Last summer I lived in Russia in my own apartment for the first time, so I learned all sorts of new skills... how to pay for the phone, how to pay for the internet, how to add money to my World of Warcraft account... Anyhoo, not too surprisingly, I also cooked. I love to cook. The mix of vegetables and meat and spices... it's simply a joy. But the Russians and the Tatars are really not into spices, so I ended up eventually buying консервы “canned food.” I brought it home, and to my shock, my otherwise well-outfitted kitchen had no can opener. To my greater shock, I realized that I didn't even know the Russian word for can opener. Such ignorance was insupportable! Particularly since it would lead to my personal hunger.

I traipsed over to the nearest department store, waltzed into the kitchen section and said to the clerk:

He looked at me as if I were a retard, the retardedest of retards, and said:

Ah. Excellent. I am now somewhat less retarded. Of course, although the phrase word-for-word means “canned-food knife”, the proper translation is simply “can opener”.

Hm... what kind of sentences can we come up with for that lexical item...

Those were all kind of boring. Have to come up with something more amusing. Here goes...

The Russian word for sun is солнце. It declines like this

The word солнце and its diminutive солнышко are also used as terms of endearment. Parents may address children that way, boyfriends and girlfriends may address each other with it. Close relatives may use it. (Generally male friends do not address each other with these terms.)

There is only one third-declension masculine noun in modern Russian, and that word is путь, which means path or way. It declines like this:

The word is particularly often found in the phrase «по пути» “on the way”:

The word is also used in the phrase «на обратном пути» “on the way back”:

The Russian word кино is an indeclinable neuter noun. Indeclinable nouns are ones that never change their endings:

One of the meanings of кино is “cinema” or “cinematography” or “film.” Although the noun itself does not change endings, the adjective that modifies it must:

The word can also be used to mean “movie theater”:

The word can also mean a film or movie:

The most common Russian word for “to shave” — as in the daily male habit of shaving one's face — is бриться/побриться. It conjugates like this:

For instance:

The thing you shave with goes into the instrumental case without a preposition. Most of the time that will be a variation on the word бритва ‘razor’: