Russian Phrases for Giving and Receiving Gifts Posted by yelena 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)…
Sweet Tooth and Sweet Table Posted by yelena on Dec 6, 2012
The New Year is не за горами (not far away). Have you put together your holiday menu? If not yet, then how about having сладкий (sweet) стол (table)? Don’t worry, you won’t need to perform miracles of confectionery mastery crafting a table out of sugar or covering your tabletop with ganache. What сладкий стол means is…
How to Tell Time in Russian Posted by yelena on Nov 29, 2012
Image source: wstryder via Flickr I always thought one of the most useless sections in my old English-Russian разговорник (phrase book) was the one that taught how to tell time. After all, years ago most of us wore часы (watches). But now that we rely on cell phones to tell the time, the topic once again becomes…
A time to sow, a time to reap, a time to add fertilizer… Posted by Rob 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…
Shopping, Lines and Discounts Posted by yelena on Nov 23, 2012
Image Source: crd! via Flickr! Today is the Black Friday in the US or Чёрная пятница. If you prefer to save, not spend, then ignore распродажи (sales) and instead learn how to talk about шоппинг (shopping) in Russian. SHOPPING By the way, the word шоппинг is a new one in Russian language. How did we manage to describe the process of…
“I am the very model of a conjugation paradigm…” Posted by Rob on Nov 20, 2012
As every student of Russian knows, learning verb conjugations can be a bit daunting. Grammarians claim that Russian has only a горсточка неправильных глаголов (“a handful of irregular verbs”) — but for a foreigner, there are countless verbs that might as well be irregular because of their conjugational oddities, even if a linguist would insist…
How to Count to a Billion in Russian Posted by yelena on Nov 15, 2012
Image source: Wikimedia Commons Do you know how to count to a million in Russian? Recently, we posted about counting до двадцати (to twenty) in Russian. And a while ago we talked about counting to 100. But суровая действительность (the harsh reality) dictates that we learn numbers well beyond the first сотня (hundred). Here’s why. Budgeting for…