Every beginning Russian student knows that the verb быть means 'to be,' and that in the present tense the verb is generally not used, thus we have sentences like:

Eventually we learn that there is a second verb 'to be,' which is бывать. The -ва- suffix in Russian sometimes forms what we call a frequentative verb, one that indicates that the action happens on more than one occasion. Thus we can have sentences like:

The verb is perfectly regular, just like читать, so you'll have no trouble conjugating it. In terms of translation style, though, you may often find yourself making non-literal substitutions. For instance:

While that is a perfectly grammatical translation, it really doesn't capture what an English speaker would say in a similar situation. For a good flow it is better to substitute motion phrases and add some typical functional words:

The 'go' version works as well:

If you include some other adverb of frequency, then don't include the word 'sometimes':

The Russian word for address is адрес:

The primary meaning is the postal address to which one send mail. Russian addresses during the 1980s began with country, then city, then city/street/street address and person. There was a certain logic to that. Nowadays the official guidelines seem to have changed, and addresses start with the person and then go to street, and then to broader areas which may include city or region, and finally comes the postal code. For instance:

The word адрес can also be used in the sense of an e-mail address:

The word адрес can also be used in the sense of a person at whom a comment is directed:

¹ Okay, this is nerd humor, so I suppose I had better explain it. Per RFC 2606 "example.com" is one of those domain names reserved for use in documentation examples; in other words, no one anywhere can ever have a working domain named "example.com." If someone gives you an e-mail address with that domain in it, it means they are pulling the wool over your eyes. So the sucker in this example will have no future with the krasavitsa in question.

Since I'll be spending the summer in Tatarstan, it seems sensible to blog about the Tatars. They are a Turkic people who speak a Turkic language. A Tatar woman is called a татарка in Russian (gen. pl. татарок). A Tatar man is a татарин. In Russian there are quite a few words for ethnic groups that end in the suffix -ин. Those words have a grammatical peculiarity. The -ин suffix occurs only in the singular forms. The genitive plural has a zero ending:

Some sample sentences:

If you speak Tatar, the Russian word to describe that is по-татарски:

The word карлик by itself can be translated midget, dwarf, little person, gnome or Lilliputian.¹ In that sense the noun is animate:

The phrase белый карлик means white dwarf, in the sense of a particular class of stars:

When белый карлик means a type of star, it's best treated as an inanimate:

(If the word were being treated as an animate in that context, we would expect «белого карлика».)

¹ The words dwarf and midget, of course, are in disfavor nowadays in the US; it's more tactful to say ‘little person.’

The word зарплата is a conversational word, short for заработная плата, literally “employment pay.” Normally we translate it as wage, pay, income or paycheck. In the States we discuss income in terms of dollars per year before taxes; in Russia we usually discuss it in terms of monthly pay: