Tag Archives: Russian language
Timeless Russian Adverbs Posted by bota on Aug 5, 2020
I’ll never pass up the chance to start a blog post with a poem by the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. This stanza is the beginning to a childhood favorite of mine, Руслан и Людмила (Ruslan and Ludmila) published in 1820, and it’s a great example of how to use adverbs of time in Russian…
Derivative prepositions (производные предлоги) and how to get them right Posted by bota on Jul 23, 2020
Prepositions (предлоги) are functional words that work together with nouns, noun phrases, and pronouns to show direction, time, and relation to other objects. Other wonderful blogs on this platform have covered prepositions (Russian prepositions of direction, prepositions of time, “в” or “на”) and provided great guidance on when to use them and even how to…
Working hard or hardly working: Russian sayings about laziness Posted by bota on Jul 14, 2020
Not sure if it’s July heat in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan that’s making any effort to do anything three times more exhausting, or the fact that I consumed triple the recommended amount of chocolate fudge cake for my birthday (you only turn 25 once, right?) — either way, I’m feeling like the biggest sloth. So, why not…
Твёрдый знак (hard sign): a case study in Russian language reforms Posted by bota on Jul 2, 2020
Last month we looked at мягкий знак (soft sign) and the rules that govern its proper use. In this blog, let’s explore the other unusual letter of the Russian alphabet: твёрдый знак (hard sign). Твёрдый знак “ъ” is the 28th letter of the Russian alphabet and similar to the soft sign, it doesn’t carry its…
Easy-breezy Russian idioms with “wind” Posted by bota on Jun 10, 2020
The Russian language is bountiful with idioms (фразеологи́змы) and there are a few particularly fun ones that use the word “ве́тер” (wind). Wind often symbolizes uncertainty, transition, and change. It also carries notions of emptiness and void since we cannot really catch it or hold onto it, but we can definitely feel its power…
How to sound Russian in less than 4 letters Posted by bota on Jun 1, 2020
An interjection is, ironically, a big name for the little words we use to express emotions. Here are five such utterances that have less than four letters. These interjections will help you feel and sound more Russian than saying babooshka over and over again (with the exception of Kate Bush, of course.) Эx [ˈɛx]…
Russian Skill Check: Can You Translate This? Posted by Jenya on Nov 12, 2014
Recently I found out that Russian President Vladimir Putin was ranked by Forbes Magazine as the most powerful person in the world; this was the second year in a row that he has earned this title. I decided that writing an article on the subject while weaving in some Russian sentences might be a good…