Throughout 2020, when I talked with my family in Russia over the phone, I couldn’t understand what was going on there. Like many other countries affected by the novel virus, Russia set a lot of restrictions in response to the pandemic. The news from my hometown looked grim. The numbers of cases were frightening. Yet
Embarrassing Story When I moved to Canada, my fluency in English was confirmed twice by IELTS. I had been studying English for decades, since I was twelve. I had ten years of experience working in an international company where English was the only spoken language. I was pretty confident in my speaking abilities, when one
Synonyms are a blessing and a curse for language learners. How can a language learner know the difference between two words that mean the same thing? How do you know when to choose one word, and when to choose the other? Can they be used interchangeably, or does each word have a specific niche and belong to a certain context? I will try to answer those questions in this article, and I will share a few practical tips on how to make synonyms your friends.
You probably know that “each other” in Russian would be друг друга. What you might have missed is that друг друга should be declined, i.e. the last word should change its ending in different cases. Here is how to decline друг друга. Genitive case: Дети учатся друг у друга. Children learn from each other. Dative
In the previous two articles, I talked about Russian cases and how words agree in a sentence according to their gender, number, and case. With the cases, the hard part is memorizing all those endings. The concept of grammatical cases is relatively easy. Perfective and imperfective verbs do not create too much extra work for
Russian is a synthetic language. For linguists, this means that Russian connects words in a sentence with the help of numerous inflectional morphemes. For people who are not linguistically inclined (sorry for the unintended pun), this means that in Russian, words should be modified when put in a sentence according to what they are doing
Speaking a language is a practical skill, almost like driving a car or cooking. Understandably, most language learners want to start using their target language as soon as possible. When I approach a new language, I feel the urge to say something meaningful from lesson one. However, as a language teacher, I know that for
In this video, I explain how to tell time in Russian in formal and informal ways. The video was originally created for my patrons on Patreon. Subscribe to my Patreon to have an early access to all my audio and video lessons. Each new subscriber inspire me to create more lessons!
Each language has proverbs, those simple, concrete sayings that crystalize common sense. Proverbs are a genre of folklore. They were created by people and passed from one generation to another as an oral tradition. They reflect the values and unique experience of the nation, and being the accumulated wisdom of many, they are a big
Would You Watch a Russian Horror Movie On Halloween? It’s Halloween, and many people are looking for new horror movies to kill time during the night after filling their stomachs full with the traditional mini-sweets (have you noticed that those Halloween candies are getting smaller and smaller?). Supermarkets all across North America have been displaying
