The Russian phrase for “each other” is formed by saying the word друг twice in a row. The second друг occurs in a case other than the nominative, i.e. you can find these five forms:

The case of the second друг depends most often on the verb in question. If the verb requires a direct object, the second друг shows up in the accusative case; if the verb requires a dative object, the second друг shows up in the dative case. Likewise genitive — genitive, and instrumental — instrumental. Here are some examples:

If the verb requires a prepositional phrase as its complement, then the preposition comes between the two другs:

Native English speakers, of course, will be tempted to write things like «Мои сёстры постоянно сплетничают о друг друге». And truth to tell, native Russians will say or write something like that, but it is not considered good written style.

Interestingly enough, sometimes the Russians substitute дружка for the second друг. Thus you get:

That makes the phrase much more informal and conversational. For instance:

I was interested to find the phrase as well in a site devoted to Russian folk magic. Here is a spell people use to help repair a family fracas:

You'll notice that жгут, обходят and читают are not command forms but third person plural verbs. In the translation they are rendered as imperatives to make the English flow better.

The verb видеть/увидеть means “to see.”

While the imperfective is almost always translated “to see,” the perfective can often be translated “to spot, to catch sight of”:

Какой is one of the question words in Russian. It asks a question, so we call it ‘interrogative,’ and in terms of its endings it's an adjective, so we call it an ‘interrogative adjective.’ It declines like this:

Although какой can be translated several ways, it's most common meaning is “what kind of”:

Sometimes какой has about the same meaning as который, and in those instances we can often translate it as ‘what’ or sometimes ‘which’:

Numbers... numbers are funny things, and human languages have all sorts of quirks in regards to them. For instance, the Ya̧nomamö tribe in South America has only three number words: one, two, and “more than two.” In Arabic grammar a feminine noun agrees with a masculine number and vice-versa, at least for the numbers three to ten. English has a word for a dozen dozens. Lusatian and Slovene have not only singular and plural noun endings, but also dual. And among the quirks of the Slavic languages is this little gem: Russian has a word that means “one and a half,” and that word is полтора/полторы. It declines like this:

Like the numbers два/две, три, and четыре, this number is followed by the genitive singular of the noun that it quantifies. Sample sentences:

Upon reflection one might wonder how the heck a language comes up with a single word for “one and a half.” After all, a caveman is not going to go out looking for one and a half yaks, and a prehistoric Slav never looked for one and a half wives. So why a number for “one and a half”? The reason is simple: it originally came from two words. The Old Russian word for half was полъ, where the final letter was a spoken vowel. The word for second was вторъ, which in the genitive case was втора. When speaking of quantities, ancient Russians talked about “half of the second” «полъ втора» item, and they assumed the listener knew that if they were talking about half of the second, they of course also meant all of the first item as well. Or if talking about a feminine thing they used вторы, which is the feminine genitive form of second. Eventually the vowels ъ and ь started vanishing from the language, which meant in terms of pronunciation they were left with полвтора and полвторы. Languages have the tendency to simplify consonant clusters, and the в eventually vanished (which is the same reason we pronounce здравствуй as [zdrastvuy] not [zdravstvuy].

¹ ГАЗ = Горьковский автомобильный завод = the Gorky Automobile Factory.

One of the meanings of the stem пол- in Russian is “one half.” The place we most commonly see it is in phrases like “It is half past one” (see details) or “I was there at half past one” (see details), but it can combine with other nouns as well that have nothing to do with clock time. The second noun shows up in the genitive singular form to make a single new word:

There is a quirk of spelling in regards to words that start with this stem. If the second part of the word starts with a vowel or with л, then you are supposed to write it with a hyphen:

Likewise you should use a hyphen if the second word is a proper name:

Otherwise the words are not hyphenated:

Words starting with пол- are most often found in the nominative and accusative cases, and in literary Russian the accusative of these words always copies the nominative. You usually don't have to worry about the other cases. Actually, a really good student of Russian will immediately ask, “But how would a Russian deal with those words in the other cases?” The answer is “inconsistently.” The rules of proper writing say one thing; conversational Russian often produces other forms. As a beginner it's best to stick with using them only in the nominative and accusative. If you have to talk about half of something in any other case, substitute the word половина instead.