These are my articles about the Russian language – its grammar, word usage and more.
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
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
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
The question of why some words look suspiciously similar in Russian and English first arose when I started learning English at the age of 11. I was so puzzled by this fact that I asked our Russian teacher to explain the mystery to me, and she told me that many centuries ago, there was a
Any language has many words that have literal definitions but are rarely used in their direct meanings. For example, nobody means that you are fearsome by saying “you are awesome!”. In the Russian language, there is a word that may mean either excitement or huge disappointment in colloquial Russian, while its literal meaning “in general”,
Russian has many ways of expressing your affection for someone. One of the most common is adding a diminutive suffix to someone’s name. This is the way that loving parents address their kids, or close friends (usually girls, because it sounds really girlish) or lovers address each other. Mashenka (Машенька) – the affectionate form of
he first thing I learned about the German language was that all nouns in German are written with a capital letter. This rule puzzled me a lot, but nobody could tell me why is that. Probably, old Germans respected objects more than actions and attributes for some reason. The difference in capitalization between English and
The Russian language, like many other languages, has many words that derived from the names of geographical places. The French province Champagne gave the name to all sparkled wines in Russian. Though French wine-makers insist that only wines produced in Champagne can be called Champagne, in Russia the word “Шампанское” (Shampanskoye) became the label for
Outside Russia, Russian literature is associated with names of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. No doubt, these writers deserve to represent Russia in the global culture. But if you ask any Russian whom he or she thinks about when talking about classic Russian literature, you’ll most probably get the answer “Pushkin”. During last two centuries, Alexander Pushkin
