Archive by Author
On Free Magazines & Expats in Russia Posted by josefina on Sep 18, 2008

As an attentive reader always on the look-out for some kind of text to stuff myself with so as to aquiere new, often wholly and fully useless, information I love free magazines. And that’s one of the pluses of living right now, in a time and place where journalism is in crisis and free magazines…
Word of the Week: трезвость [sobriety] Posted by josefina on Sep 15, 2008

«Только трезвая Россия станет великой!»[Only a Sober Russia Will Become Great!] Since I’m back in Russia I am also fully and completely back in the blogging game, now that I once again can catch the country of interest in her everyday activities, like for example this poster above. I found it on the wall of…
Безопасно ли летать в России? [Is It Safe to Fly In Russia?] Posted by josefina on Sep 14, 2008

It’s happened again. A plane crashed at 3:10 по московскому времени [Moscow time] right before it was supposed to land in Пермь [Perm’], a city with over a million inhabitants located about six hours west of Yekaterinburg, on the European side of the Ural Mountains. I’m quoting an article from the Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter: “All…
«Право на радость» [Entitlement to Joy] Posted by josefina on Sep 7, 2008
The success of Russian soccer players in early summer revealed to Дума [the Duma] the hitherto practically unknown problem of the average Russian Ivan being prohibited by law to wave the flag of the Russian Federation in any way he or she might see fit. During June this year, millions of Russians took to the…
Learning ‘Conversational Russian’ Posted by josefina on Sep 2, 2008
A good textbook often reads just like a novel. One excellent example of this is Helen Yakobson’s “Conversational Russian: An Intermediate Course” from 1985 [при The George Washington University]. Earlier this summer I found it in a box up in my mother’s attic marked “Russian books”, this pale orange and tattered little book of no…
Is The Russian Tradition «идти в гости» Dying? Posted by josefina on Aug 29, 2008
My last post may or may not have been a little too optimistic [the comparative got me carried away there for a moment], something I intend to make up for today with a more serious post on a gloomier subject. As I have to read my favorite Russian paper online these days, I stumbled on…
Let’s Go Grammar Crazy & Do Comparative! [или кое-что о сравнительной степени прилагательных] Posted by josefina on Aug 27, 2008
It has happened again, and this time it happened rather suddenly – I found something in Russian language that I haven’t given much thought to as of late but which amused me to such an extreme that I could not refrain from sharing it with you all. The other day I was browsing through a…