Archives for: July 2010, 23
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July 23rd, 2010 by DonIn 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:
| Треугольник. | A triangle. |
| Вы здесь будете? | Will you here? |
| С собой. | With one's self |
| Нагреть? | To warm up? |
| Нет. | No. |
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.
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