A website about Russian language, literature and culture.
If you ask language learners what the hardest part of acquiring a new language is, many of them will probably say, “Building a decent vocabulary so that I stop sounding like a four-year-old.” Adult learners usually experience fewer problems with conceptualization and understanding the structure and grammar rules than kids, but memorizing new words and
The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries is a nonfiction book written by two Russian journalists, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. The authors examine the history of surveillance technologies in Russia, from the very early years of the telecommunication industry to the era of social media. The book
Office Affair, a classic Soviet film, has been truly popular for over four decades. It became a hit right away, and has remained one of the most beloved movies for generations. It truthfully displayed the real life and actual problems of people in Brezhnev’s Era of Stagnation, and this is one of the reasons it became so popular. For the very same reason, viewers from other countries and even younger Russians may miss the hints and hidden jokes that make this movie not just a romantic drama, but also a brilliant, sparkling comedy. In this article, I’ll try to explain the secret language of the Office Affair to you so that you could understand the film better and enjoy it in full.
This is the third part of the series of articles about international students in Russia. Twelve people who went to study in Russia responded to my call and shared their experience with the readers of this blog. In the first article, they spoke about the language barrier and how they picked up the language by
This is the second part of the article about international students who chose to study in Russia. In the first part, my respondents talked about the language barrier and shared their thoughts about learning Russian in Russia. Language is just one aspect of being a stranger in a strange land. Language is a part of
According to the official Russian statistics, in the academic year 2019-2020, the number of international students in Russia was slightly short of 300,000 people. This is almost twice as many as in 2010. The most recent statistic is unavailable, because of “damn ‘rona”, but, most likely, the trend will persist for the next few years.
When people learn that I am originally from Siberia, they often ask me, “How is it even possible to survive the weather that cold? How do you guys live there? How can anybody live in that climate?” In this article, I’ll answer these and many other related questions. But first, let me explain what “cold”
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
