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 is: “точно–с“,  “я–с“  and  “слушаю–с“.

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 saying, “Я могу вам кое–что посоветовать.” I had seen this кое–что a couple of times, and it basically seemed to translate to the same thing as что–то.  So I asked my Russian teacher and she advised me that it’s one of those very difficult things to explain. :-)  She said that you might  say, “Кое–кто“,  when you are talking to someone else who would know what you mean, but you don’t want to say the name — perhaps because you are in a room of people, so you’d say, “There’s a certain someone that likes you.” and in that context you’d use Кое–кто. Well — I sort of got it, but not entirely.

Russian Novels Online

Not long ago my Russian professor advised me to start reading some Russian novels, especially contemporary ones to be exposed to modern words, usage and ideas.   “But I don’t know enough to understand yet!”, I protested.   “Just read.”, she said.   “Should I try to read without a dictionary at first, then read a second time looking up the words I don’t know (which felt like all of them)?”, I asked.  “No, just read.”, she said.  I thought she must greatly overestimate my progress.   But I took her advice and started reading Азазель by Борис Акунин online on his website.

Modal particles

In Using Russian by Offord and Gogolitsyna (which I describe and provide an Amazon link for here), there is an excellent description of that various and sundry particles that appear in Russian.   These are tricky for students of Russian.  They provide a nuance to the language that English can only do by tone of voice or intonation.  Most of these examples are from that fine book, which include many more examples.

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 of a plant and also the act of following someone around.   It could be argued that “profound” could also be thought of as “deep thought”.  Wikipedia says:

Polysemes are words with the same spelling and distinct but related meanings. The distinction between polysemy and homonymy is often subtle and subjective, and not all sources consider polysemous words to be homonyms. Words such as “mouth”, meaning either the orifice on one’s face, or the opening of a cave or river, are polysemous and may or may not be considered homonyms.

What is interesting to me about it is that it is a polyseme in both Russian and English for the same things.  Another shared polyseme is тупой, which means dull, as in the edge of a knife.  But it also means a person who is dim-witted.

So I’m on the hunt for more words that share polysemetic meanings between English and Russian.   Each new word gets you a free word! :-)

Барак Обама

Josefina writes in her wonderful Russian blog:

But within Barack Obama’s name there is a strange task for the Russian system of cases – his first name is masculine, ending as it does on a consonant, while his last name is feminine, ending on the vowel a. In Russian thus Барак Обама. According to the rules of Russian grammar, we must decline his first name as a masculine noun, but his last name as a feminine one.

Short-form adjectives

I was reading through one of the Russian books that I used when first teaching myself Russian: Russian: A Self-Teaching Guide (Wiley Self-Teaching Guides). It’s very good actually. It got me to the point where, after five months of study, I could say to a gentleman in Vishki (the little town in Latvia where my grandfather was born), “Мой дедушка родился здесь.”, and he understood me and I could sort of understand what he said.  Anyway, I came across a section of the book that I remember not understanding at the time — and I still didn’t completely understand it.  I had to get a little help from my wife, a proud member of the Professional Organization of English Majors, because the section opens, “Short adjectives must be used predicatively.”   I had no idea what that meant, so I asked her and she said a bunch of stuff that I still don’t understand, but I think I get why and when I’d want to use a short form adjective.

Surprising Etymology of Russian words

One of the first Russian words that seems to be taught is пальто, perhaps because it’s a good example of a indeclinable word, though personally I prefer радио as an example.  My teachers have always said that it’s indeclinable because it’s a borrowed word ending in о and those are usually considered indeclinable, as are  place names ending in о like Чикаго or  Сан Франсиско.  Anyway, I’ve asked every Russian teacher what language and word does this comes from, and they all have said, “Я не знаю!“.  But thanks to Wikipedia, I have my answer.

Why learn Russian?

This is the first question I get when I talk with a native speaker of Russian, like I must be out of my mind to waste my time learning Russian when I know English. I listed my personal reasons for starting to learn Russian in my first post.   But beyond that, I really like what it does for my brain.   Sure, it’s hard.  I have a full-time job.  I have a 90 minute class three times a week.   I end up putting in 15-20 hours of study every week, most of it on the weekends because of the daily life of coming home, cooking dinner, etc.  I try to get in an hour or more of study in the evening, but by then my brain is shutting down and I just want to watch Iron Chef and relax.  I just can’t stay up late doing homework anymore. :-)

It’s time to talk about time

I’ve read that dates and time are one of the trickiest aspects to most languages.  It’s hard to imagine anything harder than verbal aspect, genetive plural and verbs of motion.   But let’s take a look and see just how tough it is to describe time on the hour in Russian.