Tag Archives: Russian for beginners
“In eight o’clock of morning, at January 8th, on the 2013…” Posted by Rob on Jan 8, 2013
…this post are scheduled for to be auto-publishing’ed over blog Transparent! 😉 A Russian learning English might make these exactly these sorts of stereotypical blunders with English предлоги (“prepositions”) — saying “at January 8th” instead of “on January 8th,” for instance. But an English speaker learning Russian faces faces exactly the same problem of…
Chill out! (Or, “is your refrigerator running?”) Posted by Rob on Dec 11, 2012
На прошлую неделю к нам привезли новый холодильник (“Last week, a new refrigerator was delivered to our place”) — потому что старый холодильник давно дышал на ладан. Literally translated, that’s “the old fridge had long since been breathing the incense”[i.e, the incense from its own funeral Mass]. Which is to say that it стоял одной…
“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…
“Dreamin’ is free…” Posted by Rob on Oct 10, 2012
So goes a line from an old Blondie song — you could translate it as можно видеть сны бесплатно (“one pays nothing to dream”). And “dreams” are the theme for today, because позавчера мне снился странный-престранный сон. (“The day before yesterday I had an oh-so-strange dream.”) Although maybe кошмар, “nightmare,” would be more apt! Во…
Прогулка по лесу (or, “A bit o’ botany”) Posted by Rob on Oct 8, 2012
На прошлой неделе, я сидел с племянником (“Last week, I was babysitting my nephew”) and since the weather was nice, he wanted to прогуляться в лесу (“to go for a stroll in the forest”). And a прогулка по лесу (“walk through the woods”) actually offers a great opportunity for Russian vocabulary practice: not only learning…
“Sit down, stand up, lie, lay, lain!” (Verbs of Position) Posted by Rob on Oct 3, 2012
[Note: My original post made a few errors with prepositions and noun cases that have now been fixed!] I think I’ve mentioned that my first-year college Russian textbook illuminated the verb лежать included the grimly Dostoyevskian example sentence: Труп лежит на полу. The corpse is lying on the floor. Well, that’s one verb I’ll…
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…