a cake for an hour, but the winner baked it in thirty minutes.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of На конкурсе я пёк торт час, а победитель испёк его за тридцать минут.
а
and (contrastive)
я
I
на
on, at / by (transport) / to (a place) / to (in answer to)
его
him / it (acc)
Questions & Answers about На конкурсе я пёк торт час, а победитель испёк его за тридцать минут.
Why does 'an hour' have no preposition (час), while 'thirty minutes' uses за (за тридцать минут)?
This highlights the core difference between process and result! You use the bare Accusative case with no preposition (like час) to state how long an ongoing process lasted. You use за + Accusative (like за тридцать минут) to show the time it took to successfully complete an action.
How do the verbs пёк and испёк match these time expressions?
пёк is an imperfective verb focusing on the ongoing process of baking, which pairs perfectly with the duration час. испёк is a perfective verb focusing on the finished result, so it naturally pairs with за тридцать минут to show exactly how quickly that result was achieved.
Why is the word for minutes spelled минут here instead of минуты?
After numbers ending in 5 through 9, and all numbers ending in 0 (like тридцать), Russian requires the Genitive plural form of the following noun. The Genitive plural of минута is минут.
Why use его for the cake? Doesn't его mean 'him'?
его can mean 'him' or 'it' depending on the noun it replaces. The Russian word for cake (торт) is masculine. When a masculine noun is the direct object of a sentence (in the Accusative case), we replace it with его.