Elementary Russian: Thursday in the time of coronavirus... Вирусы! Пандемия! Кaрантин!

Some useful words... See, Russian isn't so hard... I bet you can guess the meanings of these words...

I'd teach you what the word отъебись means, but... I'll let this video explain...

Very useful word now, it seems...

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This unit has a lot going on. Three main concepts to take away:

1) The instrumental case, our last, and really easy... Nine times out of ten, it's preceded by the word "with" с: Мы с сестрой. Пицца с грибами. Паста с соусом. More endings... Spaghetti! You learned this yesterday in lab.
2) The FUTURE tense, which is really easy... Until it's hard. But, suffice to say: Russian doesn't really have a separate verb form for future. And, as you'll see today, the IMPERFECTIVE FUTURE is dead easy: We're going to eat pizza! We're going to hide in our room! We're going to bake cookies!
3) Aspect... Вид. It's essentially the grammatical practice of "subjective relationship to activity." In English, we have aspect, too: I read that book. I ate that cookie. I hid the pizza under the covers. I'll say more later!

Let's start with the future tense of быть, to be... Russian is weird here... recall that there is no PRESENT TENSE verb that means "to be":

• Я профессор. Я дома. Я в постели. I'm a professor. I'm home. I'm in bed. 

But, as we know there IS a past tense form of the verb, which is perfectly predictable (in its form) and used all the time:

• Был человек. Было время. Были однажды студенты на кампусе. Здесь у нас был один фонтан, а теперь у нас есть два фонтана! There was a man. There was a time.  Once there were students on campus. We once had one fountain on campus, but now there are two! 

See? Past tense, marked by gender/number. 

Now, learn the PERFECTLY REGULAR future... it's a first-conjugation verb, no mutations:

Listen as I read the conjugation:

View on Vocaroo >>

OK. Now, do this exercise:

Right? Easy. It's just a verb, and a regular one at that. 

Now, to form the IMPERFECTIVE FUTURE, which is super simple: Just the verb быть properly conjugated in the future (буду, будешь...) plus the infinitive. You are saying "I will to eat." Я буду есть. 

Listen to me read a few examples with eating and drinking. 

• to eat есть 
• to drink пить

View on Vocaroo >>

• Я буду есть макароны. I'm going to have some pasta.

Видите? The FUTURE is just a form of быть and the infinitive. Я буду пить кофе! 

А теперь... сделаем это упражнение!