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The direct translation of Она читает всё is She reads everything

  1. As I've been reading it seems that as a rule generally pronouns come before he verb where as regular nouns come after e.g.
Я тебя люблю
Я люблю кошку

I understand that depending on what you want to stress you can place the subject in a different place. Is the above rule generally only true for personal pronouns?

Can I say Она всё читает or is that weird?

  1. The object is usually in the accusative case. I believe the object is всё but I don't think this is the accusative case? Why not?

  2. Lastly, looking up the cases for всё ... there seems to be quite a few and they all have a gender (m/f/n) associated to it. If that's the case, which gender is всё associated to?

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    I think that Abakan's answer is better. I'd say that in written form "Она читает всё" is the way to go (unless you want to bold italicize "всё"). In speech you indeed need to really stress "всё" to emphasize "everything" and avoid any ambiguity, as it can indeed mean "still".
    – AR.
    Commented Dec 31, 2019 at 2:29
  • I don’t really understand why your third question is there. Looking at the table you link to, the form you’re asking about only appears in two cells: nominative singular neuter and accusative singular neuter. As you correctly surmise, the word is in the accusative case here as the direct object, which leaves only one possible option.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Dec 31, 2019 at 14:42
  • @JanusBahsJacquet моя подруга и мой друг. "My" doesn't have a gender itself but it gets it's gender from the thing it possess. Всё is not pointing to anything here
    – Luke Xu
    Commented Dec 31, 2019 at 14:46
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    @LukeXu No, it’s not modifying a noun – the meaning ‘everything’ comes from using the singular neuter form with no noun. Had it been ʙce(x), the accusative plural, it would mean ‘she reads all [the things]’ instead of ‘she reads every[thing]’. English needs to add a noun (like generic ‘thing’) because every is only a determinative, not a pronoun; but Russian doesn’t. The same word functions as both determinative and noun, so you can just leave out the noun if it can be understood.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Dec 31, 2019 at 14:54
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Thanks, this clarifies things up for me
    – Luke Xu
    Commented Dec 31, 2019 at 16:25

2 Answers 2

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"Она всё читает" with neutral intonation means rather "she is still reading" (она всё /ещё/ читает where ещё is omitted). You must emphasize всё if you want to say "she reads everything").

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    With neutral intonation it may also mean "she spends all her time reading". As in, "she has other things to do, but she keeps reading instead". That doesn't mean the reading is done in one uninterrupted session - she can take a break, go for a walk etc, but of things that matter she only does the reading.
    – GSerg
    Commented Dec 31, 2019 at 20:23
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  1. Your observation is not quite true. In English the word order is very strict and very important. In Russian, on the other hand, the word order is much more flexible, mostly because of noun cases. For instance, "Я тебя люблю." and "Я люблю тебя." are equally correct ways of saying "I love you". Saying "Она всё читает" is perfectly fine. Depending on the intonation this word order can be used to emphasize that she reads everything as opposed to something specific.

  2. In this sentence всё is in the accusative case.

  3. The gender here is neuter to mean "everything in general".

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