Russian Word of the Day

If A Russian has made soup, he might describe that by saying я сварил суп “I boiled up some soup.” Using that as a starting point, a foreigner might try to use that same verb when making tea. If you do that, the Russians will understand you, but they'll tell you it's better to say я заварил чай. The verbs are actually a bit different in meaning. The pair варить/сварить can mean 'to boil something,' i.e., to actually put something on the stove or over a camp fire or heat source in a smelter. The pair заваривать/заварить can mean 'to pour boiling water over something in order to cook/prepare it.' Russians don't usually make tea by actually boiling the leaves in a pot on the stove; instead they pour boiling water into a tea pot over the tea leaves to make a strong infusion, and then they poor some of the infusion from the teapot into a cup and then add boiling hot water and drink the result.

I was curious to know just how much more common it was to say заварить чай as opposed to сварить чай, so I did a Google search and came up with these results.

Сварить

Заварить

As you can see the заварить versions outnumber the сварить versions by a factor of 15. When there is that big a difference, you can teach your beginning students that the заварить version is right and the сварить version is wrong.

I've been on a cooking spree the last few months, and yesterday I made iced ginger elixir from p. 503 of The Garden of Eating. To my disgust I realized that I didn't know the word for ginger in any language but English. The situation was not to be tolerated! It turns out that the Russian word for it is имбирь (masc.) “I made ginger tea” = «Я сделал себе чай из имбиря.»

Имбирь is an end-stressed noun, which means that if the noun has a grammatical ending that contains one or two vowels, the stress is on the first vowel of the grammatical ending; other wise the nouns stressed on the last vowel of the word. In this case it works like this:

Well, theoretically at least that's how the word works. In fact имбирь, just like many spice words in English, usually isn't used in the plural. Can you imagine someone in English saying, "We sell cinnamons" in the sense of "We sell various types of cinnamon"? Sure, we can understand the meaning right away, and perhaps professional spice sellers might say such a thing, but an ordinary person uses the word only in the singular.

Adjective: имбирный

In Tucson there is a road named “Ajo Way” which, along with the town named “Ajo,” is one of the shibboleths of Arizona life: newcomers pronounce it ah-joe, whereas natives and long-timers pronounce it ah-kho, where the jay is pronounced like the cee aitch in the Scottish pronunciation of Loch Ness. But even native Arizonans often don't know that ajo is Spanish for garlic.

The Russian word for garlic is чеснок. If you go to a big vegetable market in Russia, you are likely to find pickled garlic маринованный чеснок, as well as pickled onions, beets, cucumbers, mushrooms and cabbage. The first Russian family I met had a seven-year old daughter Марьяна who I once watched eat clove after clove of pickled garlic as if they were M&Ms. No accounting for taste, eh?

One of the words that means 'to eat' is кушать. Theoretically one can say мы кушали пиццу 'we ate pizza.' But this word is not one that usually comes from the lips of a grown man. It's a word used by Mama and Gramma when calling people to the table by saying идите кушать, or they might ask if you want to eat by saying вы кушать будете? But even when Mama and Gramma say it there is something domestic, affectionate or cuteish about it.

There is also an old fashioned language rule that says you should never use the verb кушать in the first person.

If you want to ask if someone wants to eat, the most neutral way is to say Будешь есть/завтракать/обедать/ужинать? Cruder versions are Будешь жрать? Будешь хавать? (The хавать version is a Belarusian influence.)

The word стол means 'table.' It is one of the first words taught in Russian classes because it is short, easy to pronounce, and has perfectly regular grammatical endings. It is also the classic word used when practicing noun declensions: it's common to hear Russian students chanting стол, стола, столу, стол, столом, столе in the course of their studies. Declining стол out loud gives the good Russian student the same pleasure that a good piano student gets when practicing scales. Sure, it's a simple thing to do, but it shows a type of mastery.

There are two different patterns common to declining Russian nouns. The chant shown above follows the classical order that is used in reference books in Russia and in more traditional textbooks in the United States. There is a also another pattern, the 'linguistic' pattern, that is used by historical linguists and by newer textbooks. The newer system is better pedagogically because it illustrates the generalizations of noun declension in a neater fashion. You can see the two patterns contrasted here.

The phrase письменный стол means 'desk, writing table.'