In English when you want to say how often something happens and the period over which it occurs, you can use two constructions. The first uses no preposition, and the second uses the preposition ‘per’:

In English the ‘per’ version sounds more formal and stilted, and the prepositionless version sounds normal. In Russian the prepositionless version is not an option; you must use the preposition в:

At first glance it might seem that год is in the nominative case, but that is because it is a masculine inanimate noun. If we see a feminine noun in that context it is clearly accusative:

If you want to ask how often something happens, then the phrase to use is как часто:

That last example is interesting because you could rephrase it with minutes and skip the preposition:

Note the interesting use of the plural form of каждый before a number greater than one.

Although normally in Russian you refer to the days of the week using nouns like понедельник and среда, there is an alternate way to do it. You make an adjective out of the day of the week and then combine it with the word день ‘day’. It is not as common as simply using the nouns, but it is still possible. Here is a list of the nouns and their corresponding adjectives:

Note carefully that there is no adjectival equivalent for среда, and notice also that the adjective from суббота is soft. When translating the phrases into English, simply use the noun. Here are a few examples:

It would be a mistake to think that all the adjectives are equally acceptable. The phrase «воскресный день» is very common. The next most common is «субботний день». The others you will find in good dictionaries, but they are encountered very rarely. And why is there no adjective from среда? Hard to say. Sometimes in language you have to give up and say, “That's just the way it is.”

Previously we discussed день ‘day’ in the nominative/accusative singular. What about the other forms? Here's where it gets tricky. The -е- is a fleeting vowel, which means any time you add a grammatical ending to the stem, the -е- drops out. The -ь at the end makes the stem soft, but it also drops out when endings are added, and the endings are always soft, so the declension turns out like this:

Notice that except in the nominative/accusative singular, the д is immediately followed by н, which is tricky for us Americans to pronounce. It is a nasally-released soft [d]. In other words, you make the soft [d] sound, but then you let no breath out through the mouth, releasing the breath through the nose as you say the [n]. Here are a few sample sentences.

The Russian word for day is день. Since it is an incredibly common word, we are going to talk about it quite a few times. Today we will start with something simply. День is an inanimate masculine noun, so it's accusative case form is the same as its nominative form. That's fortunate because we mostly use the word in the nominative and accusative case. Here are some examples of it in the nominative:

You will remember that to say “on Monday” or “on Tuesday”, you have to use the preposition в + accusative in Russian. Similarly, to say “on that day” in Russian you say «в тот день» or «в этот день». Oddly enough, in English we usually leave out the “on” when combining it with “that day,” so in translation you will have to remember to add it in:

Today my second-year Russian students encountered the word надолго, which means ‘for a long time.’ Despite knowing what the word meant, the students had a difficult time translating it well in actual sentences. It turns out not only human beings have trouble with these sentences. I typed the question «Таня надолго пришла в библиотеку?» into a couple of online translation apps, and this is what they came up with:

babelfish.yahoo.com: Tanya is for a long time alien into the library?

translate.google.com: Tanya came in for a long time library?

When I finally stopped laughing, I understood it was time discuss approaches to translating it. Let's start by glossing the sentence word for word:

The context of the sentence is that Tanya is now at the library and someone else at the library is asking a third party a question. The sentence means “Has Tanya come to the library for [the purpose of spending] a long time [here]?” There are a couple ways to put this in English that more or less corresponds to the Russian original, and they are:

Sentences A and B probably sound normal to some speakers of English. They sound slightly awkward to me, and they also have the potential of being misinterpreted as meaning “How long has Tanya been coming to the library?” But the main problem with them is this: when we want to ask in English how much time someone intends to spend in the place they have just arrived at or just departed for, we most commonly phrase the question quite differently. The most normal way to ask these questions is not to use a motion verb at all, but instead use a plain verb "be" or the verb "stay":

Let's say you are a translator. These sentences will put you in a bit of a pickle, and to resolve it, you will have to consider your target audience. If your target audience for the translation consists of people who have the regrettable desire of getting translations that maximally reflect the wording of the original, then you want to choose translations modeled on A or B. But remember this: the purpose of a professional translation is to accurately reflect the communicative goals of the original text/speech, and a professional one should always flow decently in the target language. The best professional translation will choose C, D or E. Sad to say, there are times when a really professional translation is rejected by an unsophisticated purchaser, and to get paid we translators have to dumb it down to a more awkward translation. Such is life. Not much you can do about it.

Let's take a look at five more sentences from our textbook. First we will give a word for word gloss and then a good translation.