Russian Word of the Day

The Russian word возможность has multiple meanings, including chance, opportunity and possibility. It is a perfectly regular third declension noun:

Very often the word is best translated into English as chance:

Sometimes the better translation is opportunity:

The Russian word for problem is проблема. It is a perfectly regular second declension noun:

Very often this word is used with a location phrase:

It is also used with с + instrumental:

¹Okay, this really isn't a common phrase in Russian. I stole it from one of the Batman movies. And недостатки is more like 'physical defects' than 'ailments'. But the original sentence is so genteel in English that I really wanted to produce something similar in Russian.

Today we will talk about the verb учиться:

I like to translate this verb as “to go to school,” and in that sense it is only used in the imperfective. You can use it to contrast going to school (university/college/junior college/etc.) versus having a job:

The verb is used for asking what school you attend as well:

The verb pair кормить/накормить means to feed or to nourish. It is a shifting stress verb with a perfectly predictable л that appears in the я form:

First off, you can use this verb to discuss feeding farm animals:

You can also use it for feeding people:

In the US in the past there have been various food scandals, including that ridiculous time under Reagan when ketchup was defined as a vegetable for school lunch purposes. Russia, alas, is also not without its school food scandals. Right now there is company called Конкорд in Russia that has roused the ire of Moscow's parents by providing miserly food portions for public schools. They are even accused of providing the kids with fewer calories than prisoners used to get in the gulags. If you'd like to see some pictures of the food and look over a blog that deals with the issue, just click here.

The word for flu in Russian is грипп. It is a perfectly regularly first declension noun:

The flu is a pretty miserable experience, so let's document how to talk about our misery.

* For some dialects of English you could translate this as “There is a terrible flu going around Moscow.” In my dialect of American English it is ungrammatical to use the indefinite article with the word flu.