One of the great things about Russian is the way prefixes and roots combine to make new words. For instance, the prefix в- means ‘into,’ and the root ход- means ‘go.’ Put them together and you get the word вход which means ‘entrance’:

If you want to specify the place to which the entrance gives you access, it is placed after the preposition в in the accusative case:

The word can also be used to mean ‘price of admission’:

The Russian word возможность has multiple meanings, including chance, opportunity and possibility. It is a perfectly regular third declension noun:

Very often the word is best translated into English as chance:

Sometimes the better translation is opportunity:

The Russian word for problem is проблема. It is a perfectly regular second declension noun:

Very often this word is used with a location phrase:

It is also used with с + instrumental:

¹Okay, this really isn't a common phrase in Russian. I stole it from one of the Batman movies. And недостатки is more like 'physical defects' than 'ailments'. But the original sentence is so genteel in English that I really wanted to produce something similar in Russian.

The Russian word for new is новый. It's a perfectly regular adjective in its long forms, and it declines like this:

Hm... what kind of sample sentences should we come up with. Ah, of course. No one is more obsessed with newness than the people who love new cars. Let's work with that:

Here are the short forms and the comparative:

And here are a couple ways you can use them:

The first word we Americans learn for friend in Russian is друг. The word has a consonant mutation in the plural:

This word is problematic when translating from Russian to English. Americans use the word ‘friend’ very loosely. It may be a close, personal friend, one with whom you share all your intimate secrets, or it may be someone you have known for five or ten years and never had a negative encounter with. That's not the case with Russians. Russians will only use друг to mean someone they know very well, someone who knows your likes and dislikes and knows better than to buy you white bread because you only like black bread. Anyone else you know is знакомый ‘acquaintance.’ I actually like the Russian distinction. It seems more meaningful than the American version.