Every student of the Russian language knows that Russian nouns have a singular form and a plural form. Many don't know that a thousand years ago those nouns had a “dual form” as well. The dual meant “two of an item”, whereas the plural meant “more than two of an item”. Thus града meant “two cities” and сътѣ meant "two hundreds" and сестрѣ meant “two sisters”. At that time the number дъва was an adjective that agreed with masculine dual nouns and emphasized twoness, and дъвѣ was an adjective that agreed with neuter/feminine nouns and emphasized twoness as well. So back then we had дъва града “two cities”, дъвѣ сътѣ “two hundreds”, and дъвѣ сестрѣ “two sisters”.

Over the centuries time/entropy/life disrupted all that beautiful grammatical symmetry. The "-a" form of masculine nouns often resembled the genitive singular, so nowadays the numbers два/две are followed by nouns in a form that generally coincides with the genitive singular form. The gender association of the numbers shifted as well: nowadays два is used with masculine and neuter nouns, and две is only used with feminine nouns. Here are some sample sentences:

The Russian word for chocolate is шоколад, which is a perfectly regular noun. Theoretically it occurs in the plural, but it is fairly uncommon to encounter the plural form:

In Russian sometimes people use the genitive form of a noun to mean “a small quantity of” or “some”:

Шоколад is one of those words that has an alternative old genitive form that ends in -у. Such a form is called the second genitive. When it is used in the meaning of “some,” we call that usage the partitive genitive. It's entirely possible that you might encounter a sentence like this:

Those second genitives are old-fashioned. You are more likely to hear it from the mouth of a Russian бабушка than from someone under thirty years of age.

When you go to Russia you will encounter all sorts of chocolate that you have never seen before. My favorite one this summer was this one:

The line беречь от женщин means “keep away from women.” I about died laughing when I first encountered it. I wonder what happens when you feed it to women? Perhaps they turn into gremlins?

Here are some sample sentences:

Previously we discussed выходить/выйти in the sense of ‘to exit, walk out of, step out of.’ Today we want to focus on a subset of those meanings. The past tense of the verb is often used to mean “to leave a place with the intention of returning shortly.” When used this way, it is often accompanied by the preposition на followed by a time phrase in the accusative:

Over time words change their meanings, and their meanings can change in several ways:

• A particular meaning of a word can be used less and less often to the point that many people don't know the old meaning. For instance, “charity” in English used to mean “love of one’s fellow man,” a meaning of the word that nowadays is not well known outside of religious circles.
• A general meaning of a word can be used more often in a more specific sense. “Charity” is again a good example, which nowadays mostly means “giving money to the needy” or “an institution that helps the needy.”
• A particular meaning can be generalized.
• A brand new meaning can be applied to a word with only the vaguest of connections to its previous meanings. The use of “mouse” in the sense of a device used to reposition the cursor on a computer screen.

And when a word is being used in a new sense, that sense is not usually reflected in dictionaries for some time. One such word that has a very common meaning these days that is not shown in most dictionaries is the word акция which can now mean "sale, special" in the sense of a temporarily reduced price. I was very surprised to learn this meaning this summer, because previously the most common meaning of акция was “a share of stock.”

Here are some examples of that usage from this summer. In this first ad if you buy малютка, then you get a free bib, so probably the best translation of акция is “special”:

In this next one if you buy Ryaba brand mayonaisse, you can win 10,000 rubles, so again “special” is the best translation:

This next one is a banner hung in front of a Пятерочка grocery store. Notice they've added супер to the word, so here we have a supersale:

The Russian verb that means ‘to exit, walk out of, step out of’ is выходить/выйти:

The verb is most often used with the preposition из and the genitive case to indicate the place from which the subject is leaving. Although the essential meaning of the verb is 'to exit,' it often sounds stiff to use 'exit' in translation. A good translation will substitute other phrases that capture the same idea but flow better: