A website about Russian language, literature and culture.
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
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
Duolingo is undoubtedly one of the most popular language learning applications, if not the most popular one. Cute and simple interface; gamified learning script; ongoing competition between users; learning materials given in small, chewable pieces; audio with pronunciation of the words; achievable goals — all that makes Duolingo a very attractive and addictive application. But
It is commonplace in pedagogy that the teacher should create a friendly atmosphere in the classroom so that students feel comfortable asking questions. Questions are important for many reasons: they help the teacher to see what should be explained better, what topics students haven’t comprehended fully, what issues students are struggling with and why. At
One of the joys that comes with learning foreign languages is reading books in their original language. Some people may even start learning a new language solely for this purpose; they hope one day to enjoy their favorite books in the language in which those books were originally written. It is easy to find a
