The word for name in Russian, in the sense of “first name,” is имя. A beginner might assume that the -я ending means that the word is a feminine noun, but in fact it is one of the ten third-declension neuter nouns that end in -я in Russian. It declines like this:

If say, at the post office they need to know your first name, they might say:

But that is a really officious and unpleasant way to ask a name. Normally people will say:

Russian names often sound quite curious to the American ear, and of course Russians also have patronymics that complicate the situation:

Some foods you just can't do without. In the States it's almost inconceivable not to have turkey and mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving, or hamburgers at a picnic, or apple pie for dessert. If those foods aren't part of your life, by cracky, then you just aren't a real American and your status as a patriot is open to question. Among those foods that are inherently Russian, among those foods without which you cannot even conceive of a Russian upbringing and without which you cannot have a Russian soul is… сметана sour cream. The noun is a perfectly regular second declension noun:

American sour cream is not like Russian sour cream. American sour cream is adulterated with thickening agents to make it firm. If you remove the sour cream from its container, it actually retains the shape of the container… for a while at least.

Russian sour cream flows gently and smoothly, creamy and delicious, just like universal love flowing from the cosmic mind. Fresh and almost without preservatives, you eat Russian sour cream right away, not because you are afraid it will go bad, but because it is so wonderful you would never not eat it all. And like universal love, the Russians pour it over over everything: soups, pancakes, meat dishes, fruits, vegetables… Сметана can even be a dish unto itself. The cafeteria at Moscow State University used to sell glasses full of sour cream for direct consumption, some with sugar added, some without, and people just bought a glassful and ate it with a spoon.

And of course, let's not forget the medicinal powers of sour cream, especially in treating sunburn:

Since I'll be spending the summer in Tatarstan, it seems sensible to blog about the Tatars. They are a Turkic people who speak a Turkic language. A Tatar woman is called a татарка in Russian (gen. pl. татарок). A Tatar man is a татарин. In Russian there are quite a few words for ethnic groups that end in the suffix -ин. Those words have a grammatical peculiarity. The -ин suffix occurs only in the singular forms. The genitive plural has a zero ending:

Some sample sentences:

If you speak Tatar, the Russian word to describe that is по-татарски:

The Russian word for copper is медь. Just as in English it is mostly used in the singular. It is a feminine third-declension noun:

Some sample sentences:

You can make an adjective out of this noun by adding -ный to the stem:

There is a famous poem by Pushkin called Медный всадник, which literally means “the copper horseman.” Oddly enough, in this one instance we translate the title as “The Bronze Horseman.”

The word карлик by itself can be translated midget, dwarf, little person, gnome or Lilliputian.¹ In that sense the noun is animate:

The phrase белый карлик means white dwarf, in the sense of a particular class of stars:

When белый карлик means a type of star, it's best treated as an inanimate:

(If the word were being treated as an animate in that context, we would expect «белого карлика».)

¹ The words dwarf and midget, of course, are in disfavor nowadays in the US; it's more tactful to say ‘little person.’