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The same-ish, yet kinda different… Posted by Rob on Feb 6, 2013
Hello, it’s good to be back! Я целую неделю лежал в постели, с всеми признаками гриппой. (“I spent the entire week in bed with all the symptoms of flu.”) У меня были кашли, насморк в голове, лихорадка, и хуже всего, меня постоянно тошнило. (“I had coughing, head congestion, a fever, and worst of all, constantly…
“So the lady says to the talking margarine…” (Participles and dumb TV ads) Posted by Rob on Jan 16, 2013
The title of the post is drawn from a list of “Stupid TV Commercial Cliches” that I found on a Russian humor site. I got a kick out of it because “idiotic advertising” has been a staple of English-language humor for generations, but in Russian, poking fun at consumerism is mostly a post-Soviet development. Apart…
“In eight o’clock of morning, at January 8th, on the 2013…” Posted by Rob on Jan 8, 2013
…this post are scheduled for to be auto-publishing’ed over blog Transparent! 😉 A Russian learning English might make these exactly these sorts of stereotypical blunders with English предлоги (“prepositions”) — saying “at January 8th” instead of “on January 8th,” for instance. But an English speaker learning Russian faces faces exactly the same problem of…
Vital vocabulary for (not) talking about religion Posted by Rob on Dec 26, 2012
Накануне Рождества (“on Christmas Eve”), I did my once-a-year attendance of a богослужение (“worship service”), more specifically a месса (“[Catholic] Mass“) — not out of personal religious sentiment but because my parents were visiting from Arizona. Also, being a неверующий (“non-believer”) who was not expected to kneel or креститься (“to cross oneself”) when everybody else…
A Russian fairy-tale with no moral whatsoever? (Plus: Bonus “Santa horror”!) Posted by Rob on Dec 18, 2012
Last week, I briefly mentioned a classic сказка called Два мороза (“The Two Frosts”) — in which the Frost Brothers (one with a blue nose, one with a red nose) attempt to freeze a барин (“rich man”) who’s dressed in furs and a мужик (here: “male peasant”) with a thin coat. (It turns out that…
Chill out! (Or, “is your refrigerator running?”) Posted by Rob on Dec 11, 2012
На прошлую неделю к нам привезли новый холодильник (“Last week, a new refrigerator was delivered to our place”) — потому что старый холодильник давно дышал на ладан. Literally translated, that’s “the old fridge had long since been breathing the incense”[i.e, the incense from its own funeral Mass]. Which is to say that it стоял одной…
A time to sow, a time to reap, a time to add fertilizer… Posted by Rob on Nov 27, 2012
That Ecclesiastes quotation (minus the fertilizer part) is traditionally translated from Hebrew to Russian as время насаждать, и время вырывать посаженное (“a time to put in the ground, a time to tear up that which was planted”) — though the familiar English phrasing we all know from the Byrds song can be directly rendered as…