Helping those who study Russian.
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!
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
Pelmeni (plural, пельмени in Russian) are dumplings consisting of a filling wrapped in thin, unleavened dough. The typical filling for pelmeni is minced meat with chopped onion, salt, and pepper. According to a legend I’ve heard, pelmeni was the favorite food of postal coachmen and hunters who had to cross endless snowy Siberian steppes. Sometimes
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”,
“There is a large Russian community in my city, and I have made friends with some Russians. We meet on weekends and chat. We talk a lot. But all we do is talk. Nobody corrects my mistakes, and I don’t feel that I’m making any progress,” one of my students once complained. His Russian was
I’m a great supporter of online education. The Internet opens literally unlimited opportunities, for example, everyone can learn any language for free or next to free, while staying at home. Once I had an online lesson with an English-speaking student who had managed to learn Russian by himself. He did a really great job. He
My dear readers, let me share with you a story of persistence, struggle, and success. A true story from my teaching experience. I hope, it will inspire you. I hope, you’ll find something here that will help you to accelerate your progress. I have been teaching Russian for three years only, yet I’m very proud
Early in the morning today I called my parents in Siberia (we have 12 hours time difference, so it’s not that hard to figure out what time it is there). I’ve been living in Ontario’s southernmost city since September 2011, but I still remember what Siberian winters are like. And the talk with my mom
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
