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 standard Russian word for yes is да and for no — нет. For the most part they work pretty much like we would expect:

Russian sometimes doesn't work quite the way we would expect, though, when answering a question that has не in it. Remember that не is often including in Russian questions to make the question softer, more polite. But if the question is in the negative in Russian, there must be a negative somewhere in the answer as well. Let's say you are in Russia waiting outside the subway station for a woman named Tanya. You've never met Tanya; your friends have arranged the meeting, and you have only a general description of her. You spot someone who sort of matches the description, so you walk up to her and say:

In such a case, when the woman says нет, she is negating the idea of being Tanya. That interchange makes perfect sense to the American ear. Now consider this version:

In this case when the woman answers да, she is confirming your spoken negative supposition that she is not Tanya. Notice that despite the да in the original, it sounds better to have no in the English translation. (An English speaker would never say “Yes, I'm not Tanya” in this context.)

If the woman turns to be Tanya, then the question can be answered like this:

In this case Tanya is denying your stated assumption that she is not Tanya, so she answers нет and then corrects you. Notice once again that word for word translation “No, I am Tanya” simply doesn't work in English.

Let's see a few more examples and note their translations carefully. Let's say you need to ask a Russian whether she speaks English. It may turn out like these examples:

Notice this carefully: although very often да and нет correspond to English yes and no, sometimes the grammar of responding to a question requires a negative in Russian where it makes no sense in English. A professional translation in such a context requires replacing нет with yes in English. People with limited language experience might think “That's a bad translation or a dishonest translation because it says the opposite of what the words actually say.” They would be mistaken. Sometimes what appears to be an opposite translation is in fact the best translation, as long as it communicates the original intent and informational content of the source sentence.

The word вот means ‘here’ in the sense of “here it is” or “here they are.” Very often you find it used in very short sentences:

Of course, it's possible to add modifiers and clauses to make the sentences longer:

Beginners are sometimes confused about when to use вот and when to use здесь/тут. The primary difference is that вот is only used when you are actively pointing out something or someone; in other words, you are usually either gesturing with your hand or nodding toward the item with your head or glancing toward it with your eyes. Тут and здесь can be used without actually pointing out the item. Thus if you are asking the question whether an item is currently present, you use тут/здесь, not вот:

Of course, if you point out the person in your answer, you can use вот in the answer, but you still won't use it in the question:

Let's say a young Russian student is composing an essay and decides to write “I want to earn a billion dollars” in Russian. He knows the word for million is миллион, so he figures a billion must be биллион, but, being an enterprising student, he quickly double-checks his Russian dictionary. He is pleased to note that the word is exactly as he expected, so he writes «Я хочу заработать биллион долларов.» Alas, he has made an error. Even though you can find the word биллион in Russian dictionaries, people rarely use it. Instead they say миллиард:

If you are translating from English to Russian, you must be quite careful if the source document has the word billion in it. In the US the word billion always means 1,000,000,000. That's not necessarily true in other English-speaking countries. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in England the word meant 1,000,000,000,000. (In the States we call that a trillion). The US system is known as the “short scale” system of naming numbers, and the old British version is known as the “long scale.” In 1974 the UK officially switched from long scale to short scale, but there are still people in Britain who use the word the other way. That means that a good translator will take the time to determine the nationality of the author and the country in which the source was published before he finalizes his translation, and even then it's a good idea to see if the source document has some internal confirmation of which meaning is intended.

Recently we discussed the noun tan; now, I would like to continue on the topic and discuss the usage of the verb "to tan".

In Russian the imperfective and perfective forms are the following: загорать and загореть.

Personally, I always try to be careful with tanning. I can only remember a few times in my life that I've gotten badly sunburned. However, as we say in Russian, it was редко, да метко, "rarely but to the point". Every single time it happened, it was a handful. One summer, I remember, I was reading outside; the sun wasn't even out - it was cloudy! Nevertheless, I got burned so badly, I couldn't sleep the following night! What can I say? Just my luck!