Russian Word of the Day

When I was a kid, every morning when I woke up I would go into the kitchen, and immediately my mother would say, "Good morning, sweetie, how did you sleep?", and I would answer "Good, thanks." Or Mom would say, "Good morning, honey, did you sleep well?", and I would answer "Yeah" or "Fine" or "Not so great" or "Awful. I couldn't sleep at all." The verb that the Russians use when asking about how you slept is the pair высыпаться/выспаться "to get enough sleep." It conjugates like this:

Some sample sentences:

The Russian word for address is адрес:

The primary meaning is the postal address to which one send mail. Russian addresses during the 1980s began with country, then city, then city/street/street address and person. There was a certain logic to that. Nowadays the official guidelines seem to have changed, and addresses start with the person and then go to street, and then to broader areas which may include city or region, and finally comes the postal code. For instance:

The word адрес can also be used in the sense of an e-mail address:

The word адрес can also be used in the sense of a person at whom a comment is directed:

¹ Okay, this is nerd humor, so I suppose I had better explain it. Per RFC 2606 "example.com" is one of those domain names reserved for use in documentation examples; in other words, no one anywhere can ever have a working domain named "example.com." If someone gives you an e-mail address with that domain in it, it means they are pulling the wool over your eyes. So the sucker in this example will have no future with the krasavitsa in question.

One of the words in Russian that is translated as need is надо. It is used in impersonal sentences. Impersonal sentences are those which do not have a grammatical subject in the nominative case. The verb used with надо appears in the infinitive form, and the person who needs to do the action appears in the dative case. If you need to do something only once, then usually the verb appears in the perfective:

To put the sentence into the past or future, you add the words было or будет:

If you need to do something regularly, then the infinitive shows up in the imperfective:

Now here is a subtle point. If you use надо 'need' as a rough equivalent for 'it is time to,' then the infinitive appears in the imperfective, even if you are talking about a one time action:

Оканчание is the Russian word for ending in the sense of a grammatical ending. Memorizing noun and verb endings is probably the greatest challenge of the first two years of studying Russian, so it's worth getting a few phrases that help you discuss endings. The verb is оканчиваться, which is perfectly regular:

One way to say "to remove an ending" is «убирать/убрать окончание», and to add an ending «ставить/поставить окончание»:

The Russian phrase for "season" in the sense of the time of year is «время года», literally "time of year," and the plural is «времена года» "times of year." There is also a borrowed word сезон with plural сезоны which means the same thing:

If you want to specify that something happens during a season, then you use the preposition в followed by the accusative case:

Note that if you use the names of the seasons—весна, лето, осень, зима—then those seasons go into the instrumental case when you mean "during that particular season":

One last quirk of the seasons is their starting date. In the States we say that winter starts on December 21st or 22nd. In Russia all the seasons start on the first of the month, so winter starts on the 1st of December.