The word бабочка means butterfly or moth.

Вампир is one of several words that means vampire.

So the obvious question is how would you say “vampire moths”? That would be «бабочки-вампиры». The even more obvious question is why the heck would you want to say such a thing? The answer: blood-sucking moths have been discovered in Siberia. Really. I'm not kidding. Now we Americans have another reason never to leave the safety of our monolingual homes.

You can read about the critters here (mirror with translation).

The verb pair писать/написать means “to write.” Sample sentences:

Note carefully that the с becomes ш when you conjugate the verb in non-past forms; that's called a consonant mutation. Notice also that the а drops out in the present, imperative, and perfective future forms:

For some verbs it doesn't matter too much if you get the stress wrong, but it's important to get this one right on the infinitive because if you put the stress on wrong syllable you end up with писать, which means “to pee.” This of course reminds me of a classic joke:

In Russian the joke is funny not just because of the one-upmanship, but also because писать is a word you expect to hear out of a child, not out of a grown man with an education from one of the world's best schools.

The verb pair гулять/погулять means “to take a walk.” It is often used with the preposition по followed by the dative case: «Мы погуляли по парку» “We took a walk around the park,” where “around” means “aimlessly here and there through the park” not “in a precise circle around the park.” In the spread-out cities of the American West people don't take walks so much for pleasure nowadays; you practically have to drive to your own kitchen. But in Russia walking around in the evening or the afternoon is still a big part of socializing.

That's actually a common thing to do in St. Petersburg. (The bridges have to open to let boats travel up and down the river.) Or you can stroll around the streets of Moscow after the stores have closed, admiring the buildings and enjoying the eternal twilight of Russian summer evenings. Ugh. Did I really just write “eternal twilight”? What a cliché.

Гулять can also mean “to goof off.” A mother might shout at her son «Боря, чего ты гуляешь во дворе? Ты должен быть в школе!» “Boris, what are doing goofing off in the yard? You're supposed to be at school!”

When a Russian mother can't stand having her child inside anymore, she'll also use this word in the context where an American mother might use the word “play”:

(The phrase «на улице» literally means “on the street,” but the mother isn't saying “Go play in the street” out of some poorly-hidden filicidal wish. Instead «на улице» is one of the standard Russian phrases for “outside.”) Other variations: «Иди погулять» “Go play” and «Сходи на улицу» “Go outside.”

By extension of the “goofing off” meaning, гулять also can mean “to have a good time, party, whoop it up,” which leads us to a joke. It's a joke based on a pun, and puns don't translate well unless the target language has the same duplication of meaning in the punning word as the source language. We'll have to explain it in detail, which means the joke won't be that funny, but what the heck...

So why is this funny? Well, the primary meaning of the “whooping it up” word is “to take a walk,” and the phrase translated “getting started” means “walking” (i.e., walking to the store to buy vodka and get started), so in effect, he is saying “our buddies are already walking around, but we are just walking.” And of course the guy they spotted is already so plastered that he's lying under the fence and can't walk. And he is already so drunk that you can hardly say he is whooping it up. And the guys who are about to get equally plastered are feeling envious of the totally unenviable slob lying there on the ground. Now that's funny... um, right? In a kind of pathetic alcoholic way?

To say "at five minutes to two" a Russian literally says "without five two," where the preposition без means without and governs the genitive case. The "minute" words are often left out, but not necessarily so. When speaking of the minutes to one o'clock, they usually leave the number "one" out and simply say "hour." For example:

When speaking of "minutes till" for the other hours of the clock, they usually leave out the word "hour." Other examples:

Other entries dealing with time are under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."

To the Russian way of thinking, the first hour the sixty minutes from midnight to (but not including) one. The second hour is between one and two. Therefore when saying "at twelve oh one" in Russian you literally say "at one minute of the first." The number phrases after в show up in the accusative case. For example:

Other examples:

Other entries dealing with time are soon to come. Look for them under the categories "Time phrases" and "What time is it" and "At what time."