In English the word time has several meanings: a) it means a repetition, as in “She kissed me three times,” and b) it means time in the sense of “I don't have time to clean the kitchen today.” Russian distinguishes those meanings. The former is раз, and the latter is время, which we will discuss today. Время is one of the ten neuter nouns in modern Russian that ends in -мя in the nominative singular. It is declined like this:

Probably the first place we encounter this word is when discussing whether we have time to do something:

When you are talking about having the time to do something, you use the infinitive of the verb:

When you are talking about time for something, you use the preposition на followed by the accusative case:

We previously discussed the use of the preposition по in the sense of “on the subject of.” Another common meaning of по is to indicate the means by which information is communicated, in which case it is usually translated as “on” or “via” in English; in that meaning по governs the dative case:

Don's rant of the day: the idea that we are supposed to capitalize the word Интернет is completely assinine. I refuse to do it in English, no matter what the current stylistic guides say. Nowadays the internet is a generic means of communication, not a capitalizable company like MCI. Lower-case makes sense. But if you are someone trying to get a job somewhere and not get rejected because of ignorami professing current political correctness, then capitalize the word.

But in Russian I'll capitalize it cuz I don't wanna seem like an ignant furriner.

The word но means but. In grammatical terms it is a conjunction which usually introduces a clause that is contrary to previously established expectiations. For instance:

The word но rarely produces confusion for English speakers. Bummer. That means I have to think of some clever example sentences.

Crud. I guess my sentences weren't so clever after all.

There's a quirk to spoken human languages: the shorter the word, the more meanings it has, and the longer a word the fewer meanings it has. For instance, “jack” has dozens of meanings, whereas “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” really only has one (or perhaps none, if one assumes the word is never really used in anything but lists of long words). The same is true for Russian. The long preposition накануне has only two meanings, whereas the short preposition по has dozens. Today we will discuss по in the meaning of “on the subject of.” With that meaning по is used with the dative case. First of all, it can be used with nouns that indicate written content, e.g. books and magazines:

The preposition is also used for lots of things associated with academics, e.g. exams, textbooks, handbooks:

There are three words that native speakers of English often confuse at first in their studies of Russian:

1. The first one of those is дома, which is an adverb that means “at home.” It never changes its endings.
2. The second is домой, which is an adverb that means “home” in the sense of “homeward/to home.” It never changes its endings.
3. The third is дом, which is a noun that means “house” or “building” and occurs in the singular and plural of all six cases.

Today we are focusing on домой in the meaning “home/to home/homeword.” Here is a subtlety. In English we can say “She is home right now” and “She is heading home now.” The former indicates location, and the latter indicates motion. In Russian you have to use дома in the former sense because it is a location phrase, and you have to use домой in the latter phrase since it indicates motion. Note also that as an adverb домой cannot be used with a preposition:

That last example is particular interesting. When you want to specify that you are going to someone's home, the word домой can be made more specific by adding a prepositional phrase using к followed by the dative case:

Actually in the previous three examples it's more natural to leave домой out, but it's perfectly grammatical to include it.