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Best Russian Candies Posted by on Mar 29, 2013

You might be getting ready to celebrate католическая Пасха (Catholic Easter) this Sunday in which case you are probably too busy to read a long-winded post. So let’s keep it short and sweet. Let’s talk about конфеты (candies). What are some of the Russian alternatives for the candies you usually buy around Easter holiday?…

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Russian Phrases for Giving and Receiving Gifts Posted by on Dec 7, 2012

Image Source: asenat29 via Flickr! It’s that time of the year for many of us to give and receive gifts. Whichever you like most, let’s learn the Russian gift-giving vocabulary just in time for the holidays. Since it’s so much fun to get gifts, let’s start with the verbs получать (imperfective: to get, to receive)…

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A time to sow, a time to reap, a time to add fertilizer… Posted by 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…

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The right tool for the job Posted by on Sep 24, 2012

Once upon a time, when мы с товарищами снимали небольшую квартиру недалеко от Киевского вокзала (“some friends and I were renting a small apartment not far from the Kievsky train terminal”), the door on one of the kitchen cupboards got a bit wobbly, because a петля (“hinge”) was loose. Alas, although it was a furnished…

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Walking a Dog or More About Transitive and Intransitive Verbs Posted by on Sep 20, 2012

Last week I did a post about whether to use nouns in accusative or genitive case after verbs. If you missed the post and don’t feel like reading it now, here’s the rule in the nutshell: If a verb is transitive, then use the accusative case. If a verb is intransitive, then use the genitive…

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Ennunciation Matters Posted by 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…

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A Dumpling’s-Eye-View of Digestion Posted by on Jun 20, 2012

«Пищеварение, с пельменной точки зрения» We’re going to take a scientific экскурсия (“tour”) of the пищеварительный тракт (“digestive tract”), imagining ourselves as Raquel Welch and her fellow crewmembers aboard their microminiaturized подводная лодка (“submarine”) from the 1966 sci-film Fantastic Voyage («Фантастическое путешествие»). Passing the губы (“lips”) and entering the the рот (“mouth”), we’ll immediately notice…

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