Questions & Answers about В поликлинике много людей.
Why does the sentence use людей instead of the regular plural люди?
The word много (many / a lot of) indicates a quantity, so the noun that follows it must be in the genitive case. Here, we need the genitive plural form of люди (people), which is людей.
I learned that the word for 'person' is человек. How does it become люди and людей?
The Russian word for 'person' is highly irregular. The singular is человек, but the nominative plural ('people') changes to a completely different root: люди. Because we need the genitive plural case here after много, люди becomes людей.
Why does поликлиника end in -е in this sentence?
It is in the prepositional case because it answers the question 'where?' (location) after the preposition в (in/at). For most feminine nouns ending in -а like поликлиника, you drop the -а and add -е to make this case.
Why isn't there a verb for 'there are' in this sentence?
In Russian, the present tense of the verb 'to be' is almost always omitted. You simply state the location (В поликлинике) and what is there (много людей). It literally translates to 'In the clinic a lot of people.' If you wanted to talk about the past ('There were many people'), you would need to add the past-tense verb было.