The Russian word for first is первый. From the ending it's obvious that the word is an adjective. It is also a number, in a certain sense, and since it tells what order things occur in, we call it an ordinal number. Here are its endings:

Russians use ordinal numbers much more than Americans do. For instance, instead of saying “Here comes bus number one,” Russians say “Here comes the first bus.” Instead of saying “I live in apartment number one,” Russians say “I live in the first apartment.” For instance:

I don't mean to say that Russian always use ordinal numbers. It's also possible to say the same thing using the word номер, just less common:

Of course, other uses of первый are also possible:

Another meaning of выходить/выйти is “to turn out” in the sense of “to end up” or “to come of” or “to work out.” In this sense it is usually used in the perfective, and you encounter it particularly in the negative sense:

You can find this meaning in the future tense as well:

Previously we discussed how the verb нравиться/понравиться works, but we didn't mention when to use the perfective form. The perfective is especially used when you are asking about someone's first impressions of something:

The future form is also used:

Who doesn't love a good deal? And the best deal is when you get something for free or "бесплатно." The adverb бесплатно means "free of charge"; the adjectival version is бесплатный. Here is how the word breaks down: the prefix без- means "without" (and here takes the form бес-) and the stem -плат- means "pay." I love it when words make simple sense like that! But remember, just because we can translate the word as "free" doesn't mean it can be used in any other context. There is a different word for "free" as in "independent" or" available." I doubt many companies want to think of 4th of July as "Free of Charge Day!"

Here are a few examples on how to use "бесплатно:"

When I go to New York, one of my favorite places to eat is this Chinese restaurant where they have my favorite kind of deal on wine: "Вы платите за ужин, и вино бесплатно!" "You pay for dinner, and the wine is free!"

In English we often say things like “I like tomatoes.” To express the same idea in Russian we use the verb нравиться/понравиться, but the verb does not mean ‘like’. Before we discuss its usage, let's look at its conjugation. Note that it is a reflexive verb:

Нравиться literally means “to please/be pleasing,” so to communicate the ‘like’ idea, you have to mentally rephrase “I like tomatoes” as “Tomatoes please me”. Notice this is grammatically quite different than the analogous English sentence. In English the person experiencing the pleasure is the subject of the sentence, and the source of the pleasure is the direct object:

In Russian the source of the pleasure is the subject of the sentence, which means it appears in the nominative case. The verb, of course, agrees with the subject. The person experiencing the pleasure is the indirect object and appears in the dative case:

Thus when one person likes another, we can have sentences like these:

There is one last quirk. In the Russian sentence, the source of pleasure often (though not always) shows up in final position, just as in the English sentence, even though grammatically it is the subject. Notice that the verb agrees with the subject in the Russian sentence, even though the subject is at the end of the sentence:

Here are some present tense sentences. Notice carefully the case of each subject and object, and how the verb agrees with the subject:

Now let's look at those same sentences in the past tense. Note how the verb agrees with the subject: