Many verbs related to music, like слушать, играть, петь, любить, take the accusative case after them, so let’s review the accusative case.

These verbs take the accusative case after them because they take a direct object. The direct object receives the action of the verb.

Remember that in masculine and plural, the accusative case distinguishes between animate and inanimate nouns. Animate nouns take endings that look like genitive endings, and inanimate nouns take endings that look like nominative endings.

Read the sentences and find the endings оf the phrases in the accusative case to the table above.

Remember also the following particularities of names.

• Masculine names that have feminine endings will take feminine endings in the accusative case.

• Feminine names that do not end in -а/я will usually not decline.

• Kazakh first names do not follow the same patterns as Russian first names do, which means that you cannot always tell the gender of a person by their first name. Many Kazakh last names have been Russianized over time, and so they have similar gendered endings as Russian last names do (for example: -ов / -ова). Some Kazakhs are now removing those Russianized endings. For example, you can sometimes see the singer Димаш Кудайберген’s name written as the Russianized Кудайбергенов.
• Musical groups are sometimes spelled in Latin letters rather than Cyrillic, and sometimes borrow from other languages like English. How these names may decline in Russian is not always clear or consistent.

When talking about your likes and dislikes, remember that the person liking is in the dative case, and the thing being liked is in the nominative case. The verb has to agree with the thing liked. It may help you to think of this constructions as being more similar to “X is pleasing to me” in English.

Remember that the neuter form is used in the past tense when when talking about liking how something was done or that something happened, like in the fourth example below.

Remind yourself of the dative noun endings as well as the forms of the pronouns.

You also may use the genitive case when talking about music since we use genitive when talking about possession/”of” and also when we want to say “from” something.

Remind yourself of the genitive case endings:

Любимый – favorite, is a regular adjective that follows the noun that it modifies in gender, number, and case.

Тейлор Свифт – моя любимая певица.
Мой любимый новый трек – “5к” Ирины Кайратовны.
Я рассказала соседке по комнате о моих любимых песнях.