Reviewing Cases

From Russian For Everyone, some Review Exercises for the various cases:

• Prepositional 1
• Prepositional 2
• Prepositional 3
• Prepositional 4
• Accusative 1
• Accusative 2
• Accusative 3
• Genitive 1
• Genitive 2
• Genitive 3
• Dative 1
• Dative 2
• Instrumental 1
• Instrumental 2
• Instrumental 3

Noun Declension Types

Some Russian grammarians don't talk of "masculine declension" or "feminine declension", but rather of (like Latin) First, Second, and Third Declensions.

One advantage to this is that declension types are now more independent of gender.  All nouns ending in a hard consonant, Й, О or Е are in First Declension. All nouns ending in А or Я are in Second Declension. Only with nouns ending in Ь does gender matter; masculine ones are First and feminine are Third.

Also with this system, the handful of nouns that are truly odd (those neuters ending in МЯ and the nouns Мать, Дочь, Путь, and Дитя) are simply categorized by themselves.

Some learners prefer this system. If so, here are downloadable charts from I.M. Pulkina's A Short Russian Reference Grammar:

• First Declension
• First Declension nouns with У genitives - Rules for Use
• First Declension nouns with У locatives (special prepositional) - List of nouns
• Second and Third Declensions
• Peculiarities in the Plural
• Special Declensions (-МЯ, Мать, Дочь, Путь, and Дитя)

And here is a downloadable file with the Full Set of Declension from I.S. Milovanova's Russian Grammar. Note that she swaps the names First and Second.