Russian Word of the Day

Russian has several verbs that can be translated as ‘study.’ Today let's start by looking at учить/выучить:

You can use this verb to discuss what subjects you studied in grade school or high school. In this sense you usually use it in the imperfective.

If you are studying/memorizing a set of facts, then you can use both the imperfective and perfective:

The most common Russian word for six is шесть, which declines like this:

When шесть occurs in oblique cases (oblique means a case other than nominative or accusative), it works pretty well like we would expect from a theoretical point of view; that is, it declines as we would expect and the noun it quantifies shows up in the same case in the plural:

Now here's the weird part... If шесть is part of a nominative case number phrase or an accusative case number phrase, then the noun it quantifies shows up in the genitive plural:

That may seem quite complex. Just be glad your not studying Polish: its number system is even more freakish... and fascinating.

The Russian word for new is новый. It's a perfectly regular adjective in its long forms, and it declines like this:

Hm... what kind of sample sentences should we come up with. Ah, of course. No one is more obsessed with newness than the people who love new cars. Let's work with that:

Here are the short forms and the comparative:

And here are a couple ways you can use them:

The first word we Americans learn for friend in Russian is друг. The word has a consonant mutation in the plural:

This word is problematic when translating from Russian to English. Americans use the word ‘friend’ very loosely. It may be a close, personal friend, one with whom you share all your intimate secrets, or it may be someone you have known for five or ten years and never had a negative encounter with. That's not the case with Russians. Russians will only use друг to mean someone they know very well, someone who knows your likes and dislikes and knows better than to buy you white bread because you only like black bread. Anyone else you know is знакомый ‘acquaintance.’ I actually like the Russian distinction. It seems more meaningful than the American version.

The Russian word for ring is кольцо. In the genitive plural the soft sign expends into a full-fledged vowel. Note also the stress shifts:

The word can indicate almost any ring, so even a basketball hoop can be called кольцо:

But of course the most common ring of all is the wedding ring: