There are three words that native speakers of English often confuse at first in their studies of Russian:

1. The first one of those is дома, which is an adverb that means “at home.” It never changes its endings.
2. The second is домой, which is an adverb that means “home” in the sense of “homeward/to home.” It never changes its endings.
3. The third is дом, which is a noun that means “house” or “building” and occurs in the singular and plural of all six cases.

Today we are focusing on домой in the meaning “home/to home/homeword.” Here is a subtlety. In English we can say “She is home right now” and “She is heading home now.” The former indicates location, and the latter indicates motion. In Russian you have to use дома in the former sense because it is a location phrase, and you have to use домой in the latter phrase since it indicates motion. Note also that as an adverb домой cannot be used with a preposition:

That last example is particular interesting. When you want to specify that you are going to someone's home, the word домой can be made more specific by adding a prepositional phrase using к followed by the dative case:

Actually in the previous three examples it's more natural to leave домой out, but it's perfectly grammatical to include it.

In Russian you can often take a noun stem, say one like стол-, which means table, and add a suffix (often -ск-, -ов-, -н-, or -ин-), and then add adjectival flexions to form an adjective. In this case one adjective from стол is столовый. The phrase столовая комната, literally “table room” is a room where there are tables, in other words, it is the dining room. Nowadays in Russian they just use the adjective part of the phrase, skipping the noun entirely, so the word for “dining room” now declines like this:

Since it is nearly always used as a noun itself, and since its endings match normal adjectival endings, we call this a deadjectival noun.

There is another meaning of столовая, which is “cafeteria,” that is a big public dining room. Most Russian homes don't have a separate dining room, so the cafeteria meaning is the one most commonly encountered inside Russia.

The most common word for four in Russian is четыре. If четыре occurs in the nominative case, then it is followed by the genitive singular form of the noun:

However, just as with the numbers два/две and три, if you put an adjective between the number and the noun, you don't use the genitive singular. So what for do you use? Well, that depends...

If you are dealing with masculine or neuter nouns, then you have to use an adjectival form that copies the genitive plural:

If you are dealing with feminine nouns, it is usually best to use an adjectival form that copies the nominative plural:

Here are some sample sentences:

¹ You will sometimes also encounter четыре красивых дочери, аlthough красивые is better style these days.

Previously we discussed the particle ли in its function of making yes-no questions. It has another function as the equivalent of the English word ‘whether.’ In English ‘whether’ always occurs as the first word in its subordinate clause; ли must always be the second item in its clause:

If the subordinate clause contains words like должен, надо or нужно, they usually come before ли. The next most likely word to come before ли is a conjugated verb:

Any other word/phrase can occur before ли if it bears the focus of the question:

Clever students will have noticed that this use of ли is a part of what we call “indirect speech.” Indirect speech in Russian and English behave somewhat differently. In English, when changing from direct speech to indirect speech, the tense of the subordinate clause undergoes fairly complex changes. For instance, considering the following sentences.

Note the tense of the verbs in the subordinate clause in the corresponding indirect speech sentences:

This change is called “sequence of tenses” by linguists. Russian does not have a sequence of tenses rule like that. Whatever the tense of a verb is in the original direct speech is the same tense that occurs in the indirect speech. In other words, in direct speech we will have:

Rule of thumb: when switching from direct speech to indirect speech in Russian, keep the tense of the original verb.

Previously we discussed the particle ли, which turns a statement into a question, and we noted that ли must occur as the second item in the sentence. All our example sentences had a single word before ли. It turns out that certain phrases, that is, groups of more than one word, can be the first item before ли. First of all, prepositional phrases can come before ли:

The negative particle не is also a clitic, that is, it is pronounced as part of the word that follows it; unlike ли, it is a proclitic, that is, it is pronounced as part of the word before which it appears. When it combines with a prepositional phrase or other word, the whole unit can occur before ли:

This is very common with certain politness phrases:

And you can even add a бы to the sentences to make them even more polite:

Notice the word order here: не comes before the verb. Ли comes immediately after the verb. Бы comes immediately after ли. The subject pronoun comes immediately after бы. No other word order works in these contexts.