Russian Word of the Day

You probably know that chocolate is шоколад in Russian and that potato is картошка. So what if you wanted to say ‘chocolate potato’? In English you simply put the two nouns together in a row. In Russian you can't normally put two nouns together like that and have the first one modify the second. Instead you have to put the first one into adjective form. The adjective from шоколад is шоколадный, so chocolate potato comes out шоколадная картошка.

Now if you are an American, you are probably asking yourself, “Why the heck would I want to say ‘chocolate potato’ in English, much less in Russian?” Oh, my poor ignorant American friend. You need to go to Russia and try the pastry they call шоколадная картошка. You will think you have died and gone to heaven. I encountered my first ones the other day. It was in a little convenience store.

“Are those chocolate?” I asked.

“They are mumble mumble potato mumble,” she replied.

Potato, huh? They kind of look like yeti testicles covered in brown bread crumbs, but what the hell, I'll give 'em a try.

Home. I chomp. OMG! These are a chocolate potato candy! I swoon, I can't stop salivating.

It turns out that they have no potato in them at all, so in fact they are not chocolate potato candy. They are just deliriously delicious pastries.

Here's a picture of my stove here in Казань.

It's a gаs stove. A gas stove is a good stove. An electric stove is a bad stove. You can NOT properly warm a tortilla on an electric stove. Oh sure, you can sort of warm it up, but it just isn't the same. I'm an Arizona boy, and I can tell you this for sure. Of course, I'm in Russia and there aren't any tortillas here. But a gas stove is still a good stove. But before today I didn't know the word for a stove's burner, which is конфорка. It's fairly regular and has the fill vowel you would expect in a word ending in -ка.

Very often people pronounce the word комфорка, though it's considered a mistake. Myself, I don't consider it a mistake since the word was borrowed from Dutch komfoor. Still, you mustn't spell it that way.

One of the verbs that means ‘to follow’ in Russian is

In English the verb takes a direct object. In Russian it requires a prepositional phrase of за + instrumental.

The word огород means a chunk of land near your house where you grow vegetables, in other words a vegetable garden, although in English we usually just say garden. It might also have berries and apples, but it's essential to have either vegetables or greens. It's a perfectly regular 1st declension noun.

Omigosh, but the Russians love their gardens. If they have a дача, then in the summer months they get out of town and raise as much food as they possibly can. If you'd like to see some pictures of a real Russian garden, take a look here.

My language partner, Alan, and I went to an exhibition of exotic fish at one of the museums on ул. Кремлёвская. That set me thinking about aquariums. The word is fairly straight forward in Russian.

Of course the first thing I wanted to do was discuss the difference between fresh-water aquariums and salt-water aquariums, and I translated those phrases word for word into Russian. Wrong. You can't literally say ‘fresh-water aquarium’ in Russian; instead you have to say ‘an aquarium with fresh-water fish’ or ‘an aquarium with salt-water fish.’

This article would not be complete without mentioning the legendary rock band «Аквариум». Of their music I especially love the song “Rock and roll's dead, but I'm not... yet.” You can listen to it and read the words and translation here.