Archive for October, 2019
Russian Spooky Folk Characters Posted by Maria on Oct 31, 2019
It’s Halloween again! This holiday is not as ingrained in Russian culture as it is in some Anglophone cultures—children don’t usually go trick-or-treating, and you won’t see many eerie decorations in people’s front yards (especially since most people live in high-rises). However, children usually learn about it in their English classes, and there may be…
6 Slang Words for Your Face in Russian Posted by Maria on Oct 24, 2019
It has recently occurred to me that Russian has multiple ways of referring to someone’s face, especially in a critical manner. Learning some common synonyms of лицо́ (litso, face) will help you understand colloquial Russian more easily because they come up a lot in informal speech. This post will use International Phonetic transcriptions for each…
Autocomplete Question: “Why Is Russian Life Expectancy So Low?” Posted by Maria on Oct 17, 2019
We are continuing our Autocomplete Questions series — these are questions that pop up in your search bar when you start typing. This time, I put in “Why is Russian…” and one of the questions read “Why is Russian life expectancy so low?” Let’s tackle this question in this post. Some Statistics First, how low…
4 Business Failure Verbs in Russian Posted by Maria on Oct 7, 2019
You might have heard the news that the Thomas Cook travel agency has gone under. The company had purchased two Russian subsidiaries (доче́рние предприя́тия), Intourist (Интури́ст) and Biblio-Globus (Би́блио-Гло́бус), but their management has assured their customers that the Russian-based companies would not be affected. This may be a good opportunity to look at some vocabulary…