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Tag Archives: culture

Six Quintessentially Russian Concepts – Part II Posted by on Jun 22, 2016

man lifting weights

We are continuing from last week’s post on certain Russian expressions and underlying concepts that are specific to Russian reality. Нормально Нормальный as an adjective means “normal,” but it’s used in some unique ways. First, нормально is a common response to “Как дела?” (“How are you?”) Second, нормальный is used to express covert approval of…

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Six Quintessentially Russian Concepts – Part I Posted by on Jun 16, 2016

men armwrestling

See Part II of this article here. Every so often, an article will pop up online talking about culture-specific or untranslatable words in other languages. In this post, I will not be claiming that the words I discuss are “untranslatable” — yet they are used in Russian in ways that may not be obvious from…

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Dramatic poetry reading: «Багаж» (“Luggage”) Posted by on Aug 29, 2012

I’ve been wanting for a while to make a video for the blog, but it took me a while to get over my camera-shyness — not to mention, fix some technical problems with my camcorder and figure out how to (sorta) use video-editing software. As my debut ролик (“video clip”) for the blog, I decided…

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20 лет спустя – Twenty Years After, Part 1 Posted by on Aug 22, 2011

Well, «друзья» [friends], it has happened again: I sat down to write «про грамматику» [about grammar] and instead I wrote about something completely different. I found this «фоторепортаж» [photo essay] on the website of «магазин Внешняя политика» [the magazine “Foreign Policy”] called, in English, “Russia’s Big Backyard.” I have opted to translate the title…

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