To everything (Turn, turn, turn!)… Posted by Rob on Sep 19, 2012
♪♫ …there is a season (Turn, turn, turn!): A time to sow, A time to reap, A time for war, A time for peace, A time to learn confusing Russian verbs with an indecent number of syllables, A time to say “Фиг с этим!” and study Esperanto instead…♪♫ Hi, everybody — can you guess what…
«Икра» (“caviar”) without any fish eggs! Posted by Rob on Sep 17, 2012
In this video post, I’m gonna play “Julia Child” and walk you through the recipe for one of my favorite Russian hors d’oeurves — баклажанная икра, or “eggplant caviar,” which is essentially a chunky version of Middle Eastern babaganoush. In fact, the word баклажан (“eggplant; aubergine”) is itself from the Middle East, and was borrowed…
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…
When You Must Contradict Posted by yelena on Sep 6, 2012
This is in case your child says не хочу (don’t want to) a bit too often. Sometimes even the most cheerful and positive of us встают не с той ноги (get up on the wrong side of a bed). Or maybe it is the right side of the bed, but then something happens during the…
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…