A website about Russian language, literature and culture.
It was a hot Siberian summer, about +30C/ 86F. My friend and I visited my grandmother in a rural locality in the Altai region, near the Kazakhstan border. My grandmother and three other grannies, her besties, took us to pick wild strawberries. We marched a few kilometres on foot, away from the village, and reached
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
Learning a new language is always a demanding task. There are so many things you need to cover, from grammar to conversation skills. The same goes for the Russian language, which has so many difficult segments we need to master. Those segments are writing, reading, listening, and speaking. Each one is challenging in its own
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!
