One other verb that is used to express “to ask” is задавать/задать, literally “to pose.” It is used in conjunction with the noun вопрос, which means question. It is conjugated like this:

The verb combines with the noun вопрос in the accusative case, and the person being queried shows up in the dative case:

The quote by Berkeley is not very well known in Russia and does not yet have a generally accepted translation. It is so well known in the US that it spawns regular parodies, the most famous of which is “If a man speaks in the forest and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?” That one has become so iconic that it is reproduced on t-shirts regularly.

Note: the stress on the perfective past tense forms sometimes varies from the stress here indicated.

The verb pair спрашивать/спросить means “to ask” in the sense of “to ask (a question).” It never means “to ask someone for something.” It is conjugated like this:

The person who is asked the question shows up in the accusative case. The question that is asked most commonly shows up as indirect speech in a separate clause introduced by a comma:

But of course the question clause may also contain direct speech:

The verb is also used if a person answers the phone and wants to know who the caller wants to speak with. Although the phrase essentially means “Who is asking for him/her/them,” in a good translation we will paraphrase it with the standard polite equivalents in English:

One warning about this verb: it cannot be used in conjunction with the noun вопрос, which means a question. That is you cannot say «Он спросил вопрос» in the sense of “He asked a question.” For that you must use the verb задавать/задать, which we will discuss tomorrow.

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.