These are my articles about the Russian language – its grammar, word usage and more.
Acquiring a new language is a long journey, especially if your mother tongue is significantly different from your target language. Russian is fairly hard for English speakers as well as for speakers of other non-Slavic languages. Yet, there are some tricks that may help you to improve your Russian almost instantly. Well, maybe “instantly” is
The Russian alphabet scares a lot of people off from learning Russian. This is sad, because the language itself is no more difficult than any other language in the world. Russian children have a little advantage over speakers of languages that use the Latin script, because Latin characters surround Russians everywhere – from vitamins, to
What can be easier than the Nominative case? It is the basic, the original form of a noun, and its major role in a sentence is to be a subject. This is what I thought until I opened a Russian as Foreign language test guide (Требования по русскому языку как иностранному). Surprisingly, the authors of
Hey! A fellow learner here. I was wondering if you have any tip or site to practice Russian pronunciation, especially words those with “щ”, the hardest Cyrillic letter to pronounce as I have read in some pages. Thanks for your time and help! 🙂 Hi! Pronunciation is probably the hardest part of the second language
The passive voice is a very convenient grammatical category. When something has happened, we usually can tell who did what, but sometimes, we don’t want to name the agents. We may want or need to report the event itself, but would prefer to shift our focus away from the actors to the action itself. This
I was wondering if you had a post or if you could make a post about emotions. I want to learn more ways to respond to ‘Как дела?’ than simply “Я хорошо” and such. If not, could you direct me to a place where emotions in Russian are listed? Спасибо! Hi! Here are some options
When I was a teenager, I explored the Western rock music. Among other old names, I discovered The Doors and Jim Morrison. Mind you, the Soviet Union banned Western culture in general. Most of the musical heritage of the West became available to Russians only after Perestroika. I sang along to People Are Strange, and
If you are learning Russian, you might have heard that in Russian, word order is flexible. What exactly does this mean? To what degree is Russian word order flexible? And does it make Russian a bit easier to learn since you don’t have to memorize a specific word order for simple sentences and questions? At
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
