Russian Word of the Day

The Russian word for tea is чай. Russians drink a lot of hot tea, even when it's hot out. They seem to have this theory that if you drink hot tea, then you sweat, and sweat cools you down, so drinking hot tea cools you down. Don't try to argue with the logic of that. They won't buy it.

In the States if you ask someone under 30 how to make tea, they will probably tell you something like: "Put the teabag (чайный пакетик) in the cup (чашка). Pour in boiling water (кипяток). When the water changes color, pull the teabag out." If they are tea experts, they might add, "Pull out the teabag as soon as the water changes color or the tea will turn out bitter." A Russian would just laugh at that. Yes, Russians have teabags, but making tea with them is a sign of incompetence. That's right: tea-bagging = incompetence.

So how do Russians make tea? Obviously you have to start with a чайник teapot:

You may notice that the teapot is not the same thing as an American tea kettle. The teapot is smaller. If you rotate it, then you see that it has a built-in strainer:

Here's how it works. You put a ton of tea in the teapot, then you add hot water. This makes a заварка, which is an intense tea brew. You then fill your cup perhaps one fourth full of the заварка:

Then you take hot water out of a tea kettle which has brought the water to a temperature so hot that even the animals around Chernobyl would be intimidated:

You then fill the the cup with the Chernobyl water:

You then let it cool down a bit, say for 1.5 days (полтора дня). Then you drink the tea. And that's the proper way to make tea.

Okay, I was kidding about the 1.5 days part. But they really do heat the water up über-hot, and you really do have to let it cool a while.

One of the words you use in Russian to describe where something is located is the adverb слева, which can be translated "on the left" or "on the left-hand side." When you get experience your first Russian-language tours in Russia, your tour guide will certainly use the word in phrases like this:

To express the concept "to the left of," you add the preposition от followed by the genitive case:

Although слева can be used to indicate location, the word can also mean "coming from the left" or "from the left" or "from the left side":

Every beginning Russian student knows that the verb быть means 'to be,' and that in the present tense the verb is generally not used, thus we have sentences like:

Eventually we learn that there is a second verb 'to be,' which is бывать. The -ва- suffix in Russian sometimes forms what we call a frequentative verb, one that indicates that the action happens on more than one occasion. Thus we can have sentences like:

The verb is perfectly regular, just like читать, so you'll have no trouble conjugating it. In terms of translation style, though, you may often find yourself making non-literal substitutions. For instance:

While that is a perfectly grammatical translation, it really doesn't capture what an English speaker would say in a similar situation. For a good flow it is better to substitute motion phrases and add some typical functional words:

The 'go' version works as well:

If you include some other adverb of frequency, then don't include the word 'sometimes':

As weird as this sounds, sometimes it's the English words in Russian that confuse me, not the Russian words. For instance, all over Kazan these days there are signs on restaurants that read Бизнес-ланч "Business Lunch." "What the heck is that?" I ask the locals. They look at me as if I am an idiot and say, "Those are English words. You should understand them." Well that's just it. I do understand them. In the US a business lunch is a lunch where you do business. It's not the name of an item on a menu.¹

Nowadays in Russia a бизнес-ланч is essentially a particular menu offered at a fixed price. No substitutions, please. I think the best translation for it may be "lunch special" or what some menus lable a prix fixe meal. One of the many restaurants in Kazan that offer such meals is called "Meat House."

My students love this place because you can get meat without mayonaisse or sour cream on it. What? No mayo or sour cream, you say? It can't be run by Russians then. You are correct: the food is prepared by Turks. I was interested in the meal represented on this ad:

They offered it for 149 rubles, which is about 5 bucks. I decided to try it. How well did it match the advertisment? You be the judge:

The drink is lemonade. The lentil soup could have used a bit more salt. The bread was good, but I'm not a fan of bread. The donair (Canadian spelling) is finely shaved chicken accompanied by rice and some cabbage, and the salad is made half of croutons and half of vegetables tossed in what the Russians consider a Caesar sauce, but it doesn't have the sardine flavor that an American Caesar Salad requires. Here are some sample sentence:

Business lunches, in the sense of lunches where you do business, are vital in the US. When I was preparing this blog-entry, I came across a business-lunch link from Microsoft. Apparently they consider it important enough to give some basic guideliness for the event. Read it here for your amusment.

One last grammatical comment: бизнес-ланч is a phrase that is currently in a grammatical no-man's land. Although most people decline it, as a foreign phrase it is sometimes not declined by others. The orthographic dictionary at gramota.ru treats it as declineable, so that's the best approach for a foreigner to use. In the case of the examples above, one of my current native-speaker informants sometimes declined it and sometimes didn't. If it disappoints you that the Russian language is sometimes inconsistent, then you must take advice from about 2 minutes 5 seconds into the sword fight in The Princess Bride: "Get used to disappointment."

¹ Well, this not necessarily 100% true. Probably there are some restaurants somewhere in the US that have "business lunch" written on their menu. My point here is that "business lunch" in the sense of a particular meal selection for a particular price is not a standard phrase in American English.

Image courtesy
of Wikipedia

One of the slickest aspects of Russian life these days are certain machines in public places that look sort of like bank machines, but their main purpose is rather the opposite: instead of disbursing money to the person who walks up, they take money from the customer which is then applied to bills. You can pay for your cell phone at these places. You can pay for your internet services. You can pay for water and electricity. You can sometimes even deposit money into your bank accounts through them. It's pretty simple. You walk up. Choose the service you want to pay. Enter your account number. Stick in some cash. Take your receipt. Voilà, you're done!

Officially such a machine is called a платёжный терминал "a payment terminal." You can find them in the subway. You can find them in the underground pedestrian paths under big streets. Heck, you can even find one at the 24-hour fast-food place not a block from where I'm staying. Despite the official name, sometimes people simply call them автомат "automated machine" or sometimes even more sloppily банкомат "bank machine." In either case, they are incredibly convenient. Payment via internet is still not quite as common in Russia as in the US, and it seems like everybody pays for their cell phones mainly at these terminals. Lots of services in Russian, like many cell phone plans, aren't fixed monthly sums. They are pre-paid services, and as your pre-paid account gets low, you need to go to one of these machines to add money to your account, otherwise they'll shut your service down so fast your head will spin. And mind you, young Russians these days send text messages like they were going out of style. I don't think a Russian under 30 can even develop a relationship without text-messaging, so you can imagine that these machines are a vital part of their daily lives: