The word куда means where in the sense of “where to?” This word give us English speakers problems at first because in English we use the same “where” word for both location and motion. That is, in English you can say both “Where are you going?” (motion to) and “Where do you work?” (location at). Куда can only be used in “motion to” contexts. So if you meet a friend while walking across campus, and you want to know where he is going, then куда is the only option:

If you are chatting with someone on the train or bus or plane or boat, then again куда is the only option when asking where your collocutor is going:

Куда can also be used as a relative pronoun, assuming again that you are talking about a place someone is going to:

Now here is a subtlety that lots of foreigners never get. It is possible to use где with verbs of motion, but it doesn't mean “where to.” Instead it identifies the location at which the motion is currently occuring. For instance, let's say you are a foreigner in a Russian city, riding a bus with your friend. You don't recognize what street you are riding on so you say:

That said, most of the time when you have a verb of motion, you will used куда instead of где.

In Russian you can often take a noun stem, say one like стол-, which means table, and add a suffix (often -ск-, -ов-, -н-, or -ин-), and then add adjectival flexions to form an adjective. In this case one adjective from стол is столовый. The phrase столовая комната, literally “table room” is a room where there are tables, in other words, it is the dining room. Nowadays in Russian they just use the adjective part of the phrase, skipping the noun entirely, so the word for “dining room” now declines like this:

Since it is nearly always used as a noun itself, and since its endings match normal adjectival endings, we call this a deadjectival noun.

There is another meaning of столовая, which is “cafeteria,” that is a big public dining room. Most Russian homes don't have a separate dining room, so the cafeteria meaning is the one most commonly encountered inside Russia.

The word где means where in the sense of “where at?” or “in what location?” When used as a question word it rarely causes English speakers difficulties:

Где can also be used as a relative pronoun, assuming again that you are talking about a place something happens at:

The trickey thing about где is that it cannot be used when translating phrases that indicating motion to or from a place. That is, you cannot use it in translating sentences like:

For those meanings you need куда “where to?” and откуда “where from?”, which we will explore over the weeks to come.

We previously mentioned that 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 a couple quirks of дом, which means “home/building.” The standard endings of the noun are:

It turns out that there are actually two possible endings for the genitive singular after prepositions. One can say either «из дома» and «из дому», but they don't mean the same thing. The former means “(from) the building,” and the latter means “(from) home,” i.e., “from one's own home.” Notice particularly that when saying «из дому» the preposition is stressed, but both syllables of дому are unstressed. Here are some examples of the contrast:

The distinction works as well with the preposition до:

That last use of до дому is a bit old fashioned, but it lends a bit of elegance to one's conversation.

The most common word for four in Russian is четыре. If четыре occurs in the nominative case, then it is followed by the genitive singular form of the noun:

However, just as with the numbers два/две and три, if you put an adjective between the number and the noun, you don't use the genitive singular. So what for do you use? Well, that depends...

If you are dealing with masculine or neuter nouns, then you have to use an adjectival form that copies the genitive plural:

If you are dealing with feminine nouns, it is usually best to use an adjectival form that copies the nominative plural:

Here are some sample sentences:

¹ You will sometimes also encounter четыре красивых дочери, аlthough красивые is better style these days.