Двойное отрицание в русском: тренировка с примерами

What is двойное отрицание (double negation) in Russian?

In Russian, a single “no” is not enough. Every negative pronoun — ничего (nothing), никуда (nowhere), никогда (never), ни с кем (with no one) — must be paired with не before the verb. So “we did nothing” is мы ничего не делали, literally “we nothing not-did.” Drop either negative and the sentence is simply wrong. English sees two negatives as a logical contradiction; Russian sees them as a grammatical requirement.

Linguists call this “negative concord”: the negatives reinforce rather than cancel each other. The pattern holds across all negative pronouns — никто не знал (nobody knew), нигде не были (we were nowhere), никогда не работали (never worked). When a preposition splits the phrase — as in ни с кем — Russian writes it as three words: ни + preposition + кем. The teacher in this clip drills the whole set using 2020 as the theme: every question about that year (“Where did you holiday? Who did you meet?”) gets an honest double-negative answer, anchoring the rule to a shared memory no learner will forget.