Language/Russian/Grammar/A-vs-И

What does this strange looking title mean? According to my experience, when learning Russian, foreigners always confuse the meaning of these two conjunctions. In the previous lesson we discussed two of them, ‘А’ and ‘Но’. In today’s lesson we are going to talk about these conjunctions in use and particularly about how to distinguish the using of  ‘И’ from ‘A’.

Let’s begin. There are two sentences for you below:

1. У меня есть друг. - …И у меня есть друг.
2. У меня есть друг. - … у меня есть подруга

Where should we use ‘а’ and where ‘и’? Let’s sort this problem out.

The first one is: ‘I have a friend. – And I have a friend as well’. What can we say? We can say that both speakers have a friend, so in other words, they have the same object. When two speakers talk about the same object they have, we use ‘И’ conjunction.

• У меня есть друг.

• И у меня есть друг!

Obviously, that we should use ‘А’ in the second sentence.

• У меня есть друг. - I have a (male) friend

• - A у меня есть подруга. – And I have a (female) friend

Now let’s find out why we have used ‘a’ in the sentence. The thing is that now both speakers have different objects. The first one has a male friend, let’s say, Boris. The other has a female friend, let’s say Natasha. When both speakers have  different objects we use ‘A’, not ‘И’.

Remember ‘A’ always adds some new information into the sentence, while ‘И’ adds some old or at least expected information. Often ‘A’ appears in the beginning of the sentence in purpose to change the subject:

• А, кстати, ты знаешь, кто такой Фродо? – Ow, by the way, do you know who Frodo is?

Or when we repeat the question:

Как тебя зовут? – Борис.

• А тебя как? –What’s your name? – Boris. And what’s your name?

Let’s us also have a look at the example below:

• Он написал ей, и она ответила - He messaged her and she replied.

We use ‘и’ because we expected her to reply to the message.

But what if we say:

Он написал ей, а она ответила.   

What do we mean? It means that we have just added some new information there. The fact that she replied is new and that’s what our virtual speaker meant to say.

There’re also some examples of using ‘И’.

• …я, … ты, мы оба не умеем - Either you or me, we both can’t play

• играть в теннис - tennis.

What do we have to put here? Let’s have a look.

И я, и ты, мы оба не умеем играть в теннис.

We use ‘И’ in order to express the meaning of ‘either …or’ in Russian.

Quiz

Now it’s time for a short quiz:

1. У меня есть машина.- (1) у меня есть машина.
2. У меня красная машина.-(2) у меня синяя.
3. Я пошёл в кино (3) посмотрел фильм.
4. (4) кстати, ты смотрел «Властелин колец»?
5. (5) ты, (6) Борис, вы оба не умеете плавать как следует.
6. Я сказал привет, (7) она убежала.
7. Как твоё имя? – Пётр, (8) как твоё?
8. Откуда у тебя миллион долларов? – (9) у тебя он откуда?
9. Он сказал “Здравствуйте”, (10) она сказала “До свидания”.

So in today’s lesson we’ve made an attempt to find out how to distinguish two conjunctions of the Russian language. If you have any questions you can easily leave a comment or submit your question into the comment box. Thank you for your attention! Practice makes perfect.