The most common word for big or large in Russian is большой. Notice that it is an end-stressed adjective: end-stressed adjectives always end in -ой in the masculine nominative singular. It declines like this:

Sample sentences:

One phrase that the Russians use often is большие деньги, which word for word means “big money,” although it is often better translated as “a lot of money”:

One of the fun words that has developed in English over the last decade or two is “gynormous,” a combination of gigantic and enormous… in other words, really, really big. Russian has a similar word большущий, a combination of большой “big” and могущий “powerful,” which also means really, really big:

One last thing: it is easy to confuse the word большой with the word больший. They mean different things. We'll address the latter word tomorrow.

We previously discussed the word ещё, which by itself usually means still. When you combine it with кто or что, it ends up meaning “else”:

This use of ещё is also possible after other question words as well:

The basic verb in Russian that means “to eat” is есть/съесть. Notice that the second letter of the perfective forms is a hard sign, not a soft sign. This is one of the four most irregular verb stems in the language. (The others are the stems of дать, хотеть and бежать.)

There are a couple potentially confusing points here. Notice first of all that the imperfective infinitive is spelled the same as есть, that quirky present tense form of “to be” that appears in “there is/are” and “have” sentences.

The next trick is that есть is actually pronounced differently from ест. In both words the first sound is a y sound as in yes, but the vowel quality is different:

Here are a couple sentences where you can hear the difference:

As to the grammar of the verb, the thing that you eat shows up in the accusative case:

In English we often say things like “I ate breakfast/lunch/dinner,” and in Russian theoretically it's grammatical to say things like «Я (съ)ел завтрак/обед/ужин.» But frankly the Russians rarely say that. Instead they subsitute the verbs that directly address those meals: «Мы (по)завтракалали/(по)обедали/(по)ужинали».

* The careful student may notice that in this sentence the accusative plural акриды copies the nominative plural, which is atypical for modern Russian. Animate accusative plurals did not always automatically copy the genitive. This change began hundreds of years ago with words referring to male human beings, and then it eventually spread to other noun classes. That process is nearly complete in modern Russian, although there are still a few constructions where animate nouns sometimes occur in the accusative plural in a form that copies the nominative.

Since работать/поработать means “to work,” you will want to be able to use it to say that so-and-so works for so-and-so. Beginning students of Russian often use the word для as the most generic word for “for,” (not the best idea, incidentally), so one might be tempted to translate “I work for Honeywell” as «Я работаю для фирмы “Хоневелл”». Nope, that would be error. When you want to express the idea that you work full time for an organization, the prepositions you want are в and на followed by the prepositional case. (Follow the general guideliness for selecting на.)

Now here is a subtlety. If you work for a company or organization part time, then you work на followed by the accusative case:

¹ Фирма is normally a на word. Why the heck the Russians say в in this context is a mystery to me.

The verb работать/поработать can also mean “to work on” in the sense of “to fine tune one's skills,” “to improve something.” Thus “I'm working on my pronunciation” comes out «Работаю над произношением». Other examples: