The verb pair спрашивать/спросить means “to ask” in the sense of “to ask (a question).” It never means “to ask someone for something.” It is conjugated like this:

The person who is asked the question shows up in the accusative case. The question that is asked most commonly shows up as indirect speech in a separate clause introduced by a comma:

But of course the question clause may also contain direct speech:

The verb is also used if a person answers the phone and wants to know who the caller wants to speak with. Although the phrase essentially means “Who is asking for him/her/them,” in a good translation we will paraphrase it with the standard polite equivalents in English:

One warning about this verb: it cannot be used in conjunction with the noun вопрос, which means a question. That is you cannot say «Он спросил вопрос» in the sense of “He asked a question.” For that you must use the verb задавать/задать, which we will discuss tomorrow.

The verb pair просить/попросить can mean either “to ask (someone for something)” or “to ask (someone to do something).” It never means “to ask a question.” It is conjugated like this:

When you ask someone for something, the person asked appears in the genitive case after the preposition у, and the thing for which you ask appears in the accusative case:

If you ask someone to do something, there are two different ways of putting the words together. The first way is just like English: the person you ask is the direct object (accusative case) and the thing you ask them to do is expressed as an infinitive phrase:

The other way is to use a чтобы phrase, which actually can be put together one of two different ways:

These sentences are slightly different in meaning. The second one specifies that the speaker asked his father to drop him off. The first one doesn't specify that. In other words, in the first sentence the speaker might have asked his mother to have his father drop him off.

One of the words that Americans tend to misuse is ресторан restaurant. Ресторан is a place where you go with friends to spend an evening together. Entertainment is often provided. The meal stretches out over many hours. МакДоналдс не ресторан. McDonald's is not a restaurant. At the very kindest McDonald's is a кафе. Кафе is a place where you go to eat, but you don't intend on spending much time there. There is another word that even better catches the idea of what MacDonald's is: забегаловка. The root of the word is бег- which means run, and the за- prefix adds the idea of dropping in briefly, so a забегаловка is a place where you drop in for a quick bite to eat. It's sort of what we would call a fast-food place in the US, but a забегаловка may serve alcohol as well.

Back in 1986 there wasn't a single McDonald's in all of Russia, but now every Russian knows them. Interestingly enough, even though the name of the restaurant is officially МакДоналдс, that's not how Russians usually pronounce it. Usually they pronounce it МакДональд, softening the ell and leaving out the ess, or they pronounce it МакДональдс, softening the ell and keeping the ess. And sometimes the thirty-something crowd of Russians is overshadowed by the muse of verbal efficiency and simply call it Мак-Дак.¹

Extra points to anyone who can tell me how they translate McDonald's slogan “I'm loving it” into Russian.

¹ The Мак-Дак name might also be a jokey adaptation that originated among Russians who saw Скрудж МакДак Scrooge McDuck in Утиные истории Duck Tales, which was broadcast on Russian TV in the early nineties.

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I guess the world of insects is not well known to широким слоям населения the general public , unless you are a biologist or smth. Myself I got a little exposure to the insect world when I visited my Ukrainian great-grandmother during my childhood. There, I got acquainted with creatures like божья коровка (lit., God's little cow), жуки-солдатики (lit., little soldier beetles), колорадский жук (lit., Colorado beetle), and the most interesting one, медведка, which literally means “little bear thing” but in English is translated as mole cricket. My great grandmother had a big orchard and garden and a big potato field, I used to help her tend the land. To rid the potato bushes of the насекомое-вредитель “insect pest” колорадский жук “Colorado potato beetle” (which we threw in jars with kerosene). Sometimes we saw a nasty creature that looked like a black crawfish coming out from their земляных норок burrows, and that юрко проползало между картофельных кустов scrambled nimbly amidst the potato plants. Seeing them always gave me a nasty feeling. My grandmother usually перерубала их мотыжкой или тяпкой chopped them in two with a hoe or hand rake. it seemed to be the only way to kill them.

Медведки - dangerous creatures, they harm клубни картофеля potato tubers и другие корнеплоды and other root vegetables. They eat them up underground, and if there is a colony of медведок, they can consume the whole potato crop, leaving people without their food supply for the winter. If there is a conventional way to destroy their colonies - I don't know it. Do you? I am wondering if медведки exist in the US? Or are American potatoes safe?

Jan. 12, 2011, Don adds: here's a video that will really give you a good idea of just how gross those медведки are. The video is from antclub.ru.

Попса is a slangy and somewhat deprecatory Russian word for pop music. Sample sentences:

One of the best thing about this decade is that it's easy to find a lot of current Russian music on the web. The links in the sample sentences above will take you to some pop music.

¹ Sentence adapted from this source.