The word прошлый means 'last' in the sense of «В прошлом году я перестал чистить зубы» "Last year I stopped brushing my teeth" or «В прошлом месяце у меня выпали все зубы» "Last month all my teeth fell out." Прошлый means last in the sense of time but not in the sense of "last one of the batch." In other words, you can use it to say 'last week' but you can't use it to say 'I bought the last tomato.'

We particularly find this word in the following time phrases:

Notice that years and months are used with the preposition в and the prepositional case (году is an irregular prepositional form), seasons are used in the instrumental case with no preposition, weeks are used with на and the prepositional case, and days are used with в and the accusative case.

On occasion people will say «прошлой субботой» in the instrumental case with no preposition to mean 'last Saturday,' but that's considered uneducated. Never write it in a composition.

Last but not least, if you are discussing American academic life, you will need the phrases:

I was searching for the best phrase to get a little more room at the table, something like "Could you move over?" or "Could you scoot over a bit, please?" My first thought was to use the verb отодвигаться-отодвинуться, but that's more like "move away" as in «Отодвинься, урод! От тебя воняет, как от последнего бомжа!» "Get away from me, you freak! You reek like a hobo!" I stole that last sentence from an article on things not to say to your children. Talk about good advice. You can read the article yourself here.

The better way to say "scoot over" is «Можешь немного подвинуться?» Variations are:

Of course, sometimes the opposite situation occurs, in which case you can use a different verb: «От тебя хорошо пахнет. Придвинься поближе.» "You smell nice. Move a little bit closer."

The Russian word for people is «люди». Russia is a large country and therefore has many people of different ethnicities and backgrounds. The Russian word for person is «человек». People can say, “this person is very nice” «этот человек очень хороший» or, “these people are very nice” «эти люди очень хорошие». It is important to note that the singular word for person is «человек» while the plural word for people is «люди».

Many people from other countries like to visit Russia to see the country. These people are called tourists «туристы». Sometimes it can be easy to spot a tourist in Russia. For example, when Russian people attend church, they tend to dress in dark clothing which covers the majority of their body. However, a tourist may walk in a church wearing shorts and not realize that this is disrespectful attire. People may say, «посмотрите на эту женщину, она в шортах!» meaning, "look at that woman, she is wearing shorts!". Moscow is especially popular since it contains many historical Russian buildings. My family in Russia sometimes says «туристы часто приезжают в Москву» meaning, “tourists often come to Moscow”.

If A Russian has made soup, he might describe that by saying я сварил суп “I boiled up some soup.” Using that as a starting point, a foreigner might try to use that same verb when making tea. If you do that, the Russians will understand you, but they'll tell you it's better to say я заварил чай. The verbs are actually a bit different in meaning. The pair варить/сварить can mean 'to boil something,' i.e., to actually put something on the stove or over a camp fire or heat source in a smelter. The pair заваривать/заварить can mean 'to pour boiling water over something in order to cook/prepare it.' Russians don't usually make tea by actually boiling the leaves in a pot on the stove; instead they pour boiling water into a tea pot over the tea leaves to make a strong infusion, and then they poor some of the infusion from the teapot into a cup and then add boiling hot water and drink the result.

I was curious to know just how much more common it was to say заварить чай as opposed to сварить чай, so I did a Google search and came up with these results.

Сварить

Заварить

As you can see the заварить versions outnumber the сварить versions by a factor of 15. When there is that big a difference, you can teach your beginning students that the заварить version is right and the сварить version is wrong.

The word стол means 'table.' It is one of the first words taught in Russian classes because it is short, easy to pronounce, and has perfectly regular grammatical endings. It is also the classic word used when practicing noun declensions: it's common to hear Russian students chanting стол, стола, столу, стол, столом, столе in the course of their studies. Declining стол out loud gives the good Russian student the same pleasure that a good piano student gets when practicing scales. Sure, it's a simple thing to do, but it shows a type of mastery.

There are two different patterns common to declining Russian nouns. The chant shown above follows the classical order that is used in reference books in Russia and in more traditional textbooks in the United States. There is a also another pattern, the 'linguistic' pattern, that is used by historical linguists and by newer textbooks. The newer system is better pedagogically because it illustrates the generalizations of noun declension in a neater fashion. You can see the two patterns contrasted here.

The phrase письменный стол means 'desk, writing table.'