To communicate the idea of starting a process, Russian can either use specific verbal prefixes or one of several specific verbs. The most basic verb is начинать/начать.

The verb can be complemented by either a noun or an infinitive phrase. In either case the person who starts the process is in the nominative case. When working with nouns, the thing that starts is in the accusative case:

When using an infinitive phrase after this verb, that infinitive MUST be an imperfective infinitive:

One thing you CANNOT do with this verb is to say something like “The movie starts at 5:00.” For that you need the reflexive form of the verb, which we will discuss tomorrow.

As I recall, back in 1997 nobody had cell phones in Russia.* Now they are all over the place. “Mobile phone” is trans­lated мобильный телефон or мобиль­ник, and cell phone is trans­lated сотовый телефон, although sometimes people just say сотовый. And young Russians send text messages like crazy. Properly speaking, the text message protocol is called SMS, the Short Message System. “Text message” is translated текстовое сообщение, but really almost no one says that. Usually people write СМС (pronounced эсэмэс) or смс-ка (pronounced эсэмэска), or sometimes they just write it in Latin letters as SMS.

In the early days of Russian texting, only Latin letters were available, so the Russians wrote things like:

That approach to writing Russian is often called транслит. There are several ways to go about transliterating Russian with Latin letters, and you can read about them in this Wikipedia article. The Russians aren't particularly consistent in how they use транслит, so the example we used above might come out “zdu teba u vhoda v biblioteku.” Sometimes that leads to humorous misunderstandings:

Here the texter meant “S Pashoi” to represent «С Пасхой», which is an Easter greeting. The other texter mistook the h to be part of ш, and thus a typo for «С Пашей» “With Paul.”

Although many Russian cell phones can now send/receive text messages in Cyrillic, often people send them still in Latin letters. Sometimes they do this because the person they are sending to has a phone that can't receive Cyrillic. But there is another reason that people write in Latin even when both sender and receiver have phones that work with Cyrillic. It turns out that for technical reasons a Cyrillic text message is limited to a maximum of 70 characters, whereas one written in Latin letters and numbers can have up to 160 characters.

Quick texters in English use T9 predictive keying. Not surprisingly, it has also been adapted to Russian:

Т9 - офигенно удобная штука, смс-ки сейчас набираю только ею. (source)	T9 is awesomely convenient. It's the only way I type text messages now.
А я всегда пользуюсь этой функцией… только смешно получается, если я что-то пишу, а слово получается не то, а я так и отправляю Например, если написать "сижу дома, скучаю, хорошо, что у меня пиво есть", то автоматом вместо "пиво" пишется "план" (Adapted from this source)	Well I always use this function… only it comes out funny if I write something and the wrong word comes out and I send it. For instance, if I write “I'm at home, bored, good thing I have beer,” then the algorithm writes “dope” instead of “beer.”

* For comparison's sake, I should say that I purchased my first cell phone in the States in 1998, although they were available before that.

Война means war. It is a на word:

The most common word for one in Russian is один in its various forms. Morphologically it is an adjective, which means it occurs in masculine, feminine, neuter, and plural forms in all six cases:

Since один is an adjective, it has to agree with its noun in gender:

Why would you need the plural of the number one? You may encounter the plural of один when specifying that you have one item that is pluralia tantum. Plurale tantum are nouns that only occur in the plural. In English we have a few nouns like that, such as pants. You don't say “Hand me the pant” even if you mean just one item of clothing. Instead you say “Hand me the pants.” In Russian the words брюки pants and часы “a watch” only occur in the plural, so if you want to specify one pair of pants or one watch, you theoretically can use the plural of один:

Alas, the Russian number system is not entirely stable, and occasionally you might find an odd bird who objects to using одни with these words. The issue of how to combine numbers with plurale tantum is quite complex, so for the moment trust me that the Russians often say it this way.

Back in 1988 or so I was in Moscow at «Дом книги» with a former student. He was thirsty. I asked a saleswoman whether there was any place he could get a drink of water. I figured the woman would say to one of her coworkers something like «Покажи нашему гостю, где попить» “Show our guest where to get a drink.” Instead she said, «Надь, напои этого мальчика» “Nadya, water this boy.”

Wow, talk about a learning moment. Once again a Russian had shown me her ability to compress what was a multiword phrase in English into a single Russian verb: поить/напоить. The verb means “to give [something] [to someone] to drink,” and it's conjugated like this:

The person or animal that will be drinking shows up in the accusative case. The thing you give them to drink shows up in the instrumental case:

Note: standard dictionaries describe the stress pattern of this verb as either shifting-stress or end-stressed. All the native speakers I have consulted prefer the shifting stress pattern shown here.