To discuss sleep cycles, late-night observations, and patient demographics in a research lab, this lesson teaches how to express approximate times and ages.
Approximating Age (под + Accusative)
In Russian, you use the Dative case to state someone's age (for example, пациенту шестьдесят — the patient is sixty).
To say that someone is approaching or nearing a certain age, add the preposition под before the number. The number itself is in the Accusative case (which, for numbers ending in zero, looks identical to the Nominative case).
Approximating Time of Day
You can also use под + Accusative to mean "towards" or "approaching" a specific time of day, such as утро (morning), вечер (evening), or ночь (night). This is very useful when describing long experiments or overnight shifts.
Inside the Sleep Lab: Recording and Interrupting
Monitoring sleep involves specialized vocabulary. Key action verbs include фиксировать / зафиксировать (to record, to track) and прерывать / прервать (to interrupt).
You will also use important nouns to describe what is happening to the patient, such as фаза (phase), цикл (cycle), длительность (duration), пробуждение (awakening), and отклонение (deviation/anomaly).
Bringing it Together
When running overnight observations, you will often need to combine these scientific terms with time approximations to report exactly when an event or anomaly occurred.