The word море means sea. It's one of the few nouns in Russian that ends in -е and has a soft consonant before it. Many two-syllable neuter nouns in Russian have a stress shift in the plural. In this case, the noun is stem-stressed in the singular, and end-stressed in the plural. It declines like this:

The seas closest to Russia are:

Notice that the «море» part in Russian is not capitalized.

Russians love to go to the sea of vacation, especially to a sea that is warm and has palm trees. Back in the Soviet period, one of their favorite places was Ялта, a city on the Black Sea that had, relative to Moscow, a warm climate. (By Arizona standards the place is refreshingly cool, but of course this blog is not entitled “Arizona Word of the Day,” so the Moscow viewpoint must predominate.) Море is a на word. In otherwords, when you talk about going to the sea or being at the seashore, you must use the preposition на, not в.

In Modern American English we mostly talk about going “to the beach” in these contexts, so “sea” will often not appear in such translations.

The generic Russian word for doctor is врач. It is an end-stressed, first declension noun:

Russia has some great doctors. Although they often do not have access to the latest Western equipment, they have profound clinical experience, and I have never regretted sending my students to Russian doctors when they are ailing. Twice this last summer I had to take students to the doctor or hospital, and, to the best my eye can tell, they did exactly the things necessary for the students' conditions. Here are a few sample sentences:

Actually, that last line is potentially misleading. The word терапевт, when used by itself, is often the equivalent of ‘general practitioner,’ so just because someone is called a терапевт does not mean he are not a physician.

One last comment... although the example sentences assumed a male doctor, most doctors in Russia are actually women.

If you were to make a list of the most classically Russian dishes, щи would be at the top. Щи is a cabbage soup. It usually includes some beef, and the meat and cabbage are cooked separately. The word only occurs in the plural, which results in this curious declension pattern:

You can't mention щи without mentioning the saying «Щи да каша — пища наша» “Cabbage soup and boiled grain is our kind of food.” People say this when they are putting ordinary food on the table to indicate that they aren't fancy-shmancy gourmands with expensive tastes. They are just good ol’ down home folks with simple desires. The American equivalent would be something like “We’re meat and potatoes folks.” Here are some sample sentences.

I'm teaching from a new 1st semester Russian book this semester, so I decided to blog about the first word in the vocab list from chapter 1, which turned out to be аптека. Alas, I've already blogged about that word, so I decided to press on to the second word, which is банк. It is a perfectly regular first declension noun if you bear in mind the seven-letter spelling rule:

Back in the Soviet period, normal citizens never had anything to do with banks; if they wanted to save money in an account, they could use сберегательная касса (а savings bank), but such institutions didn't have checking accounts or home loans or car loans or any of those things normally associated with a western bank. Nowadays there are dozens of Russian banks in every Russian city, and probably the ATM machine банкомат is the major way that citizens interact with them. Russia still doesn't do direct deposit. Employees usually get cash on paydays from their accounting departments, and then they have to take them to their banks, if they bank their money at all.

Here are a few sentences with the word банк in them.

The Russian word for cabbage is капуста. It is a perfectly regular feminine noun that declines like this:

Russian families eat cabbage all the time, so you can often come across phrases like this:

The Russians eat cabbage ten thousand ways. The Russian version of sauerkraut is called квашеная капуста, literally “fermented cabbage.” If you wrap the leaves around meat and rice and then steam them, then they are called голубцы. If you turn it into soup, it is called щи. If you add beets to the soup, you end up with борщ. If you put it on your head with mayonaisse, it is an aid to logical thinking.

Okay, I made that last bit up, but I really do love cabbage nowadays. If you have never developed the habit of eating it, take a quick trip to Russia where they know how to cook it right.