The verb pair просить/попросить can mean either “to ask (someone for something)” or “to ask (someone to do something).” It never means “to ask a question.” It is conjugated like this:

When you ask someone for something, the person asked appears in the genitive case after the preposition у, and the thing for which you ask appears in the accusative case:

If you ask someone to do something, there are two different ways of putting the words together. The first way is just like English: the person you ask is the direct object (accusative case) and the thing you ask them to do is expressed as an infinitive phrase:

The other way is to use a чтобы phrase, which actually can be put together one of two different ways:

These sentences are slightly different in meaning. The second one specifies that the speaker asked his father to drop him off. The first one doesn't specify that. In other words, in the first sentence the speaker might have asked his mother to have his father drop him off.

Most students of Russian first encounter the word кататься in the phrases кататься на лыжах “to ski” and кататься на коньках “to skate.” A single skate is a конёк or “little horse.” If you use your imagination, you can see how an ice skate might look a little like a horse. Roller skates are called роликовые коньки, more commonly known as ролики, so you can also кататься на роликах.

Кататься is a handy verb that refers to any kind of motion for fun. It often translates the English “ride” or “take a ride.” The perfective is покататься.

For all of the above, use ездить instead of кататься if you are traveling for transportation rather than for fun:

More riding for fun:

Amusement park rides are called аттракционы:

Some English words ending in –ing turn into this rather peculiar set of coinages:

Sometimes this verb is used for things you don’t ordinarily ride on for fun:

The word уже means already. Be careful to get the stress right because if you say уже that means narrower.

When уже combines with the negative particle не, we translate the combination into English with the phrases “no longer” or “not anymore.”

The Russians use уже much more than the English speakers use the word already, and very often the meaning is somewhat attenuated. That kind of “faded” уже is sometimes captured by the word “now” or “really,” and sometimes it's best left simply untranslated.

One last quirk is that уже is sometimes shortened into уж. There is also a noun уж that means “grass snake.” So how do you tell when the Russians mean “already” and when they mean “grass snake”? Frankly, if you can't tell the difference between those two things in context, you aren't smart enough to study Russian. Consider switching your major to French.

The verb надевать/надеть means “to put on” an item of clothing. It conjugates just like одевать/одеть:

The item of clothing that is put on goes in the accusative case:

If you put the item of clothing on somone else, the other person appears in the accusative case after the preposition на:

You can also specify various body parts after на, and other prepositions can also be used to indicate layers of clothing:

Let's think about the verb одеваться/одеться. It conjugates like this:

The verb means “to get dressed.” If the item of clothing is specified, then it occurs in the accusative case after the preposition в:

If one person dresses another, then the non-reflexive form of the verb is used:

You know how there are certain rules of language you are taught in school that absolutely everyone violates? One of those rules is you absolutely musn't use одевать/одеть to mean "to put an item of clothing on (oneself)." The Russians violate this rule like crazy. Absolutely everybody from news anchors to professors to welders makes this mistake, so in the press you can see things like:

In that sense you are supposed to use надевать/надеть, thus the previous sentence should have been written «Анжелина Джоли надела платье задом наперед». (See tomorrow's entry for details on how to use that verb.)