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 дом, which means “home/building.” As a noun it occurs in all six cases in the singular and plural:

Since it is a noun, it can be used with prepositions:

Of course, the noun can also be used without prepositions:

Свобода is the Russian word for freedom or liberty. When my family immigrated to America over 20 years ago, it was in search of exactly that; and when we moved to New York, we got to see one of the biggest symbols dedicated to being free.

The adjectival form of свобода is свободный. It is often used in the sense of “available/free.” When you are asking whether someone is free/avaialable for consultation, you usually use the short forms of the adjective, namely свободен, свободна, свободно and свободны:

Just remember that even though the English translation for свободный is "free" it's not to be confused with бесплатно, meaning "free of charge.

They say diamonds are a girl's best friend. The Russian word for this girl's multifaceted best friend is бриллиант or in the plural бриллианты. Doesn't the word just sound so shiny and, well, brilliant?

As with many Russian words, there is a way to refer to small diamonds — бриллиантик or бриллиантики.

For example:

Over the course of history there have been many beautiful and revered diamonds. My favorite is The Shah. It is originally from India and weighs 88.7 carats. The first three owners of the rock engraved their signatures on it. Eventually, as a show of diplomacy, Persia gifted it to Tsar Nicholas I.

The Russian word for city is город. It has one of the many nominative plurals that end in a stressed -а, which means all the rest of the plural forms will also be end-stressed:

The writer Толстой had an axe to grind against cities. I believe he thought that when people lived in cities, relationships decayed and moral issues became compromised. When they lived outside of the city, relationships had the potential to be healthy. Let's continue that thought with our example sentences:

If you look up the word котлета in some Russian-English dictionaries, you will find the word cutlet as a translation. If you do, take your black pen and cross that line of the dictionary out. In modern American English a cutlet is a piece of meat, but it is NEVER ground meat.¹ In Russian котлета means a patty of ground meat.

You can have all sorts of ground meat patties, of course, from all sorts of animals:

Ground meat patties are very common in Russian cafeterias and on the table in Russian homes. Here are some sample sentences:

¹ If you look at certain dictionaries, e.g. the current definition of cutlet at dictionary.com (mirror) includes something like “a flat croquette.” That is not a current meaning of the word in the US.

² Although “fish patties” is a perfectly grammatical phrase in English, I don't think I've ever had a fish patty in the US in my entire life. The phrase sounds bizarre to the average American ear.