One of the Russian words for half is половина. It is perfectly regular in declension. Sample sentences:

"Cпортзал" is made up of two words, спорт (sport) and зал (hall). It is used to describe various fitness clubs and gyms. Lately more and more Russians have begun to use the English terms but спортзал remains the most dominant. Here are a few examples for this two-part word:

Finding an affordable "спортзал" has become a bit easier for Russians, or at least for Muscovites, than before.

A few years ago it came to me that I should visit a “спортзал” once in a while to stay active, or at least try to, so I got a membership at a decent Arizona gym that had all the basic equipment and a pool for a good $30 a month. When I went to Moscow for the summer I decided to sign up at a “спортзал” there too, just in case I’d continue with this new healthy habit of mine. But as I soon realized… this goal was too naive.

Unlike in the States, fitness clubs are fairly new to Russia and began to emerge only in the late nineties. Sure, every school had a gym and physical education was important but those gyms were different, nothing like 24 Hour Fitness, and for students only, unless you knew the security guard or the principal. As a result, parks and swimming pools tend to be the most popular spots for healthy Russians. But parks and crowded pools were not on my list; I was already spoiled by my American “спортзал.” So I searched out a couple fitness clubs not too far from my apartment and went down to check them out.

The first one was your typical gym—weights, treadmills, yoga, aerobics. A manager with a joyous smile gave me a tour around the place, describing everything in detail, except for the rates, and convincing me to sign up. To me it was an average gym, just what I hoped for, nothing special. When I finally got the rates sheet and glimpsed at it, I was first bumped by slight confusion and then hit hard by sudden alarm. The cheapest plan with which you could visit the gym only four days a week was $500 a month, after a membership fee of $4000. Certainly wasn’t prepared for this. I looked at the manager, her smile faded, made the usual excuse about needing more time to think the decision over and quickly left.

The other place was not any prettier—$50 a day. This made me lose my gym motivation for the summer and suddenly going to the park didn’t sound all that bad.

The verb замечать/заметить means “to notice observe.” It conjugates like this:

The thing you notice goes in the accusative case:

You can also follow the verb with an entire clause. The clause usually begins with что, but it can also begin with a question word used as a relative pronoun:

The word замечание means “a comment, an observation.” Sometimes the word is entirely neutral:

At other times the word has the sense of “a comment containing criticism.”

The newest letter of the Russian alphabet is ё. Although it was first used in print in the 18th century, it didn't become an official letter until the middle of the 20th century. It's the naughtiest of Russian letters because it's the first letter of the masculine past tense form of the Russian eff word. Now of course Russian Word of the Day readers are much too cultured to bother looking up the ten thousand ridiculously creative ways the Russians use that verb and all its variants, but they should know the several euphemisms for that word that occasionally show up in conversation, particularly «ёлки-палки», a mild phrase which we can translate as “oh, fudge” or “holy moly” or “oh, crud” or “hell's bells” It can express surprise, disgust, or pain. Russians also say «ё-моё», which means roughly the same thing, but is maybe slightly less vulgar.

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

The picture you see at the right is a monument that was erected to the letter ё in the city of Ульяновск, which has about the same emotional effect as erecting a monument in the states to the letter eff. It has always surprised me that local authorities let the monument go up.

Since until relatively recently it was simply considered a variation on the letter е, sometimes dictionaries treat the letters as the same. Thus you might find the word ёж in the е section, or you might find it in its own ё section. If you have trouble finding a word with that letter, double check to see if it's in another section, or check to see whether the word is alphabetized differently than you first thought. Properly speaking, if two words differ only by е/ё, theoretically the е version should come first and the ё version should come second. If you are dealing with lists sorted by computer, be aware that there may be an additional problem. If the algorithm a program uses does not conform to the current rules, then you might unexpectedly find ё sorted before а or after я or inconsistently before/after е.

For the most part Russians don't write the double dots over the ё. It's only used in textbooks for kids and foreigners, in dictionaries, and occasionally in regular writing when otherwise the text would be ambiguous, for instance in distinguishing все “everbody” from всё “everything” or осел “settled” from осёл “donkey.” Interestingly enough, if you write the double dots in a text where people aren't expecting it, it feels awkward to the Russians and slows down their rate of reading, just as when Americans may trip over spellings like coöperation and hæmoglobin. That fact occasionally leads to rational discussions, rants and diatribes, and sometimes to amusing art:

Used by permiision of Артемий Лебедев