There is no common rule, unfortunately. You should take care of the verbs and nouns like "любить-любовь", "бежать-бег", "ловить-ловля", "спать-сон" "пить-питье" ... and hundreds of others. Normally the Russian nouns are not made by adding something, the way you do it in English, although some nouns are simply made of root + eние: "курить-кур(ение)". The answer to your question is in the Dictionary, not in the Grammar.

Никогда об этом не задумывалась, но вот что нашла. http://www.langust.ru/rus_gram/rus_gr08.shtml

Additional problem could be if you have a few nouns from one verb. For example, from "бежать" - "бегун", "беглец", "бег", "беготня", "бегство", "бегунок", etc etc. And each one has its own meaning..

Сидеть - сидение Учить - учение Читать - чтение Слушать - слушание Курить - курение So, in most cases you take a root of a word and add -ение. But you can not do it with all the verbs, for example, you can not make such a noun from the verb работать, because there is already a noun работа, other variants are not possible in this case.

There are three genders in Russian: masculine, feminine and neuter. You can usually determine the gender of a noun by its ending. http://aspx.italki.com/docs/385C17B4-EDD9-413F-A223-660E7D11182E.htm In Russian language the nouns change their forms and get different endings. These forms (and their endings) are called cases. The case of a noun shows what role a noun plays in the sentence. http://aspx.italki.com/docs/3598450A-E31E-4889-AAFA-346703E4D915.htm