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Tag Archives: animals

4 Russian Sayings With Animals Posted by on May 6, 2019

close-up of a mosquito

Russian has quite a few sayings featuring animals—you can see our previous post on this subject here. This time, I wanted to add four more expressions you can occasionally hear in Russian speech. Кот напла́кал Кот is a male cat (the female form, ко‘шка is more common to talk about a random street cat whose sex…

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4 Ways to Refer to Living Things in Russian Posted by on Jul 3, 2018

bunny

Do you know what to call that cute fuzzy creature in the woods? Read on to learn four ways you can talk about living creatures and what distinguishes each of these ways. 1. Животное Живо́тное is related to жить, to live. This word is a general word for “animal.” You can hear it in speech…

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Can You Name 10 Birds in Russian? Posted by on Apr 12, 2017

sparrow

One of the areas where have struggled to build up my second-language vocabulary has been wildlife. Perhaps because there are so many different plants and animals and because city dwellers only ever encounter a fraction of them, words for flora and fauna tend to fall by the wayside. Let us correct that deficiency by looking…

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Birds’ Rights And Other Animal Idioms in Russian Posted by on May 30, 2016

horse

There are a few idioms referring to animals in Russian. These idioms are used in colloquial speech and expressive writing to get the idea across vividly. На птичьих правах Права is, of course, “rights” (singular право). Птичий comes from птица, bird, and means “bird’s.” На птичьих правах means “without a lawful status or claim to…

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The care and feeding of pets (but especially rats!) Posted by on Nov 13, 2012

Может быть, вы думаете завести какого-нибудь питомца? (“Maybe you’re thinking about getting some kind of pet?”) But perhaps a cat or a dog wouldn’t fit into your образ жизни (“lifestyle”) — or your apartment. In that case, allow me to recommend the lovable серая крыса (lit., “gray rat”), commonly known in English as the “Norway…

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Ba-ba-ba-bird is the word… Posted by on Sep 12, 2012

A couple months ago, I did a post about an imaginary game show called «Назовите эту птицу», the object of which was to guess the identities of six feathered “mystery panelists.” But in writing the post, I had considered more than a dozen different birds before eventually culling the list down to six. And while…

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Cows, Pigs, Wolves and Dogs – More Russian Sayings Posted by on Dec 14, 2010

So in the last few days the news seems to be all about WikiLeaks and about the arrest of its founder Julian Assange. While Russian Internet gets flooded with Wikileaks-related «новости» [news] and «домыслы» [speculations], including far-out «теории заговоров» [conspiracy theories], Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is back in the news cycle as well (like…

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