который – friend or foe?

Который is one of those Russian things that I find often trips me up when used as a relative pronoun.    For the uninitiated, который declines like an adjective and must agree in gender and number with the noun or pronoun to which it refers, but (and this is a really big but) it’s case is determined by its function within the subordinate clause in which it appears.

Don’t be so negative!

Leon Trotsky and Diego Rivera

Negation can do some unexpected things in Russian grammar.   This isn’t a complete list, because I don’t know everything. :-)  But if you have some more examples, please send them to me or leave a comment and I’ll add them.

Short Stories in Russian

I came across an interesting site, http://short-story.ru.   It has a number of excellent short stories, but what I really like is that in addition to classic Russian short stories by Chekov (Чехов), Gogol (Гоголь), etc.,  some of them are translations of stories written originally in English.  For example, they have stories by James Joyce (Джеймс Джойс), Mark Twain (Марк Твэйн), Faulkner (Фолкнер), Hemingway (Хэмингуэй), etc.  The only downer about the site is the menu is difficult to use.  When you mouse over the name of the author, a list appears of the stories (if they have more than one for that author) and I feel like it’s a struggle to get over to the list without my mouse losing track of the author.

Russian as Russians speak it

Here’s an interesting set of 11 videos from YouTube.  I believe that these were originally distributed on LPs.   Even though most of these dialogs use a fairly simple vocabulary, these make a great refresher.  These are well over 20 years old, made during the Soviet times, so you’ll hear some things that you might not hear today (like товарищ).   Some complain that “no one talks like this day” in terms of formality.  Perhaps that’s true when young people speak to young people, but older people still definitely use the formalities and if you are a tourist, you’ll certainly be much better off being too formal than too informal, in my opinion!

New film: Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession

I’ve added another classic Soviet film to the Russian film page. Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession (  Иван Васильевич меняет профессию) is a Soviet comedy film produced by Mosfilm in 1973. This film is based on a play by Mikhail Bulgakov and was one of the most attended movies in the Soviet Union in 1973 with more than 60 million tickets sold.

New movie: Операция „Ы“

I’ve added a bunch of new movies to the movie page, and the latest one is this:

Operation Y and Other Shurik’s Adventures (Russian: Операция „Ы“ и другие приключения Шурика) is a 1965 Soviet slapstick comedy film directed by Leonid Gaidai, starring Aleksandr Demyanenko, Natalya Seleznyova, Yuri Nikulin, Georgy Vitsin and Yevgeny Morgunov. The film consists of three independent parts: “Workmate” (Напарник, Naparnik), “Déjà vu” (Наваждение, Navazhdeniye) and “Operation Y”^[1] (Операция „Ы“).^{[verification needed]} The plot follows the adventures of Shurik (alternative spelling — Shourick), the naive and nerdy Soviet student who often gets into ludicrous situations but always finds a way out very neatly.

Operation Y and Other Shurik’s Adventures was a hit movie and became the leader of Soviet film distribution in 1965.

LibriVox

I came across a site…well, my iPhone came across a site :-) where you can listen or download audiobooks for free.    The reason they are free is that the readers are volunteers reading public domain books.  They include links to the text as well, so you can follow along.  And guess what!  There are Russian books there as well.

Once you’ve got it — how do you keep it?

Megan posted a kind comment, and made the point that even after one has learned a great deal of Russian, it can be difficult to keep it alive in your head if you are living in an English speaking culture.  It’s an excellent point.

More about же

Marina from http://onlinerussianlessons.com forwarded some other extremely useful examples of using же.  These are from www.lingvo.yandex.ru.

Online Russian Lessons

Marina

I wanted to pass along a pointer to a great resource for individual online Russian lessons (or English lessons for Russian speakers). Full disclosure: the teacher is my cousin Marina and I’m helping her set up the website. Marina is a native speaker of Russian and a language teacher by profession in her hometown of Daugavpils, Latvia.  Her site is http://onlinerussianlessons.com. I don’t make a dime from the venture, I’m just helping her to get established.  And you can bet that I’m taking Russian lessons with her! :-)

She’s also going to have a blog where she posts things like “Idiom of the Week”, grammar notes, and  other stuff.  That blog will be part of the site, and it has an RSS feed so you can keep track of her new posts.

Check out the site!  There is nothing to replace being able to practice conversation with a native speaker.  Marina is a warm, funny, patient person and a gifted teacher who really cares deeply about helping others to learn.  When you contact Marina, please tell her “hello” from me!  Передавауйте привет Марине, пожалуйста, от меня!