The genitive case is one of the most commonly used cases in the Russian language. Luckily for Russian scholars, it is fairy easy to master its usage:
- To denote possession - книга Машы (lit. the book of Masha) -
- To denote absence - У него нет книги (lit. he does not have a book)
- To express the direct object of the sentence - this is a little more nuanced, it can only encompass animate male singular, and all animate plurals
- After certain prepositions (e.g. для, из, от)