I'm in Kazan with a group of students. Many of them are in host families. Americans are very communicative, so before the program began, one of our students sent a message to her host father to say that she was excited and looking forward to meeting them. She wrote:

Я очень возбуждена и спешу встретиться с вами.

Now that's pretty damn amusing. The word she chose for ‘excited’ means excited when the appetite is excited by exercise or a solar cell is excited to stimulate the emission of electrons by photons. But when applied to humans it can mean ‘sexually excited.’ The word she chose to for ‘to look forward to’ also means ‘to be in a hurry.’ So in effect the good-hearted girl had written:

I am very aroused and rushing to meet you.

Our resident director clarified the situation to the host father...

The verb ‘to stimulate; excite; arouse’ in Russian is возбуждать/возбудить. It conjugates like this:

This word can be used when one's appetite or thirst or curiosity or surprise are aroused:

I suppose I must give at least one sexual example:

The preposition от is often used with the word лекарство ‘medicine’ to indicate the condition which the medicine is used to treat. It is always used with the gentive case.

The preposition от often means ‘from’ in the sense of ‘due to a negative cause’, and it is always used with the genitive case.

The preposition от often means from, and it is always used with the genitive case. Specifically if you are coming from seeing someone, then you can use от:

The Russian word этот is a demonstrative adjective that can be translated as this/that/these/those, depending on the context. (For a discussion of the this/that distinction, see the entry on тот.) It declines like this:

For first- and second-year Russian students, I call this word ‘changing это’ because it changes it's ending for case, number and gender. Beginners often confuse it with ‘unchanging это’; for discussion of the distinction, see this blog entry.