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
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
What can be easier than the Nominative case? It is the basic, the original form of a noun, and its major role in a sentence is to be a subject. This is what I thought until I opened a Russian as Foreign language test guide (Требования по русскому языку как иностранному). Surprisingly, the authors of
The passive voice is a very convenient grammatical category. When something has happened, we usually can tell who did what, but sometimes, we don’t want to name the agents. We may want or need to report the event itself, but would prefer to shift our focus away from the actors to the action itself. This
If you are learning Russian, you might have heard that in Russian, word order is flexible. What exactly does this mean? To what degree is Russian word order flexible? And does it make Russian a bit easier to learn since you don’t have to memorize a specific word order for simple sentences and questions? At
Every time I start my car, a dash camera (yes, I have a dash camera in my car) says: “Starting driving recording”. This phrase drives me crazy, because to my Russian ear they are the three unconnected nouns! It takes me a second to build connections between the three words and figure out what is
