The Russian word for coffee is кофе. It's an indeclinable noun, which means it never changes its ending for case or number. Despite the ending, it's a masculine noun, not a neuter one. In other words, one is supposed to say чёрный кофе, not чёрное кофе. There is a reason for that: the word used to be кофей, which is clearly masculine. In fact, if you read Crime and Punishment in Russian, you will still find it spelled that way.

You know how in English data is supposed to be plural, but everyone uses it as a singular form? That is, we are supposed to say “These data are interesting,” but in fact we usually say “This data is interesting”? The Russians are in a similar situation with the word кофе. Theoretically it's masculine, but it's incredibly common to hear it as a neuter. The error is so widespread that it has spawned a well-known joke:

The last line is funny because in that context a Russian will say одна булочка; thus the foreigner accidentally got the grammatically tricky point right, but then he slaughtered the Russian language by making a mistake that no native speaker, not even the least educated, would ever make.

This joke is retold all over Russia in a thousand variations where the customer changes: often he's a Georgian because the Georgian accent is well known and commonly mocked, sometimes a Russian, sometimes a foreigner, and the jokes are sometimes written with funky Russian spelling to portray his non-Russian accent.

Update 2009-09-02: As of yesterday a decree of the Russian Ministry of Education and Science went into effect that affirms several dictionaries as normative for Russian as the official language of the Russian government. Those dictionaries acknowledge that кофе can be treated as neuter, so in a sense it is now officially acceptable to say чёрное кофе. The dictionaries include:

• "Орфографический словарь русского языка" Б.Букчиной, И.Сазоновой и Л.Чельцовой
• "Грамматический словарь русского языка" под редакцией А.Зализняка
• "Словарь ударений русского языка" И.Резниченко
• "Большой фразеологический словарь русского языка" с комментарием В.Телия

In Soviet Union лёгкая про­мышленность “light industry,” including парфюмерная про­мышленность “perfume industry,” were not developed at all, as many might know. But every woman wants to be beautiful, in any country or place. So, how did the Soviet women go about it? Well, the lucky ones could get Polish make-up, which is of highest quality (at least, was ). Polish make-up and skin care was easy to get in Moscow or Saint-Peterburg, not in the rest of Russia. So a lot of times ladies relied on nature's gifts. For example, beets were used for rouge and lipstick sometimes! Raw or boiled beats, and their color looked natural and pretty, like the color of your own cheeks. For eyeliner sometimes mashed coal was applied with a sharpened end of a match, and boiled onion skins (отвар из шелухи лука) were used to dye hair. Also skin creams were made at home often, with herbs, flowers, honey, berries, fruits, etc. Календула marigold was used to clean the face, then tonic из ромашки “made from chamomile” was applied, and then home made creams, from ромашка chamomile, жень-шень ginseng, rose petals or petals of other flowers, etc. Маски из тёртого огурца и клубники “masks made of ground cucumber and strawberries” were very popular; they made the skin bright and translucent. Faces looked pretty, but very natural, as if no make-up was applied at all.

The only thing that was hard to get from nature was тушь mascara. The most popular one in Soviet Union (maybe, even the only one made within the country) was from Saint-Petersburg's perfume factory. It was a little brick, of very hard consistency, which needed water to make it soft and applicable to eyelashes. Ресницы выглядели слипшимися от такой туши! But of all Soviet women's dreams, French mascara was beyond the wildest imagination of average Soviet woman; only privileged wives of government officials, and some artists who traveled abroad, could get this luxury, as well as French parfum (французские духи), which is considered the best in the world in Russia, even to this day.

In my wildest dreams I could not imagine, growing up in Soviet Union, that one day I'd have all these unimaginable things among my possessions, French mascara, French perfume, all the good make-up! But something else I understood also. Some places women have all these wonderful make-up things, but still… something's missing. What is it? I understood that amount of beauty does not equal to quantities of make-up available… what is it then, the secret behind being beautiful? Genes? Good taste? The ability to make make-up “play” on your face? Or is it only inner beauty that shines through and beautifies the outside? Any opinions?

Every once in a while when you have mastered some grammatical backflip, you discover that one is not enough: you have to do a grammatical double gainer. This is the case to say that someone “doesn't have” something or that “there isn't” something somewhere.

You recall that when a person has something, in Russian we express by saying “At so-and-so is such-and-such.” The person shows up in the genitive case as the object of the preposition у, and the thing the person has shows up in the nominative case, and the “there is/are” is expressed by the word есть:

When the person doesn't have something, the “doesn't have” idea is expressed in the present tense by нет, and the thing he doesn't have shows up in the genitive case.

The past tense of нет is always не было, and the future tense is не будет. Notice the contrast between these sentences. In the “have” sentences, the verb changes according to the gender/number of the subject. In the “doesn't have” sentences, the verb does not change for the subject because there is no grammatical subject (that is, nothing in the nominative case), and the verb defaults to neuter singular form:

These tricks also apply to sentences expressing sentences with the idea of “there is no” or “there was no”:

Every once in a while when you are studying a foreign language, you have to learn to do some grammatical contortion and say something in a way that seems bizarre in contrast to your native language. For us English speakers, learning how to say “have” in Russian is one of those.

In an English sentence like “John has a book.” John is the subject of the sentence. The thing that he has is the direct object. To communicate the same idea in Russian, you have to rephrase the sentence as “At John there is a book.” Specifically, when a person has something, the person shows up in the genitive case as the object of the preposition у, and the thing the person has shows up in the nominative case, and the “there is/are” is expressed by the word есть.

Есть is the present tense form of the verb быть, so if you want to put those sentences in the past or future, you use the past and future forms of быть to say “At John there was a book” and “At John there will be a book.”

When an organization (as opposed to a person) has something, then instead of using the preposition у, the prepositions в and на are used with the prepositional case. Thus “The university will have/has/had a dormitory” comes out:

“The post office will have/has/had a fax machine” comes out:

Actually these sentences can be translated two different ways. «На почте есть факс» can be translated either “The post-office has a fax machine” or “There is a fax machine at the post office.” If these types of sentences use prepositions other than у-в-на, usually “have” is not the best translation:

The verb быть is also used in sentences with predicate adjectives. You may recall that in copular sentences (“to be” type sentences), the subject is the thing you are talking about. The predicate is everything else:

There are two types of adjectives in Russian: long form adjectives, which are the vast majority of adjectives, and short form adjectives.

An adjective that is in the predicate is, not surprisingly, called a predicate adjective. Long form predicate adjectives in Russian normally occur in the instrumental case. The only exception is when it is directly a part of a present tense is/am/are phrase, in which case the predicate is in the nominative case:

A short form adjective in the predicate will always be in the nominative case:

Of course feminine, neuter, and plural forms are also possible: