My first lesson about Russian grammar

I dusted off the copy of the New Penguin Russian Course I bought a couple of years ago and decided to start reading up on Russian grammar, a full 4 months after my decision to acquire Russian with a Comprehensible Input / Mass Immersion Approach.

I quickly skipped the first two chapters which cover how to read the Cyrillic script and encountered the first grammar lesson in chapter 3.

1. There is no present tense of 'to be' ('am', 'is', 'are')

2. No equivalent of the articles 'a' and 'the'

3. The word это has multiple meanings, including 'this', 'that' and sometimes 'it'

4. All Russian nouns are either masculine (он), feminine (она) it (оно) or neuter.

5. Masculine nouns normally end with a consonant or й.

6. Feminine nouns normally end with a or я. Although words that specifically denote men are masculine. 

7. Neuter nouns end with o or e.

8. Most nouns ending with ь are feminine but there are masculine words with that ending as well. 

9. If a noun ends with и, y or ю it is likely to be a foreign loan word which is neuter.

10. Foreign words that denote women, no matter their spelling are female.

11. When something has been named, subsequently any referrals to it as 'it' will become gendered. он, она or оно.

I already knew the first four points and learned 5 and 6 through my vocabulary studies over the past couple of months (the Anki deck sometimes points out when a word is masculine or feminine). Points 7 to 10 are new to me, while 11 is something I also started noticing.

I took me 3 minutes to read through these rules... and for me that's enough grammar for one day!