Russian Word of the Day

Sometimes Russians seem insane, particularly in their desire to drink hot tea and eat hot soup for lunch in the middle of summer. But they have one soup that is cold that they also like, and it is called окрошка. We don't have any special name for it in English, so we just transliterate it as okroshka. Essentially it is a cold vegetable soup for which the base is kvas, a beerish liquid made of a mildly fermented bread mash, which has almost no alcohol content. If you are going to have soup in summer, it makes sense to my American mind to have this relatively light and cool one. Here's a picture of the окрошка from the Трали-Вали cafeteria at one of the universities in Kazan:

There are quite a few variations on окрошка. If you want to specify that you are making it with квас, then you call it окрошка на квасе. If you use water and кефир instead of квас, then you call it окрошка на кефире. Yesterday morning I was sitting at my currently favorite overpriced (but very tasty) coffee place, Кофейня «Капитал», in Kazan when I spotted this advertisement:

It says that they will make окрошка special for you not just with kvas, not just with kefir, but, if you prefer, with BEER! That's right, окрошка на пиве! You can have it made with dark beer, light beer, or honey beer! Beer soup for lunch... does that not sound like redneck heaven??? Plus they will be happy to add beef tongue, boiled beef, or sausage. See if you can figure out what the остальные ингредиенты "remaining ingredients" are from the sign.

Here are some sample sentences:

On Saturday I was sitting just outside the men's section of the place where I get my hair cut here in Kazan, when a guy walked up and asked «Сколько там мастеров?» A second-year student of Russian would probably have translated the sentence "How many masters are there?" and would then have no idea what it meant. Here's the scoop. The word мастер in Russian often bears the meaning "someone qualified in a particular trade." In other words, he wanted to know how many barbers there were there that day.

The word itself is one of those that have a stressed -а in the nominative plural, and thus is end-stressed through the plural instead of stem-stressed:

There is no commonly used word in English that is quite as general as мастер in this sense, so when translating it, it is best to substitute the common name of the tradesman who practices the trade in question. Thus, if you are sitting outside an establishment that cuts men's hair with the old-fashioned standard cuts, the phrase «Сколько там мастеров?» is best translated "How many barbers are there?" The lovely and willowy Розанна who cuts my hair also does women's hair and can color hair as well. She would probably object to the word barber, and in fact someone with all those skills in the States would be better labeled a "hair stylist," so in this case the best translation may be "How many hair stylists are there?" or "How many stylists are there?"

I was in the dormitory of Moscow State University in 1986. My bathroom sink began to come out of the wall. The floor attendant said «Я вызову мастера». In this case she meant the guy who takes care of the dorm's minor maintenance requests, so her sentence would be best translated as "I'll call the handyman" or "I'll call the maintenance man." (BTW, when he showed up, he simply took a look at the sink, shoved it bank into the wall and smeared some cement over the screw and brace that held it in place. The wall was cinderblock. And the sink was anchored to the cinderblock by a screw... The word мастер struck me as completely ridiculous in that context.)

Thus if you summon a мастер to fix the plumbing, translate мастер as plumber. If you summon a мастер to fix your electrical outlet, translate it "handy man" or "electrician," depending on just how qualified the guy is.

Although the generic word for ice cream in Russian is мороженое, you also need to know the word пломбир. Ordinary мороженое per Russian standards contains 2.5 - 4% milk fat, which in the States we used to call "ice milk" instead of "ice cream," although nowadays it is sometimes called "low-fat ice cream". Пломбир according to the same standards has 12-13% milk fat. If you think that that makes пломбир smooth and creamy and delicious, you are exactly right. Most US ice cream has high fat content, so пломбир can usually simply be translated into English simply as "ice cream".

Пломбир comes in all sorts of forms, just like regular мороженое. My most recent taste was in this fun brand:

Once you unwrap it, it's basically an ice cream with a chocolate coating:

I came across a couple off ads recently with the word in them. This first one is on an ice cream stand, and it means "For the world, peace; and for you, plombir." It's cute because it rhymes:

This ad says, "Gold Standard is plombir #1 in Russia." Gold Standard, obviously, is a brand name.

And here are some sample sentences:

The most essential sauce of western cookery is doubtless mayonnaise, which in Russian is майонез. It is a perfectly regular noun, so it's declension causes no difficulty.

Although the Russians' love of alcohol is legendary, and their love of sour cream is nearly obsessive, their passion for mayonnaise is equally astonishing. For instance, I was at a cafe this morning and ordered manty, which are kind of like enormous ravioli. Doubtless hearing a bit of an accent in my voice, the cashier asked whether I wanted ketchup or mayo with them. Well, duh, I know the answer to that one: we are in Russia so it has to be mayo! Here's a picture of the manty. Note the quantity of mayo on them:

The Russians also garnish soups with a dollop of mayo:

If you mix mayo with 100 grams of any vegetable matter, then they call it a salad. One of the most famous Russian salads is called «сельдь под шубой» "herring under a fur coat," which when you first look at it seems to have little mayo:

Let's examine the recipe. We start with the ingredients:

• 300 g herring, shredded
• 300 g grated, boiled potato
• 300 g grated, boiled carrot
• 300 g grated, boiled beets
• 300 g grated apple
• 150 g grated
• mayo

Now the procedure:

1. Place the potatoes on a serving dish. Even them out. Cover with mayo.
2. Put the herring on top. Cover with mayo.
3. Put the onion on top.
4. Put the carrots on top of the onions. Cover with mayo.
5. Put the apples on the carrots. Cover with mayo.
6. Cover with beets. Even the layer out.
7. Garnish with mayo.

To the American palate this quantity of mayonnaise is simply grotesque. We immediately think of the clogging of our carotid arteries and our inability to have six-pack abs or a shapely waistline. But this is perfectly normal for a Russian dish. And truth to tell, once we get past our cultural knee-jerk reaction, it tastes just fine. So here are some sample sentences:

Note: the н is pronounced hard in this word, thus [маянэз].

In our first years of learning Russian we spend a lot of time learning conjugation and declension, trying to figure out how to weave sentences together with subjects and direct objects and prepositional phrases. It's an amazing grammatical dance that has its own beauty, though perhaps it takes ten years before one really sees the beauty part... Anyhoo, so you take your first trip to Russia, and you are braced to collide with strange cases and unreal conditional clauses and sentences that last longer than Kafka's, and then you are stunned to learn that it's the really short sentences with nothing but the nominative case that entirely floor you.

For instance, yesterday morning I was in my currently favorite eating place, and I heard the following conversation:

I can pretty well guarantee you that right now first- and second-year readers are thinking "What the heck?" The conversation is between a woman customer (blue lines) and the cashier (yellow lines). Spend a minute or two to see if you can figure out what the heck they are talking about, then click 'read more' for a line-by-line explanation.

Read more »

One of the words I love in Russian is дно, which means bottom in the sense of the bottom of a glass or the bottom of the ocean or the bottom of a barrell. I love it because words just don't start with 'dn' in English, so it's a complete shock when students first encounter it. We English speakers want to put a vowel between the д and the н, but the Russians don't do that at all. Insteaad they start making the д sound, and the air that builds up in the mouth behind the tongue is released through the nose. The singular of the word is perfectly regular, but it has an irregular plural:

The place American students of Russian are most likely to first encounter this word is when they go to Russia for their first study-abroad program. The first week of class they diligently do their homework every day, and then Friday night rolls around and their new Russian friends invite them home for dinner and vodka, and once the vodka starts flowing they learn the phrase «до дна» "to the bottom," which essentially means their buddies don't want them to sip the vodka like a sensible human being, but to do the shot all at once and then follow it with beer, wine, or more vodka. Thus «до дна» is about the equivalent of the phrase "bottoms up" in English. (And of course in the morning the students wake up with похмелье and swear they will never drink again, which of course doesn't work because they are in Russia. To really refuse alcohol in Russia you need a nice solid religious mooring, so I recommend that all my readers immediately become Baptists.)

But of course the word has a thousand other uses that have nothing to do with alcohol:

One of the verbs I really like in Russian is разбираться. It has several meanings, but the one I have in mind today is the equvialent of "to have insight into, to understand". In this sense the verb is only used in the imperfective. For instance,

As an imperfective/perfective pair the verb can mean "to sort out the details, to figure out what's going on, to clarify the situation":

Here is the conjugation of the verb for your convenience:

Notes: "House" is amazingly popular in Russia. Everyone I talk to here has watched it.

The conversation about пельмени is based on one I had at the Чеховский рынок in Казань. The woman who ran the pelmeni stand was particular gracious and willing to have an extended conversation with a foreigner. It was she who introduced me to хинкали. She was selling mass-produced ones that were very good. I think regular khinkali actually have thinner dough. See this Wikipedia article for a picture.

Sometimes a word just sounds so funny that you laugh out loud the first time you hear it, and one of those words for me was фрикаделька, which means meatball. Why is it funny? I suppose it reminds me of words like roley-poley or higgledy-piggledy. In fact when I first heard it, I was sure it must have come from some kind of child's poem. I was wrong. Fasmer says that it was borrowed from German Frikadelle or French fricadelle, which originally came from Italian frittadella, meaning "fried in a pan." Despite the fact that the word in Italian meant 'fried,' фрикадельки in Russia aren't fried in a pan, but rather boiled in some kind of broth. Here's how it declines:

Although you usually encounter the word in the plural, it is also possible to find it in the singular. There is also a non-diminutive form фрикадель, although I haven't heard it in common speech.

Фрикадельки can be made of the flesh of pretty well any animal. When you are specifying what kind of meatballs they are, usually you use the preposition из followed by the genitive case of the type of meat. The four types I have encountered most often this summer are listed below. (I'll explain why I added Google hits in a moment.)

Sometimes you also hear the word фрикадельки preceded by an adjective to indicate the type of meat. I was curious which construction was more common, so I ran a Google hit comparison (2010-07-18) to determine that. Making grammatical judgments by a Google hit count is not a reliable way to understand the intricacies of grammar, but for what it's worth, it looks like the «из» construction is more common than the adjectival construction:

My favorite фрикадельки at the moment are the курино-говяжьи фрикадельки 'chicken and beef meatballs' served at the Трали-Вали dining room at ТГГПУ. Oddly enough, I don't get any hits on that phrase at all on Google, so perhaps they are a newer type of фрикадельки.

Here are some sample sentences with the word фрикадельки:

The Russian word for a plastic bag, like the kind you get in a grocery store to hold your groceries, is пакет. It's a completely regular noun. In many American grocery stores the cost of the bag is included in the price of the food, and the cashier and bagger will automatically bag the food for you. Not so in Russia. Usually the cashier will ask you something like:

To which you may respond

or

and then you bag the groceries yourself. Since they actually have to pay for a plastic bag every time they get one, the Russians are much more careful with them than Americans are. If you are about to go to the grocery store, you pack a few plastic bags in your purse or pocket. I've been in Kazan over a month now, and I can tell you that anytime I go out of the house, I make sure I have at least one plastic bag neatly folded in my briefcase or back pocket just in case I have to buy something on the way.

Here are some sample sentences:

One word that gets used a lot more in Russian than in English is киоск kiosk. I think the average American doesn't normally use this word, and I think most of us don't even have a clear idea of what it means. My first encounter with the word in English was at the University of Arizona. There were several brick structures which we called kiosks that had bulletin boards attached to which one could staple announcements for concerts, parties, businesses, etc. That is not what киоск means in Russian. A киоск is a small stand or booth where people sell things. Usually it's a free-standing structure, though it can also be part of a larger one. (It's never just a cart.) These are everywhere in Russia: at train stations, in the subway, anywhere there is a pedestrian street. And they sell all kinds of stuff. To say what kind of stand it is, Russians sometimes put an adjective before the noun:

Sometimes the description of the stand comes in the genitive case after the noun:

During the Soviet period you could find the oddest things at kiosks. The ones that seemed to have the most variety were the газетные киоски. I remember seeing toothbrushes and red pepper being sold в газетных киосках.

The noun itself is fairly straightforward with no grammatical quirks (as long as you remember the seven-letter spelling rule). Here are some sample sentences:

Here are some shots of various kiosks around Kazan. This first one is basically a beer, snacks, and tobacco place. Its sign reads:

There is a reason that they offer printing services here. Right nearby there is an Architectural University. Universities here don't offer printing services to their students. They often don't have the internet. And students are too poor generally to own printers.

This next one is a flower stand.

And here we have a souvenir stand:

This next one is a shoe repair stand.

And here is a beer stand. The beer stand is interesting because you have to pay for both the beer and the container. If you bring your own plastic bottle in, then you just pay for the beer and they fill your bottle for you.

Last but not least, here is a little auto supply kiosk. They mostly sell oil and antifreeze.

Меню is a word that both Russian and English have borrowed from French, and it of course means menu. Because it ends in a sound that is not typical for a nominative singular noun in Russian, the noun is indeclinable, which means that it never changes endings. That's right: the genitive singular of меню is меню, as is the instrumental plural and all the other forms. However, the adjective that modifies the noun will definitely change for case. Since меню is both indeclinable and inanimate, it is treated as a neuter noun in Russian. Thus the phrase 'this menu' declines like this:

Here are a few sample sentences:

When you first get to Russia and look at a Russian menu, your brain will likely undergo a complete meltdown. They phrase things differently. They list the weights of the components for many dishes. They have different customary dishes. And things are simply organized differently. So here for your viewing pleasure, I shall provide you with a Russian menu. It's a little trickier than Moscow menus because it contains borrowed Tatar words like элеш and перемяч which even Russians don't necessarily know outside of Tatarstan. It's the menu of a little kiosk that is located not far from the building that houses the филфак of the Tatar State Humanities Pedagogical University. There was a week where I had coffee there every morning. A preview of their menu is at the right. Click on the menu to see a larger version. An English translation of the menu is below.

Menu

If you read carefully, you'll notice the same item is listed twice at different prices (#22 & #29). I still haven't figured that issue out. And considering the numbering problem on the menu, I'm guessing that they haven't figured it out either.

One thing that surprises Americans in Russia is how often you can see people squatting. In the States I think most people lose this ability somewhere by the time they are thirty; constantly sitting in chairs allows the hamstrings and calf muscles to get tighter and tighter, which means those muscles lack the elasticity to maintain the position. (Regular attendance at yoga classes can help you bring that elasticity back.) The prepositional phrases in Russian used to describe this position include the word корточки. It only occurs in the plural, and theoretically in all six cases, though truth to tell I have never seen it in the instrumental, dative, or nominative:

If a person is in a squatting position, one mostly uses the verb сидеть/посидеть 'to be sitting' to capture the image. This verb is a location verb, thus you use with with the prepositional case and the preposition на.

When anthropologists discuss this position, they often use the word 'hunkering.' In the fully developed position the buttocks rest on the back of the shins or ankles. Young Russian men often hunker together in summer evenings smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. You aren't really supposed to drink beer on public streets in Russia, but as long as you aren't causing trouble, the police generally turn a blind eye:

To describe getting into that position, you most commonly use the verb садиться/сесть 'to sit down,' although you can also use присаживаться/присесть or опускаться/опуститься. These are motion verbs, so you use them with на plus the accusative:

The generic word for ice cream in Russian is мороженое. In form it is declined like a neuter adjective, although they use it as a noun. Theoretically the plural forms exist, though I have not personally encountered them yet:

We Americans have all heard stories of those crazy Russians buying ice cream in the dead of winter. During my first trip to Moscow in 1986, I asked my acquaintance Алёша about that:

Oh. Well, ask a stupid question...

During the Soviet period you could mostly buy vanilla ice cream, although ice cream with a chocolate coating (эскимо) was commonly available as well. Occasionally you would see chocolate or strawberry. Nowadays they have all sorts of flavors and toppings. I had a crème brûlée (крем-брюле) ice cream the other day that was wonderful. Here are a few sample sentences:

Although мороженое is a generic word for ice cream, there is another word you have to know nowadays to be ice-cream-competent in Russia. I'll blog about it in a week or so. Your assignment: take your best guess what that word is and post it in the comment section.

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":