The Russian word карта is translated as map. It can also be translated as card, whether it’s a collectible card (коллекционная карта), or a playing card (игральная карта). The dimunitive is карточка and is usually used to describe smaller sized cards, like a business card (визитная карточка) or a postcard (почтовая карточка).

Карта and карточка are very similar words but are rarely used interchangeably. For example, it would be incorrect to call a topographic map топографическая карточка, or refer to a postcard as a почтовая карта. Don't call a map карточка, and in most cases try not to refer to a small card as a карта, and you'll be fine.

Image from contact-plus.ru

The discount card is one of the exceptions where you can either say дисконтная карточка or дисконтная картa.

Here are some examples with the words карта and карточка:

The Russian word пропуск has more then one definition and can be a bit difficult to use and easy to confuse, especially if you are not following the conversation closely. It can be translated as “admission,” “pass” or “permit. Sometimes it means password but words like пароль and пассворд are used a lot more often for that. Пропуск can also refer to absences and no shows. And at last, it can be translated as a gap or a blank between something.
The word originally comes from the verb пропускать, which means to let pass, and to skip.

When пропуск means a pass or permit, it declines like this. (Note the irregular nominative/accusative plural).

Image of an old Soviet пропуск that allows for unrestricted travel around the city during an air raid. Taken from autogallery.org.ru.

Here are some examples for the use of various translations of the word пропуск:

This is a very popular Russian idiom used to calm someone who has been injured in some way. The literal translation is: before (до) wedding (свадьбы) it will heal (заживёт). You are pretty much telling a physically or emotionally wounded person to stop worrying and take it easy because the injury is not permanent and will eventually heal in time for the wedding. I heard the phrase a lot as a kid, mostly from parents and doctors. I still get it now and then when I do something stupid, like cut my hand while carelessly opening a can of peaches.

Now, cобачья свадьба “a dog's wedding” is an example of an idiom that has almost vanished and lost its meaning. When I heard it for the first time, uttered by an elderly gentleman in a fit of anger, I had no idea what it meant—just another ancient slang term on the brink of extinction. Собачья свадьба is used to describe a fling, a love affair, a one-night stand. You might bump into it in some old movie or novel… but in today’s world it will likely come from a crazed dog lover who actually wants to organize a real dog wedding.

Image from zoochel.ru

The word похожий means “similar to, resembling”:

Here are some sample sentences:

Of course the adjective exists in the short form as well.

The short forms of these words are incredibly common when commenting on resemblances between people. Note that the person you resemble shows up in accusative case after the preposition на.

If the antecedent of the word is это, then of course you use the neuter short form:

The neuter short form also doubles as an adverb, and in this usage can have the same meaning as кажется ‘it seems’:

Вкусный means tasty or delicious.

As a standard hard adjective it works pretty well like you'd expect it to in sentences:

This adjective, like most other qualitative adjectives, also has short and comparative forms:

That by itself is not so interesting, but it gets interesting when we think about the neuter short form, which for most hard adjectives also doubles as an adverb. Russians use adverbs a lot more than English speakers, and they use them in ways that are quite unnatural to the American ear. An English speaker would almost never use the word 'tastily,' but you can find it all the time in Russian:

That last example is of a type that used to drive me crazy. I wanted people to write вкусна in the feminine form, in other words with standard adjectival agreement. But in these types of contexts, the вкусно isn't referring directly to the beef. Instead it means something like “it is tasty to eat the beef”, in other words the ‘it’ isn't referring to the noun itself, but to the more abstract experience associated with the beef. Frankly, it still stresses me out that the Russians do that.

The subject of the wide use of adverbs in Russian is an interesting one. We'll try to include other examples in the near future.