The Russian alphabet scares a lot of people off from learning Russian. This is sad, because the language itself is no more difficult than any other language in the world. Russian children have a little advantage over speakers of languages that use the Latin script, because Latin characters surround Russians everywhere – from vitamins, to […]
Russian
18 Meanings Of the Nominative Case. Really?
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 […]
- Pronunciation
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Q&A: Practicing Pronunciation And Specifically Щ
Hey! A fellow learner here. I was wondering if you have any tip or site to practice Russian pronunciation, especially words those with “щ”, the hardest Cyrillic letter to pronounce as I have read in some pages. Thanks for your time and help! 🙂 Hi! Pronunciation is probably the hardest part of the second language […]
Passive Voice In Russian
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 […]
- Podcasting
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Пять минут. Выпуск 25
Привет! Вы слушаете двадцать пятый эпизод подкаста “Пять минут”. Это подкаст для тех, кто учит русский язык. Меня зовут Евгения Власова. Я лингвист, я веду блог ProperRussian.com и преподаю русский язык. Сегодня мы поговорим о снеге. А снег идет, а cнег идет, И все мерцает и плывет, За то что ты в моей судьбе, Спасибо, […]
When You Are Strange
When I was a teenager, I explored the Western rock music. Among other old names, I discovered The Doors and Jim Morrison. Mind you, the Soviet Union banned Western culture in general. Most of the musical heritage of the West became available to Russians only after Perestroika. I sang along to People Are Strange, and […]
Word Order In Russian
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 […]
Parts Of Speech
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 […]
What Do You Call Your Loved Ones?
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 […]
Russian Words Derived From Geographical Names
The Russian language, like many other languages, has many words that derived from the names of geographical places. The French province Champagne gave the name to all sparkled wines in Russian. Though French wine-makers insist that only wines produced in Champagne can be called Champagne, in Russia the word “Шампанское” (Shampanskoye) became the label for […]