The word for corner in Russian is угол. It means corner both in the sense of a street corner and the corner of a box or a pointy hat or a polygon. The о is a fleeting vowel, so it only shows up in the nominative singular:

Notice that there are two separate forms for the prepositional case. If you are using the preposition в or на to indicate location, then use the углу form, which is sometimes called the locative case since it indicates locations. If you are using the preposition о, use the угле form.

That last example shows a cultural difference. In the US we usually tell kids, “Go sit in the corner,” not “Go stand in the corner.” Russians usually tell their kids to go to the corner or go stand in the corner. In the old days the Russians even “ставили детей на колени в угол” sent kids to kneel in the corner, and sometimes they even had the kids kneel on gravelly stuff to increase the misery:

<sigh> I miss those days.

Although normally in Russian you refer to the days of the week using nouns like понедельник and среда, there is an alternate way to do it. You make an adjective out of the day of the week and then combine it with the word день ‘day’. It is not as common as simply using the nouns, but it is still possible. Here is a list of the nouns and their corresponding adjectives:

Note carefully that there is no adjectival equivalent for среда, and notice also that the adjective from суббота is soft. When translating the phrases into English, simply use the noun. Here are a few examples:

It would be a mistake to think that all the adjectives are equally acceptable. The phrase «воскресный день» is very common. The next most common is «субботний день». The others you will find in good dictionaries, but they are encountered very rarely. And why is there no adjective from среда? Hard to say. Sometimes in language you have to give up and say, “That's just the way it is.”

Previously we discussed день ‘day’ in the nominative/accusative singular. What about the other forms? Here's where it gets tricky. The -е- is a fleeting vowel, which means any time you add a grammatical ending to the stem, the -е- drops out. The -ь at the end makes the stem soft, but it also drops out when endings are added, and the endings are always soft, so the declension turns out like this:

Notice that except in the nominative/accusative singular, the д is immediately followed by н, which is tricky for us Americans to pronounce. It is a nasally-released soft [d]. In other words, you make the soft [d] sound, but then you let no breath out through the mouth, releasing the breath through the nose as you say the [n]. Here are a few sample sentences.

The Russian word for day is день. Since it is an incredibly common word, we are going to talk about it quite a few times. Today we will start with something simply. День is an inanimate masculine noun, so it's accusative case form is the same as its nominative form. That's fortunate because we mostly use the word in the nominative and accusative case. Here are some examples of it in the nominative:

You will remember that to say “on Monday” or “on Tuesday”, you have to use the preposition в + accusative in Russian. Similarly, to say “on that day” in Russian you say «в тот день» or «в этот день». Oddly enough, in English we usually leave out the “on” when combining it with “that day,” so in translation you will have to remember to add it in:

Previously we discussed the particle ли in its function of making yes-no questions. It has another function as the equivalent of the English word ‘whether.’ In English ‘whether’ always occurs as the first word in its subordinate clause; ли must always be the second item in its clause:

If the subordinate clause contains words like должен, надо or нужно, they usually come before ли. The next most likely word to come before ли is a conjugated verb:

Any other word/phrase can occur before ли if it bears the focus of the question:

Clever students will have noticed that this use of ли is a part of what we call “indirect speech.” Indirect speech in Russian and English behave somewhat differently. In English, when changing from direct speech to indirect speech, the tense of the subordinate clause undergoes fairly complex changes. For instance, considering the following sentences.

Note the tense of the verbs in the subordinate clause in the corresponding indirect speech sentences:

This change is called “sequence of tenses” by linguists. Russian does not have a sequence of tenses rule like that. Whatever the tense of a verb is in the original direct speech is the same tense that occurs in the indirect speech. In other words, in direct speech we will have:

Rule of thumb: when switching from direct speech to indirect speech in Russian, keep the tense of the original verb.