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 [...]

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

More about же

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

Read Full Post »

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 [...]

Read Full Post »

I’m listening, sir!

I started reading Anna Karenina in Russian, and was pleasantly surprised to find I could actually read it; well, 80% anyway, good enough for basic comprehension.   Clearly, I’m missing a lot of the subtlety, but you only learn this by repeated applications of Tolstoy.   However, I did run across something that completely baffled me, that [...]

Read Full Post »

что–то or кое–что, that is the question!

I was recently exchanging emails with a Russian pen-pal who wanted to arrange a time to talk via Skype, but was lamenting the difficulties because of the difference in time zones.  I wanted to say, “I can suggest something.” and I wrote “Я могу вам что–то посоветовать.”. He wrote back and corrected my Russian by [...]

Read Full Post »

Polysemes

One thing that I thought was pretty cool was to find out that глубокий means “deep”, as in “This well is very deep”, but also means “profound”.   I thought that this was a homonym, but Wikipedia implies that a true homonym requires the two meanings to be starkly different, such as “stalk” meaning the part [...]

Read Full Post »