Russian Genitive case after numerals

Asked by George Jagels on March 24, 2019

Question

I ran across this sentence in a Russian instructional video
“Я могу запомнить около 50 новых русских слов в день”
My understanding is that a direct object is only in the genitive case if the object is animate, which слово is not. So I am perplexed by the fact that “new Russian words” appears to be in the genitive case. Could you help me understand this?

Answer

Hello George,

The Genitive plural is also used after numerals. In this case, you have the numeral "50" there.

Actually, we can also use Genitive singular with the numbers 2,3 and 4 and all the numbers that end in 2,3 and 4, except for 12, 13 and 14.

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