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!

Же – Modal particles, part 2

In an earlier post, I spoke about Russian modal particles, and gave some examples from Using Russian by Offord and Gogolitsyna.  The cover of the book on the left is a link to it on Amazon.

In her Russian blog, Jen asked about the meaning of the modal particle же.  I thought I’d pass along some examples of the use of же from Using Russian.  Again, this book is an amazing resource, I highly recommend it

How could there be a sin in synonyms?

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pretty sick of having just one or two ways of describing a whole range of things.  Sure, хорошо is a handy word, and it is used all the time by Russians.  But sometimes it’d be nice to be able to be as little more expressive.  I was intrigued by a book on Amazon called Using Russian Synonyms by Terence Wade and Nijole White.  When I saw that Amazon had it on sale (right now it’s $40.60 marked down from $59), I decided that it was time to give it a chance. The photo of the cover on the left is a direct link to the book on Amazon.

It’s very nicely done, I really like it.  It’s filled with tons of great examples.  Be forewarned — it’s not for beginners.  You should probably be at an intermediate level before you leap into a book like this.  In another of my favorite Russian grammar books, they divide words into R3 (academic, highly formal), R2 (everyday, normal written and spoken Russian) and R1 (spoken, very informal, colloquial), and this book follows that style.

One of the words that I’m really tired of using is очень.  But it’s so incredibly necessary if you don’t have another way of saying “very”!  So, I turn to my new book to see what alternatives it has for me.

Poetry

I was chatting with one of my online Russian pen-pals the other day, the very cool and wonderful Alexandra “Саша” Sazanova.  We were chatting on Skype and she sent me a few childhood photos of herself after seeing all the old family photos I have on my family website http://dumes.net.  I remarked that she didn’t look like her mother, who was in one of the photos, and she said that she resembled her father, and further mentioned that her father resembled Mayakovsky.  I had to admit that I didn’t know who or what a Mayakovsky was — and soon became introduced to what is referred to as the “silver age” of Russian poetry. Some of the major poets of the silver age were Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, Nikolay Gumilyov and others.

One verb at a time

I’m always looking for new ways of studying, because I think you get in a rut otherwise.  In class, you get 50 to 100 new words per week that you try to force into your head long enough to take the test and then forget after 2 weeks because you’ve already had to force another 100 to 200 new words into your head.

This method may be ok for passing tests, but not very good for real learning!  So I’ve taken a break from active work on vocabulary for a while.  I’ve been reading Russian every day,  watching movies, listening to Russian radio while I work, and chatting with my cousins in Russian, and all of that has been great.  But I think it’s time to get back to adding in some vocabulary.  But I need to find a new way to do it that will be fun, interesting, and allow these things to go into long-term memory.