Russian Word of the Day

Russian has two words for zero, and they are ноль and нуль. For most purposes they are completely interchangeable and decline like this:

You will most encounter these words is when reading phone numbers out loud. In the US one usually reads phone numbers out loud digit by digit:

In Russia they usually break up a seven-digit number into groups of 3-2-2, and you say ноль only when the zero is the first unit in a group of two or three digits, thus:

(The first zero is pronounced as ноль, and the second zero is understood as part of девяносто.)

In the US most people do not refer to the time of day using the twenty-four hour clock (“military time”) unless they have served in the military or are engaged in precise time-keeping functions, but in Russia all official schedules are posted in twenty-four time, so the phrase «ноль часов ноль минут», which means literally “zero hours zero minutes” and can be translated “oh zero hundred” in military parlance, sounds perfectly normal to an average Russian. You can even hear the phrase in the song «В ноль часов и ноль минут» “At midnight,” which is a cute little tune about how hard it is as a child to stay awake all the way till midnight on New Year's Eve. Click the title of the song just above to hear it. Do listen to it. It's charming.

After two weeks of studying Russian every student knows that не means not. Thus «Я не говорю по-русски» means “I do not speak Russian.” Seems pretty simple. Nonetheless, не can sometimes be misleading because Russians often use не in offers/suggestions to make them softer, more polite, less pushy. Consider the following sentences and translations:

Notice that none of the English translations have ‘not’ in them. The не in the Russian sentence simply makes the request a bit more polite, and therefore the best translation of such sentences often contains could or would in them.

Notice that a beginner might be tempted to translate «Не хочешь чая?» as “Don't you want some tea?” That would be a bad translation. When an English speaker asks “Don't you want some tea?”, he is asking because he is surprised that the other person doesn't seem to want tea.

The verb стоять means “to stand”:

In the “stand” meaning it's used pretty much like one would expect:

The Russians use the verb стоять much more than English speakers use the word “to stand.” Very often if an object is stationed somewhere in a vertical position, the Russians will use it where an English speaker will simply use the verb “to be”:

The command form is often used in the sense of “stop” or “don't move”:

Злой is an adjective that beginners trip over for several reasons. First off, it is so short that it looks funny and they can't really believe that it's not longer:

Very often beginners memorize the word as meaning “wicked.” That's true as far as it goes:

However the word very often just means “mean” or “angry”:

The Russian word for Christmas is Рождество, which comes from the verb родить “to give birth.” Here we have the text of the angels' message to Joseph (Matt 1:18-21). The text on the left is from the Russian Synodal Bible, which uses pre-revolutionary spelling. The text on the right is from the King James Bible.

The word for not in Russian is не. It can be used to negate nouns, verbs, prepositional phrases, and most other parts of speech:

When you want to contrast something by first saying what it is not, you then use the conjunction «а» to introduce the thing it is:

When не negates a verb, it is pronounced with the verb as a single word and is almost always unstressed, which means it's pronounced [ни] not [не]. Thus «я его не знаю» “I don't know him” is pronounced [я йиво низнаю]. There are a few exceptions where the не becomes stressed when negating a verb, and of those it's particularly important to know that when the past tense of быть is negated, the не becomes stressed and the быть form becomes unstressed. This happens in all past быть forms except the feminine:

The word я ‘I’ is a personal pronoun that declines like this:

In American English there are a couple of problems with the word ‘I.’ First off, in conversational English we often say ‘me’ where we should say ‘I’ in the literary language. Thus kids often say things like “Me and John went to the store” or “It's me” when theoretically we should say “John and I” or “It is I.” The Russians never make that mistake. They always use subject/nominative form in the right place:

Other examples:

¹ Although this sentence is theoretically okay, the Russians usually say it differently. We'll address the better usage in an upcoming entry on the word мы.
² Although theoretically one should say “It is I” in this context, no normal American will do so. Only pedants say “It is I.”

The word он is a personal pronoun that declines like this:

The «н» versions of the pronoun occur when the pronoun is the object of a preposition.

Он refers to masculine singular nouns, which can be either people or things, so sometimes it is translated as he/him, and sometimes it is translated as it. In other words, if you are refering to a врач doctor, then the sentence must be translated with he/him, and if you are refering to a грузовик truck, the same sentence must be translated with it:

In casual conversation it's common in America to say things like “Me and John went to the store,” especially when we are children. Schoolteachers then try to beat us out of that habit and make us say “He and I went to the store.” Because of that influence, English speakers may be tempted to say things like «Он и я ездили в магазин» in Russian. While theoretically one can say that in Russian, no one ever does. Instead it gets rephrased as “we with him” «мы с ним». Of course, it would be ridiculous to translate that as “we with him” in English; you still want “he and I” or just plain old ‘we.’

As students advance in their study of Russian, they eventually encounter the words тоже and также, both of which can be translated as “also.” The difference between the two is complex.¹ But if you are a really sneaky Russian student, then you can sometimes avoid both words by using и. For instance:

¹ The best description of the difference between the two words I've seen for beginners is in Richard Robins's first-year textbook Голоса, pp. 123-124. For a more complete description look at Nakhimovsky and Leed's “Advanced Russian,” which gets to the essence of the topic in terms of theme-rheme.

Today we'll learn about asking “How long does it take to get to such-and-such a place.” Probably the easiest way is to use the phrase «как долго» “how long” followed by a unidirectional infinitive and the prepositions от/до. (От and до are usually used to mean “from” and “to” when talking about distances or times.) Of course, you will want to change the verb depending on the mode of transport:

If you want to ask about how long it will take on a particular occasion, then of course you can use either the past or future as well:

The phrase «сколько времени» can replace «как долго» in all those sentences and will mean the same thing.

Пельмени (pelmeni) are these tiny, delicious, uniquely shaped, dumpling-like bits of dough filled with a combination of meat, onions and various spices. The key to creating a perfect пельмень is to get the shape right, because no matter how good your pelmeni taste, people won’t give you credit if they look sloppy or deformed or fall apart in one’s plate. It might be a bit tough at first but it’s very simple cooking, so a little practice is all that’s needed (unless you have extremely clumsy hands like me). The original, Russian recipe that most people use requires the meat to be a trio of beef, pork and lamb that is than mixed with onions and black pepper. Пельмени can be fried or boiled in either water or bouillon (usually boiled) and must be served with sour cream—it’s essential for the full eating experience. I don’t recommend you buy preprepared, packaged ones at the store; they never taste as good as homemade. Overall, it’s impossible not to like this plain Russian dish when it's done right.

Пельмени topped with sour cream
Image taken from gotovim.ru

Here are some example sentences:

After their first week of class all Russian students know that и means “and”:

It's so simple, why the heck would anyone bother to blog about it? Listen carefully, my children: the word и will save you grief in learning Russian. For instance, once you have learned the word и, you never have to learn a separate word for both! For instance…

See how easy that is! And what's wonderful is that it's not only nouns that can be coordinated that way, but also verbs, adverbs, and prepositional phrases:

Actually the и can connect more than two words. In English, theoretically, we should only use “both” when coordinating two items, but sometimes when we are not thinking too carefully about what we are saying, we use it in constructions where more than two items are coordinated:

In Russian it's perfectly fine to coordinate more than two items with и, whereas in English if you use “both” in the context, rude pedants will correct you. I say “rude” because Mama taught us that we shouldn't correct the speech of other people unless they specifically ask us to.

Пластинка is a slang term for a грампластинка (gramophone record) and can be translated as record. Another popular slang term that is still around in both English and Russian is винил, which simply means vinyl.

Records were always a big deal in almost any household that had at least a tiny stray of affection for music and some type of a gramophone. Records of groups like the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and the Beatles were a huge deal amongst меломанов (passionate music lovers) because they were really hard to obtain, especially in the 60’s and most of the 70’s, the golden years of rock-n-roll. For example one of my relatives was allowed to occasionally travel abroad, and always brought back a couple of Led Zeppelin and Beatles albums for which people always offered him serious rubles. The main reason for this is because a lot of western music was considered to be ideologically inconsistent with the morals of the state and was largely frowned upon by the government. The biggest Soviet record label Мелодия (Melody), at first didn’t distribute certain albums and songs that were widely popular in the West at the time. In return, people found creative ways to get around this dilemma, like “burning” music onto records made out of large X-ray prints, known as запись "на костях" (recording "on the bones"). Fortunately by the mid 80’s, the restrictions began to faded off, finally warranting people to listen to what they liked and allowing numerous Russian rock bands like Кино and Зоопарк to go mainstream.

Image from livejournal.ru

Photo of a record "on the bones." The music was recorded onto someone's X-ray print. I think I'll make one out of my grandfather's lung shots.

Here are some example sentences:

In June I came across a poem by Anna Akhmatova that was new to me. I disliked the translation that was presented with it, so I decided to make a new one. To go about the process, I began with a word for word gloss next to the original:

I wanted my final translation to reflect the original rhyme scheme, but I couldn't come up with any lines with “did not rescue” or “did not save” that flowed in neat iambs, so I eliminated the “not” approach and rephrased it in the positive with “God let this be.” With that established, I could then work backwards so that all the previous lines would lead up to it. Here's what I came up with:

What can we say about this translation? It captures the bitterness and despondency which are the essence of the original. That by itself makes it a decent translation. It flows decently in English. That makes it a good translation. It captures the irony of each line of the toast, and it approximates the ABAB rhyme scheme of the original. That combination of successes makes it a very good translation.

Notes:

• I am not an Akhmatova scholar and have never properly researched her life, so it is entirely possible that my translation misses autobiographical references from the original.
• Akhmatova lived in an apartment in the garden wing of Sheremetev Palace on the Fontanka embankment from the mid 1920s till 1952. (Wikipedia)
• If you are interested in poetic translation as a topic, you can see some variations I played with here.
• The third line means “to the loneliness of two together.” It is so concisely put in Russian that I don't know of any way to capture its punchiness in English. The word одиночество contains the root один one, and “two together” contains the stem дв- ‘two,’ and the contrast between them is heart-rendingly obvious in Russian. (The English word ‘lonely’ also comes from a phrase that used to mean “all one,” but we no longer feel the ‘one’ part of the word as clearly as the Russians understand один in одиночество.) The only option is to find some phrase in English that gathers heartbreak neatly. “In tatters” is my best attempt.
• Line 7 is the one most open to criticism. It is only loosely connected with the original in that a world without justice is ipso facto a cruel world. Doubtless I will be accused of отсебятина. If anyone can come up with a line to replace it, making whatever other adjustments are necessary for the poem to work, I'd love to see it.
• The word “cheated” in line 5 will be first interpreted by the English reader as meaning spousal cheating. If upon study it turns out that it was betrayal that had nothing to do with the marital relationship, then the line needs to be rewritten. That of course means the rhyme in line 7 will most likely have to change as well.
• Feel free to add your own translation in the comment section.

Alexander Pushkin is a писатель. Franz Kafka is a писатель, and so is Hemingway, along with that lady who wrote “Twilight.” The word писатель derives from the verb писать (write) and as you might have already guessed, is translated as writer. Писатель is a masculine term used to refer to male writers and писательница refers to female writers. But nowadays it’s not unusual to hear a woman be called a писатель.

Image from newsimg.bbc.co.uk

One of the best-known and most controversial писателей of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov, at work.

The next generic verb of motion is пойти. Note especially its irregular past tense forms.

Пойти is more specialized than ходить in that it always talks about motion in one particular direction; since it is perfective it also focuses on some result of the action:

In that sentence, the result is that I arrived at the pharmacy and thus could make my purchase.

Пойти can also be used to describe each leg of a multileg journey:

Of course you can do the same thing in the future tense:

Now here's something amusing... let's think about this English dialog:

Does the second sentence imply that Mom got to the store? No, it doesn't. Here it emphasizes absence from the point of departure while mentioning her intended destination. Likewise in Russian a perfective verb of motion can be used with meaning of “absence from point of departure”:

The sentence does not say whether Mom has necessarily reached the store, just that she is no longer here.

¹ In terms of the classical description of English grammar, this sentence should be, “She has gone to the store.” For some English speakers that is still the best version of the sentence, but the English present perfect is slowly being replaced by the simple past, so “She went to the store” sounds perfectly normal for many speakers of American English.

Столица is the Russian word for capital, as in a capital city, not a capital letter. It's a perfectly regular noun (as long as you know the five-letter spelling rule).

Note: for a reminder on the difference between capital and Capitol, see the first usage note at dictionary.reference.com.

The Russian word газировка is a slang term for газированная вода (carbonated water) and can be translated as soda. At one point it was almost synonymous with various soft carbonated drinks like Тархун, Буратино, Дюшес, Байкал, and so on... Now people tend to go by the brand’s name, especially when it comes to the popular Coke and Pepsi products.

In the Soviet days and even the early nineties, one could often spot special self-service soda fountains on city streets and public areas like airports, train stations, parks, farmer markets, and etc. The bulky, rectangular apparatuses were similar to the vending machines of today; you’d insert a kopeck or two and select the desired drink (sweet drinks cost more). There were no bottles or cans, every machine had a reusable стакан (glass) that was to be rinsed off with water in a special compartment and then used for the газировка. On a hot afternoon there could be a line of people standing next to the soda machine, each patiently waiting to quench his tormenting thirst. If lucky, you could hear one of these glasses shatter on the pavement and then find out that it was the last one, or better yet you could absorb some of your predecessor’s germs. For some reason I still miss those machines, although since then have been turned into scrap metal and become part of Soviet-era nostalgia. How awesome would it be to just have one in your kitchen right now?

Image from wikipedia.org

This is an image of a typical Soviet-era self-service soda machine. It's one kopeck for plain carbonated water and three kopecks for the water to be mixed with sweet syrup.

Here are some example sentences with газировка:

The next generic verb of motion is идти. Note especially its irregular past tense forms.

Идти is more specialized than ходить in that it always talks about motion in progress toward a particular place. Because of that “in progress” bit, we can often translate it as “heading to” or “on the way to”:

Although adverbs of frequency and phrases of frequency (like часто and каждый день) usually trigger an indeterminate verb, if the situation describes something that happens regularly on the way to a place, then you use the determinate verb идти:

One of the curious uses of determinate verbs is that they can be used to say how long it takes to get to a place. From the English-speaking point of view, that is rather odd. After all, getting to the place implies a completed action, so we should use a perfective verb, right? But from the Russian point of view in these sentences they are indicating how long the process takes, so the imperfective works:

Having a good крыша over one’s head is one of the core necessities in life. Without a real крыша, people seem to be vulnerable and weak, stripped of basic protection from the unpredictable weather and exposed in every way to the dangers of the suddenly harsh, surrounding world. Anyway, enough with the obvious… the word крыша is translated as roof.

If you do something outrageously dumb, like smoke a cigarette at a gas station, your shocked Russian friend might yell out at you: “У тебя что, крыша поехала?!” The idiom крыша поехала (roof is moving) is an abrupt way of saying that you’re not thinking right at the moment, that you’re out of your mind and have gone crazy.

The term крыша can also be associated with the criminal world. A couple of low-tempered brutes dressed in tracksuits come into a private shop, declare that they are the proprietor’s new крыша and threaten to bring havoc to the place, unless they start receiving a certain amount of money on a regular bases. To put it simply, the thugs are muscling the owner into paying protection money. So крыша can refer to “protection” by a crime organization, and hopefully you'll never have to encounter this word in that particular context.

Image from 4rent.ru

The roof of the Охотный ряд (Hunter's Row) underground shopping mall located in the heart of Moscow, on the Red Square.

There are several ways in Russian to express the idea of “the same” in the sense of “the same house” or “the same country.” One way is to use один (which is also used as a cardinal number), and another way is to use «тот же». For instance, if you are just starting a conversation, you could say:

Oddly enough, in that context you cannot say «в том же доме». What's the difference? Essentially it's this: in order to use «тот же» the noun must have previously been mentioned in the conversation. For instance:

Another example. If you are for the first time mentioning your transportation over the weekend, you might say:

But if you have already mentioned the train car, then you use the other phrase:

Of course, the phrases can be used in other cases as well:

Sometimes один and тот же combine into a single phrase «один и тот же», but we'll save that phrase for another time.

In Hollywood movies, it seems as if all Russian men wear a distinct, funny-looking winter fur hat with two goofy earflaps tied together at the top. If this doesn’t ring a bell, just watch one of the older James Bond films, Rocky IV, Armageddon or The Hunt for Red October. Popularized by Hollywood and made into a stereotype image of the Russian man, this hat is a highly demanded souvenir that almost every other tourist brings back. But aside from the stereotype of these hats, what does a Russian actually wear in winter? For better or for worse (probably for better), it so happens that a lot of Russian men do indeed wear this exceptional headpiece. The winters get a bit cold and the thick fur will keep you warm, especially if you tie the earflaps around your chin.

Шапка-ушанка can be translated as ear-flap hat. The word шапка is translated as hat, while the word ушанка doesn’t really have a real translation. It is used to identify the earflaps and derives from the noun уши, which means ears. In the West, people sometimes simply refer to the hat as ushanka. An ushanka can get a bit pricy if it’s made out of sable or mink, so fox tends to be the choice for those with a thinner wallet.

I’ve mostly stuck with beanies, but I do have to admit that the ushanka is one of the better inventions to come out of the Motherland, and I do own one. It was created in the cold and for the cold. Nowadays, you can occasionally spot Russian ushankas on random, crazy-looking snowborders racing down the steep slopes of the Rockies.

Image from movieactors.com

The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, wearing an ushanka in the film Red Heat.
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Image from 2.bp.blogspot.com

Another example of the Hollywood stereotype of a Russian. Here we have the drunk cosmonaut Lev Andropov in an ear-flap hat from the film Armageddon.

Here are some example senternces:

Back in July I thought to myself, “I should just open the very first chapter of the Russian textbook I'm currently teaching from and blog on the very first word of the very first vocabulary list.” It turned out that the word was Америка. What the hell? The very first word in the the very first vocab list of a Russian language textbook is America? Is that not ironic beyond words?

Still, it struck me as a challenge, so let's discuss that world-dominating, hated-by-terrorists, hoped-for-by-the-immigrant, subjected-to-the-mockery-of-its-own-citizens noun. In terms of declension Америка is a perfectly regular second declension noun (once you know spelling rule #1), so what can you say about it that would be interesting?

Actually, there is one interesting phrase the Russians use that may surprise Americans, and that's «я не открываю Америку» “I'm not discovering/revealing the New World.” They use it in the sense of “I'm saying the obvious” or “this is no big surprise” or “it's not a big deal”:

The «тоже мне, открыл Америку» in the last sentence is a funny one; I have yet to meet a Russian who can quite explain it to me, but it's roughly the equivalent a sarcastic “you're a real genius.”