Wisdom is meant to be shared with others. No piece of advice given to me proved to be so wise in regards to learning Russian as the one I am about to share with you today. Back in the days when I was biding my time in Sweden after studying one semester in Saint Petersburg and before heading out into the wild unknown in Siberia, I managed to spend an entire week attending classes in Russian Language at Gothenburg University’s Department of Slavic Languages. (Little did I know back then that I was to receive my Bachelor from that very same department roughly three years later without attending any more classes, but that’s a whole other story!) The professor who taught Russian grammar told us this during our first class: “If you’re only going to buy one book about Russian language while in Russia, let it be a «толковый словарь русского языка» [Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Language], and I bet you’ll never regret it.” I put his words to the test as soon as I arrived in Omsk and the first thing I aquired at the book store was a big green dictionary of some 940 pages by С. И. Ожегов and Н. Ю. Шведова for 220 rubles. It proved to come in handy so often that I brought it with me back home to Sweden, and bought yet another one just like it when I moved to Yekaterinburg, this time black and for 10 rubles less. If you’re going to Russia, be it for a short period of time or to study a couple of months at a Russian university, it is now also my most wise advice for you to bring one of these babies back home with you.

Well, some of you might be wondering, those of you whom I failed to convince so easily; what’s so great about this dictionary? Can it really be anymore useful than my ordinary bilingual lexicon (be it English-Russian or Korean-Russian)? Let me tell you a little bit more about the structure of this dictionary, and just why I find it so brilliant and versatile whenever working with a new text in Russian and translating its unfamiliar words. First of all it gives an explanation of every Russian word in Russian. Thus you will often learn a couple of words even when looking up just one single word. It contains all the usual good stuff of the bilingual lexicon – it’ll tell you on what vowel the stress is, if the stress moves as the word changes in different cases, or, when it comes to verbs, how to conjugate it correctly, plus what part of speech it is, and its gender (if you’re dealing with a noun that is). But in addition to all this it will also often give you idioms and customary phrases using the word in question.

Here are a couple of things you can find in the article for the word «любовь» [love]:

ЛЮБОВЬ, любви, творительный падеж. любовью, женский род. 1. Глубокое эмоциональное влечение, сильное сердечное чувство. [LOVE, love’s, instrumental case. with love, feminine gender. 1. Deep emotional inclination, strong heartfel (alt. deep) feeling.]

«Выйти замуж по любви (за любимого человека)» [Marry (about a woman) someone because of love (marry a man you love)].

«Любовь ушла, прошла, угасла» [Love went away, passed away (is over), burned out].

«Страстная, взаимная, безответная, платоническая, романтическая любовь» [Passionate, mutual, unrequited, Platonic, romantic love].

«Совет да любовь!» (разговорная речь) – пожелание благополучия вступающим в брак. [Literally “Advice and love!”, but usually translated as “May you live happily!”, informal speech – wish of prosperity to the newlyweds].

In case you’re not going to Russia anytime soon, or you’re just worried you won’t have enough room in your suitcase for all the vodka needed to bring back as gifts for relatives if you use up two pounds on a book, don’t despair – you can look words up in the same fashion online. I’ll give you two good links that are good to bookmark. The first one, «Большой Энциклопедический словарь» [Big Encyclopedic Dictionary], is very much like the paper version – just write the word you’re looking for and it’ll find it. «Словопедия» [‘Slovopedia’] is a little more ‘upscale’ in that it combines more dictionaries together, and will give you a more detailed description than you ever really need of any word that you’re looking for an explanation to. I always go for the last link first, but whenever that gets too confusing, I find my refuge in the first one. Or you can always go to good old faithful – the Russian Wikipedia.