Archive for July, 2012
Greka and the Crayfish: The Sequel Posted by Rob on Jul 30, 2012
Last week, I offered some general tips on improving your pronunciation in Russian. One suggestion I overlooked: Reciting скороговорки (“tongue twisters”) can give you practice at distinguishing similar-but-different sounds, such as the hard and soft variants of consonants. For instance, the shortest Russian tongue-twister I know of is Пароль — «орёл» (“The password is eagle“)…
Speak Russian без акцента in just one month!!(?) Posted by Rob on Jul 25, 2012
Okay, maybe it’s not actually possible for a student of Russian to speak «без акцента» (“without a foreign accent”) in just a month — heck, I started studying the language in 1989 and I still haven’t completely gotten rid of my US-English акцент! But with the caveat that my Russian pronunciation is far from native…
Let’s Fake It Until We Make It Posted by yelena on Jul 23, 2012
(If you don’t feel like reading the entire post, skip to the end for a fun challenge) Writing for the Russian blog is, without any doubt, one of the most interesting and rewarding things I’ve done up until now. Not only do I get to better my English (how else would I learn the difference between…
Ennunciation Matters Posted by yelena on Jul 19, 2012
The person in the above video does not pronounce one of the letters, the Russian letter Р. But it doesn’t stop him since, as he points out, there are 32 other letters to work with. Don’t worry if you don’t understand most of what he says. He speaks so fast that even native speakers of…
A couple more words from the birds Posted by Rob on Jul 18, 2012
When I was working on last Monday’s “Name That Bird” post, in which a panel of six avian “mystery guests” offered подсказки (“hints, clues”) to their identity, I considered a longer list of birds but ended up cutting some of the feathered panelists just to avoid making the post too long. For instance, фламинго and…
If You Don’t Have Ozhegov Posted by yelena on Jul 17, 2012
A few days ago I was at a weekly чаепитие (tea party) with my Russian friends when the conversation turned to Russian books. After discussing how difficult and expensive it is to buy интересные и качественно изданные книги (interesting high quality of print books), we talked about books we all brought with us years ago…
Reading the Russian News: Opposition Protests Posted by Natalie on Jul 13, 2012
Доброе утро, дорогие читатели! [Good morning, dear readers!] Каждый день, я читаю новости на русском [Every morning, I read the news in Russian]. It is a habit I got into last year, when we had to bring a news story to Russian class every day. I am sure I have said this before, but…