Yes,I want more examples. Right now, I don't get that rule.

In my writing exercises I use British English spelling rules, that's why I wrote "neighbour" instead of "neighbor"

In this joke the main point is that, if all other consider you as a stupid person, they are make a huge mistake. You are right, they are always not!

In one of my previous writing exercise "Shark-eat-shark world" I were given a similar peace of advice. In Russian we tend to write more longer sentences, so I'm going to pay more attention on this part of my grammar.
Thanks for helping me out with it.

Sure. Try to think about what the main topic of the phrase is. With "joke translation" the main topic is the translation itself, so you don't need to use the plural form of "joke".

But, if the main topic is the jokes themselves, not the translation of them, you use the correct form of the noun, in this case, since there are a number of them, "jokes".

(As I think about this, a better title for this would probable be "Jokes Translated", because the main point is the jokes, not the translation of them.)

As another example, let's think about singing. If you wanted to write about how to sing in general you could use "song singing" -- the focus is the singing, not the songs. But it you were going to list the songs, or talk about what happened when you did sing them, "songs sung" would be better phrasing.

But, in most cases, I wouldn't say "song singing", I would say "singing songs". And I wouldn't say "joke translation" if I were talking about how to translate jokes, I would say "translating jokes". Either one is fine, but the first example of each sounds much more academic; the second just feels much more natural to me for more casual speech.

Things like this are what we call "noun phrases" in English -- multiple words that serve the purpose of a single noun. I guess if I were going to state it as a simple rule you could try to remember, it would be something like: "If the noun goes first in a noun phrase, use the singular. If a verb goes first, use the plural".

I've just come up with this as I've written this for you. It's almost certainly not going to cover all cases, because English is a frustratingly complex and inconsistent language, but it will probably get you close.

I hope this helps a bit more.

Ah, that is fair! I'm a yank so I naturally corrected it to my native spelling, but you're absolutely correct that "neighbour" is also acceptable. Sorry about that one. :)

OK. I might phrase that something more like "If everyone thinks you're the stupidest person in the room, you might be the smartest". It still doesn't feel "jokey" to me, so it probably still works better in Russian than in English, but it's clear what you're trying to say that way.

You bet, I love helping folks with English. :)

You're right.
English language could be extremely frustrating and inconsistent, but by learning it I open for myself the complicity of English speaking world thought books, movies, art, and I like it!

Out of curiosity, how consistent is Russian spelling and pronunciation? It is like English, where even if you know what a word sounds like you can have no idea how to spell it, or more like Spanish where just looking at a word you almost always know exactly how to pronounce it?

I have a friend from India whose native tongue is like Spanish in that regard. He told me when he first learned as a child that we have "spelling bees" in English, that we actually have *contests* to see who can remember how to spell a word, it blew his mind.

I'm learning Dutch right now, which isn't totally consistent in pronunciation, but is much more so than English. Instead, I need to remember the seemingly totally arbitrary way that plurals are formed. Some end in "en", some end in "s", and it's not always immediately apparent which should be which. There are some general rules, about seven of them, which can help you decide, but there are also plenty of exceptions to those.

And of course there's grammatical gender, which I know is very common in other western languages, but feels *completely* useless and unnecessary to me as an English speaker. :D At least Dutch only has two.

I've seen "spelling bees" *contests* in some movies.
In Russian we have only some differences in spelling and pronunciation, but mostly it pretty straightforward.
But we do have another parts of language that foreigners have difficulties with.
Six cases, verbs - perfective/imperfective, verb prefixes and suffixes, aspect especially for verbs of motion. I'm sure there are a lot of things that Russian-learners don't get on the fly.
I think that every language has its own hardest and easiest parts, but all in all they are in some kind of balance.
And , by the way, in Russian three gender; masculine, feminine, and neuter (neutral). :-)

Yeah. Russian is definitely one of the harder ones for English speakers to learn, although definitely not the hardest. The Foreign Service Institute, an American organization that supports language learning amongst our diplomats, has an interesting list that categorizes the relative difficulty of different languages from English. Russian is in category 4 out of 5, with 5 being the hardest. The only things in category 5 are Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. It's at https://www.atlasandboots.com/foreign-service-institute-language-difficulty/ if you're curious.

It is fine to spell "neighbour" with a "u" – this is the British spelling. Americans do not include a "u", but both are acceptable!