Russian Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Russian language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Two examples from Duolingo:
Why do I have to use большой in one case, but много in the other, when I want to express "a lot of experience"?
How do I decide which one to use?
How about other qualifiers, such as немного or мало?
Are there other nouns where these qualifiers change like that?
Большой is an adjective, много is an adverb. In the first sentence you describe the experience itself (big, large, great). In the second sentence you describe how much of experience (a lot of, a great amount of). It works the same as in any other language.
Well, any language have some language of redundancy - the same thing can be said this way or another. In English we can say "He is highly experienced" or something like "he has a lot of experience", when we say "большой" we mean that level of something is high, when we say "много" we indicate that quantity of something is large.
That's, pretty much, it - in this particular context they are completely interchangeable.
Just to add something, you can also say -
У этого авторa много опыта.
У бабушки большой опыт.
Both are legit and have the same meaning as yours. So you don't really need to decide between "много" and "большой" in this case.
There are some situations where you need to choose specific word e.g
I would say that "большая", "маленькая", etc are mostly used when you describe the size of something, and you're not trying to count it. Whereas "много" "мало" "немного" "несколько" indicate the number of things you're talking about.
Just to add some words to the previous opinion that I share, about немного и мало. Немного means "some" or "a little", a small quantity, whereas мало is "little","few", lacking quantity, not enough. I think it is just an addition to the first part, and there is no need to separate them. У этого авторА- misprint.
