Borscht (борщ), a cabbage and beetroot soup, is known in many, if not every, Slavic cuisine. I wouldn’t be wrong to say that this soup all-Slavic. Borscht is delicious, nutritious and can be stored in a fridge for a few days without losing its taste. It actually becomes better the next day than on the
Every time I start my car, a dash camera (yes, I have a dash camera in my car) says: “Starting driving recording”. This phrase drives me crazy, because to my Russian ear they are the three unconnected nouns! It takes me a second to build connections between the three words and figure out what is
What’s the difference between настоящий естественный and реальный ? Could you give some example phrases to illustrate the distinctions, and some collocations? Настоящий – 1) real as opposed to fake. Это настоящий Хеннеси, не подделка! This is real Hennessey, not a counterfeit. 2) It can also be used an amplifier, similar to English ‘real’: Это
The Napoleon Cake also is known as mille-feuille, a sort of custard slice cake, and has been one of the most popular cakes in Russia for two centuries. As Wikipedia says, “the exact origin of the mille-feuille is unknown”, however, one of the versions suggest a connection between the name of the cake and the
When I was a child, I was an insatiable reader. I read everything I could get my hands on. Once I found the Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy and spent a couple of weeks reading that incredibly long novel. Of course, the book was in Russian, because in the Soviet Union, books in English were
We need goals. They navigate us through the chaos of life. They help us to become what we want to be. They organize us. If you decide to learn a new language, you have to set up your goals. The only problem is that more often than not our goals remain unachieved. Most people start
I often hear from students of Russian that verbal aspect (perfective and imperfective verbs) and verbs of motion are the two grammar topics most difficult to comprehend. As a native speaker, I can only guess how scary and confusing it can be when one has to choose which verb of motion to use and whether
I’m a German native speaker and I can’t roll the R at all. It really bothers me and I feel awkward while speaking Russian because it just doesn’t sound right. Am I worrying too much? One of my Russian teachers said that there are even Russians who can’t roll the R at all, but I
Have you heard about a language learning method called interlinear translation? I hadn’t, until recently. A few days ago, I got an email from Linas Vaštakas, a guy who runs a project – Interlinear Books for learning languages. In the project, they translate books for language learners in an innovative way, and they have recently
The first steps into a new language are the hardest ones. You know so little, you have to look up every word in a dictionary. You struggle with unfamiliar grammar forms, you can’t distinguish one part of a speech from another, and fail to recognize new grammatical forms of familiar words. It is so frustrating!
