Word
Позаботься о моей матери.
Meaning
Take care of my mother.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Позаботься о моей матери.
мой
my / mine
мать
mother
позаботиться
to take care of (perfective)
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Questions & Answers about Позаботься о моей матери.
Why does the word for mother change to матери here?
Мать (mother) is an irregular feminine noun. In all cases except the nominative and accusative singular, it adds the special suffix -ер- to its stem. Here it is in the prepositional case because of the preposition о, so it takes the ending -и like a third-declension noun, becoming матери.
Why do we use the preposition о and the prepositional case to say 'take care of'?
The verb позаботиться (to take care) behaves like thinking or talking about something. It conceptually means 'to show care about,' so it requires the preposition о followed by the prepositional case, which gives us о моей матери.
How is the command form позаботься built?
It comes from the perfective verb позаботиться. To make a command, we look at the stem of the future 'they' form (позабот-). Because the stress falls on the root (-бо-) rather than the ending, we add a soft sign (-ь) instead of -и. Finally, we attach the reflexive ending -ся.
Why does the reflexive ending use -ся instead of -сь at the end of позаботься?
The rule for reflexive verbs is to use -сь after vowels and -ся after consonants. Because the soft sign (ь) counts as a consonant letter in Russian spelling rules, we must use -ся.