Archive for 'language'
Doing Business по-русски Posted by yelena on Sep 14, 2012
It’s the end of the week, so let’s do something fun. How about watching cartoons? Some time ago I found a cartoon on YouTube called Бизнес по-русски (Russian-style Business). Of all the episodes I could find, I liked Труба (Pipe) one the most. The story is of обычный россиянин (an ordinary Russian) who comes up…
Transitive and Intransitive Verbs Posted by yelena on Sep 13, 2012
Back in August Rob did a post about Russian анекдоты (jokes). One of the jokes went like this: – «Ну, и чем вчера закончилась твоя ссора с женой?» – «О, она приползла ко мне на коленях…» – «И чего сказала?» – «Вылезай из-под кровати, подлый трус!» – “So, how did your argument yesterday with…
Ba-ba-ba-bird is the word… Posted by Rob on Sep 12, 2012
A couple months ago, I did a post about an imaginary game show called «Назовите эту птицу», the object of which was to guess the identities of six feathered “mystery panelists.” But in writing the post, I had considered more than a dozen different birds before eventually culling the list down to six. And while…
Could I get a volunteer from the audience? Posted by Rob on Sep 5, 2012
A couple months ago, I agreed to do some volunteer work for my sister’s church. I’m not religious, but my sister and her husband are католики (“Roman Catholics”), and they requested some help making art for “Vacation Bible School” — i.e., a week-long summer program of religious education for children at the church, including my…
Do You Speak Runglish? Posted by yelena on Sep 4, 2012
If you are to search Google for a phrase “на каком языке говорит эта женщина” (what language does this woman speak), you will get более шестисот тысяч результатов (over six hundred thousand results). The above video will be at the top of the search results followed closely by articles and forum discussions, many – highly…
Dramatic poetry reading: «Багаж» (“Luggage”) Posted by Rob on Aug 29, 2012
I’ve been wanting for a while to make a video for the blog, but it took me a while to get over my camera-shyness — not to mention, fix some technical problems with my camcorder and figure out how to (sorta) use video-editing software. As my debut ролик (“video clip”) for the blog, I decided…
Time to Lighten Up Posted by yelena on Aug 28, 2012
What can be easier that learning Russian verbs? Russian adjectives, of course! And to switch gears, let’s choose лёгкое слово (easy word). In fact, why not talk about this exact adjective – лёгкий. To begin with, лёгкий might describe an object that is light as in Лёгкий танк весит меньше, а двигается быстрее, чем тяжёлый…