After two weeks of studying Russian every student knows that не means not. Thus «Я не говорю по-русски» means “I do not speak Russian.” Seems pretty simple. Nonetheless, не can sometimes be misleading because Russians often use не in offers/suggestions to make them softer, more polite, less pushy. Consider the following sentences and translations:

Notice that none of the English translations have ‘not’ in them. The не in the Russian sentence simply makes the request a bit more polite, and therefore the best translation of such sentences often contains could or would in them.

Notice that a beginner might be tempted to translate «Не хочешь чая?» as “Don't you want some tea?” That would be a bad translation. When an English speaker asks “Don't you want some tea?”, he is asking because he is surprised that the other person doesn't seem to want tea.

Злой is an adjective that beginners trip over for several reasons. First off, it is so short that it looks funny and they can't really believe that it's not longer:

Very often beginners memorize the word as meaning “wicked.” That's true as far as it goes:

However the word very often just means “mean” or “angry”:

The word for not in Russian is не. It can be used to negate nouns, verbs, prepositional phrases, and most other parts of speech:

When you want to contrast something by first saying what it is not, you then use the conjunction «а» to introduce the thing it is:

When не negates a verb, it is pronounced with the verb as a single word and is almost always unstressed, which means it's pronounced [ни] not [не]. Thus «я его не знаю» “I don't know him” is pronounced [я йиво низнаю]. There are a few exceptions where the не becomes stressed when negating a verb, and of those it's particularly important to know that when the past tense of быть is negated, the не becomes stressed and the быть form becomes unstressed. This happens in all past быть forms except the feminine:

The word я ‘I’ is a personal pronoun that declines like this:

In American English there are a couple of problems with the word ‘I.’ First off, in conversational English we often say ‘me’ where we should say ‘I’ in the literary language. Thus kids often say things like “Me and John went to the store” or “It's me” when theoretically we should say “John and I” or “It is I.” The Russians never make that mistake. They always use subject/nominative form in the right place:

Other examples:

¹ Although this sentence is theoretically okay, the Russians usually say it differently. We'll address the better usage in an upcoming entry on the word мы.
² Although theoretically one should say “It is I” in this context, no normal American will do so. Only pedants say “It is I.”

The word он is a personal pronoun that declines like this:

The «н» versions of the pronoun occur when the pronoun is the object of a preposition.

Он refers to masculine singular nouns, which can be either people or things, so sometimes it is translated as he/him, and sometimes it is translated as it. In other words, if you are refering to a врач doctor, then the sentence must be translated with he/him, and if you are refering to a грузовик truck, the same sentence must be translated with it:

In casual conversation it's common in America to say things like “Me and John went to the store,” especially when we are children. Schoolteachers then try to beat us out of that habit and make us say “He and I went to the store.” Because of that influence, English speakers may be tempted to say things like «Он и я ездили в магазин» in Russian. While theoretically one can say that in Russian, no one ever does. Instead it gets rephrased as “we with him” «мы с ним». Of course, it would be ridiculous to translate that as “we with him” in English; you still want “he and I” or just plain old ‘we.’