The word уже means already. Be careful to get the stress right because if you say уже that means narrower.

When уже combines with the negative particle не, we translate the combination into English with the phrases “no longer” or “not anymore.”

The Russians use уже much more than the English speakers use the word already, and very often the meaning is somewhat attenuated. That kind of “faded” уже is sometimes captured by the word “now” or “really,” and sometimes it's best left simply untranslated.

One last quirk is that уже is sometimes shortened into уж. There is also a noun уж that means “grass snake.” So how do you tell when the Russians mean “already” and when they mean “grass snake”? Frankly, if you can't tell the difference between those two things in context, you aren't smart enough to study Russian. Consider switching your major to French.

The word for a tear is слеза. Notice the stress pattern:

A few sample sentences:

The word teardrop is big news this month in the US due to a viral e-mail going around that contains, among other things, this picture and these words:

When I saw that note, I had no idea whether it was real or not, so I headed right away to snopes.com to see if it had been debunked. Go figure: it's legitimate, and the monument even has an official website where you can see a picture of Putin at the dedication.

The words левша and правша mean leftie (a left-handed person) and rightie (a right-handed person) respectively. The former declines like this:

The word правша declines precisely the same way. A few example sentences:

Though every beginning student of Russian knows that there are masculine nouns and feminine nouns, not every student knows that there are common gender nouns as well, and among them are левша and правша. A common gender noun is one that takes masculine adjectives if referring to a man and feminine adjectives if referring to a woman. Thus one could theoretically say:

Simlarly if a common gender noun is the subject of a sentence, it induces masculine agreement in the verb if the noun refers to a man and feminine agreement if the noun refers to a woman. Thus, though not a common thing to say, one could theoretically say:

The word for jaw in Russian is челюсть, which is a feminine noun. Not too surprisingly, the movie “Jaws” was translated into Russian as «Челюсти».

Doubtless the most famous historical incident involving a jaw is Samson's slaying of the Philistines:

Sometimes your neck and head can hold a lot of tension, in which case you should take the following advice:

When you combine челюсть with the adjective вставная “insertable” or съёмная “removable,” it means denture:

Oh, the horror! Oh, the humanity! Actually, when I read things like this in Russian, I'm encouraged: it proves that not it's not just we Americans who can be shallow beyond words.

The verb надевать/надеть means “to put on” an item of clothing. It conjugates just like одевать/одеть:

The item of clothing that is put on goes in the accusative case:

If you put the item of clothing on somone else, the other person appears in the accusative case after the preposition на:

You can also specify various body parts after на, and other prepositions can also be used to indicate layers of clothing: