Russian Language Blog

Russian has a few fun sayings for talking about getting your hopes up—and getting them crushed. Let’s look at three of them with examples and explanations. 1. Гу́бы раската́ть Гу́бы is the plural of губа́, lip. Раската́ть is related to ката́ть and means “to roll out.” So, all together, this saying means “to roll out…

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With obesity being a worldwide problem, people are talking about the importance of eating healthy. However, it often comes up during cross-cultural encounters that different cultures have different ideas of what makes a healthy diet. Even though it’s impossible to generalize the preferences of an entire country, there are some common themes that come up…

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The Russian alphabet is one of the first challenges a prospective student runs into. We have posted some advice for learning the alphabet on this blog, but if you don’t know where to start, start with the vowels. Learning to read and pronounce Russian vowels is a manageable task that has many benefits. Only 10…

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There are certain brands that have widely recognized in Russia, in large part thanks to their clever—or ridiculous—advertising. Of course, this list will vary for different people, but I’d like to share, in no particular order, some famous Russian food brands. Note that when I say “Russian,” I mostly mean “widely known and marketed in…

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You might have noticed that, to talk about physical sensations or afflictions in Russian, you often use an impersonal construction, where the person not feeling well is technically not the subject of the sentence. Here are some of the most common patterns for these sayings. Dative noun + predicative expression First, what’s a predicative expression?…

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