Russian Word of the Day

Russian has a whole series of verbs that mean ‘to enter.’ One means to enter by one's one power, another by vehicle, another by water, another by crawling, another by running... Frankly, I expect that if we ever achieve interstellar space travel, it will develop verbs that mean ‘to enter by space’ and ‘to enter by hyperspace.’ For today we will focus on ‘to enter (by one's own power)’ or ‘to walk in to.’ That verb is:

Note that the place you enter appears in the accusative case after the preposition в.

A majorly important verb in Russian is договариваться/­договориться. It means ‘to come to an agreement about doing something.’ It conjugates like this:

The verb is first of all used to say you agree with the plans that have been discussed. In that context one uses it almost exclusively in the plural:

Almost every conversation about making plans includes the word that way. The verb can also be used in the sense of “to make plans”:

One of the verbs that means ‘to fall in love’ is:

Note that the verb is complemented by a prepositional phrase with в followed by the accusative case.

Although the verb is mostly used in the past tense, it can be used in other tenses as well.

You may recall that we previously said that полюбить can also mean ‘to fall in love.’ That leaves us with the question of when to use which verb. Actually, you can start some pretty interesting arguments among Russians about which is the more serious emotion, полюбить or влюбиться. Nonetheless, I can give you one guideline, if you suddenly fall head over heels in love with a person, then влюбиться is the verb you use to describe it, not полюбить.

One of the verbs that means to love is:

When you use the imperfective, it means the subject has an established liking for the direct object, and it can be translated as like or love:

The verb can also be complemented by the infinitive:

The prefix по- often adds the idea of ‘start to,’ and that applies to this verb. In English the equivalent of ‘start to love’ is ‘fall in love with’:

If you want to ask how often something happens in Russian, you can use the phrase «как часто»:

Now here's one of those subtle differences that occur between languages. Although the «как часто» phrase is perfectly grammatical in both Russian and English, the frequency of the use of the phrase is not the same. The English phrase is much more common in usage. In Russian it is more common to ask the question slightly differently, phrasing it simply "Do you often?":

When you ask the question, it is usually used with intonation construction three, jumping up on the stressed syllable of часто: