Comments:

1. 

    

   Marcus:

   850 за гостиницу – как-то очень дешево.

   • 

      

     yelena:

     @Marcus Так это же гостиница типа хостел – то есть в комнате еще 7 человек 🙂 Дешево и сердито.

2. 

    

   Marcus:

   Еще: а спидометры разве расстояние в милях мерят, а не в километрах? Я вообще не слышал, чтобы кто-то в России использовал слово “миля”, никто и не знает, сколько в одной миле метров.

   • 

      

     yelena:

     @Marcus Это в России они в километрах мерят, а в Штатах – в милях (1,6 км = 1 миля, кажется). Так что здесь все быстро переключаются. У меня на машине как раз почти 200 тыс миль. Еще очень часто говорят вместо “миля” – “майл”. Пример “на моей машине всего двадцать тысяч майлов”.

     In Russia it’s kilometers, but in the US – miles (1.6km = 1 mi, if I’m not mistaken). So once here everyone switches quickly [to miles]. I have just about 200 thousand miles on my car. Also, you might here the word “mile” pronounced in Russian just like it is in English, but it gets declined as any Russian word would.

3. 

    

   Rob McGee:

   Totally Useless but Fun Stupendously Big Number

   десять дуотригинтиллионов also known as гугол (googol)

   I can think of exactly one “useful” (?) purpose for the number гугол, or rather части на гугол (“parts per googol”): when describing so-called homeopathic dilutions. For instance, the homeopathic remedy known as Oscillococcinum 200C theoretically consists of one part утиная печень (“duck liver”) per гугол^4 parts of water. (googol^4 = 1 followed by 400 zeros)

   Since the estimated number of QUARKS in the entire universe is only about 10^80 (i.e., единица со восьмьюдесятью нулями, “1 followed by 80 zeroes”), it follows that Oscillococcinum 200C is nothing more than water, and only has a placebo effect.

   In fact, you’d need to drink объём раствора, больше целой Вселенной (“a volume of the solution larger than the entire universe”) in order to get even a single “molecule of duck”!

   • 

      

     yelena:

     @Rob McGee I once had a very interesting conversation with врач-гомеопат (a homeopathic doctor) about this very issue. He mentioned something about молекулярная память (molecular memory) of water.

4. 

    

   Rob McGee:

   per гугол^4 parts of water

   By the way, how does one pronounce in Russian a number expressed with “scientific notation” (exponents)?

   Like, say, Avogadro’s number, which an American chemistry student would typically write as 6.022 x 10^23, and we could say it aloud as six-point-zero-two-two times ten-to-the-twenty-third-power.

   I’m pretty sure that the first part of it (6.022) would be written by a Russian as 6,022 and said aloud as шесть целых и двадцать два тысячных (“six wholes and twenty-two thousandths”). But the “times ten to the 23rd” part, I have no idea!

   • 

      

     yelena:

     @Rob McGee Rob, this would be шесть целых двадцать две тысячных на десять в двадцать третьей степени, so pretty much like in English. in this case, we skip the word “умноженный” (multiplied, times). Also, you might hear people skip the word “целых” (of a whole) and instead say шесть и двадцать две тысячных.

5. 

    

   Rob McGee:

   Avogadro’s Number

   I.e., the quantity of atoms in a моль — not to be confused with Avacado’s Number, which is the quantity of atoms in a “guaca-mole,” har-har-har… 😉

6. 

    

   mike:

   Fun with numbers!

   A linguist once told me that fluent use of numbers was the last feature you acquire in learning a language. I have known how to spell all the Russian numbers and even decline most of them 🙂 for some forty years but still have trouble parsing them in normal speech.

   Here’s a silly question for you… do Russian children have a method equivalent to the way English-speaking children count seconds? For example, in hide-and-seek we say “one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand…” to slow down the count so that it’s closer to a second.

   • 

      

     yelena:

     @mike Mike, what a fun question! I’m not sure about other Russian kids, but when I was little, my Dad taught me to slow down counting сто и один, сто и два, сто и три (one hundred and one, one hundred and two, one hundred and three), etc. He explained, that if I was to just say сто один (101), it wouldn’t slow me down enough and I had to add “и”.

7. 

    

   mike:

   I googled сто и один, etc. but got only one hit and it was for plain сто один in a poem:
   http://www.mari-el.ru/homepage/nataly/stix4.htm

   Wikipedia gives my example under its entry for ‘one thousand’. There’s even a word for the phenomenon — chronometric counting.
   http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/one_thousand

8. 

    

   Rob:

   Also, you might hear people skip the word “целых” (of a whole) and instead say шесть и двадцать две тысячных.

   Thanks, Yelena — especially for the info that it’s okay to omit “целых”. And, come to think of it, if you have future plans for other number posts, a short discussion of the vocab for basic arithmetic functions could be useful to people. Like, how would a math teacher ask, “What’s 365 multiplied by 52,” and how would a child ask the same thing in more colloquial language? Like, in English, we can use different terms like “minus” or “subtract from” or “take away,” but the last phrase is one you’d mainly hear in elementary grades, not from adults.

9. 

    

   Rob:

   And, incidentally, I just thought of one other number-related term that might be useful: the term for “even” (i.e., evenly divisible by 2″ is чётный, which derives from чета, an old word for “a pair.”

   Guessing how to say “odd-numbered” is left as an exercise for the reader! 😉

10. 

     

    Mark S:

    There is a podcast about math words (add, multiply, subtract, division, power, etc), №131 here: http://russianpodcast.eu/crbst_9.html. She gives this podcast entirely in Russian but everything is simple and well-explained.