The verb pair кормить/накормить means to feed or to nourish. It is a shifting stress verb with a perfectly predictable л that appears in the я form:

First off, you can use this verb to discuss feeding farm animals:

You can also use it for feeding people:

In the US in the past there have been various food scandals, including that ridiculous time under Reagan when ketchup was defined as a vegetable for school lunch purposes. Russia, alas, is also not without its school food scandals. Right now there is company called Конкорд in Russia that has roused the ire of Moscow's parents by providing miserly food portions for public schools. They are even accused of providing the kids with fewer calories than prisoners used to get in the gulags. If you'd like to see some pictures of the food and look over a blog that deals with the issue, just click here.

The word for flu in Russian is грипп. It is a perfectly regularly first declension noun:

The flu is a pretty miserable experience, so let's document how to talk about our misery.

* For some dialects of English you could translate this as “There is a terrible flu going around Moscow.” In my dialect of American English it is ungrammatical to use the indefinite article with the word flu.

Russian has several verbs that can be translated as ‘study.’ Today let's start by looking at учить/выучить:

You can use this verb to discuss what subjects you studied in grade school or high school. In this sense you usually use it in the imperfective.

If you are studying/memorizing a set of facts, then you can use both the imperfective and perfective:

The most common Russian word for six is шесть, which declines like this:

When шесть occurs in oblique cases (oblique means a case other than nominative or accusative), it works pretty well like we would expect from a theoretical point of view; that is, it declines as we would expect and the noun it quantifies shows up in the same case in the plural:

Now here's the weird part... If шесть is part of a nominative case number phrase or an accusative case number phrase, then the noun it quantifies shows up in the genitive plural:

That may seem quite complex. Just be glad your not studying Polish: its number system is even more freakish... and fascinating.

The Russian word for new is новый. It's a perfectly regular adjective in its long forms, and it declines like this:

Hm... what kind of sample sentences should we come up with. Ah, of course. No one is more obsessed with newness than the people who love new cars. Let's work with that:

Here are the short forms and the comparative:

And here are a couple ways you can use them: