The Russian word for roller blades is ролики. A few months ago, my friend became very interested in learning how to rollerblade. She was determined to become good at rollerblading by the end of the month so that she could impress her boyfriend who was coming into town. She called me and said «Я хочу научиться кататься на роликах. Ты можешь помочь мне научиться?» “I want to learn to rollerblade. Can you help me learn?” I wanted to support my friend so I agreed and we went to Kiwanis Park that afternoon. I told her to be careful but she insured me that it was not a big deal and that rollerblading was “easy.”

I watched nervously as she began rollerblading on the sidewalk. She was doing very well and my nervousness finally began to ease. Unexpectedly, she turned towards me and said «Я хочу съехать с этой горы» “I want to ride down this hill.” Before I had time to answer, she was off, and I again watched nervously as she began her ride down the hill. I noticed that she was rollerblading down the hill very fast and with a terrified look on her face she yelled «Я не могу остановиться! Как мне остановиться?» “I can’t stop! How can I stop?” I watched in horror as she fell on the concrete. Luckily for my friend, she was wearing protective gear so her injuries were very minor. Now, she pays more attention when I tell her to be more careful.

Don's additional comments: A slightly more formal way to say the same thing is «роликовые коньки» “roller skates” as opposed to «ледовые коньки» “ice skates.” Ролики and роликовые коньки can mean both in-line skates and the old fashion skates with a "four corners" wheel arrangement.

Though this will sound very odd to English speakers, Russian has no single word that means "to spell." Russian spelling reflects pronunciation much more closely than English spelling. For the most part Russians don't need other Russians to spell a word letter by letter when they have heard an unfamiliar word.

But of course Russian spelling doesn't reflect pronunciation perfectly, so they do have ways to clarify the unclear. The most common phrase is «Как пишется это слово?» “How is this word written?” In response the other party will not name the letters of the word, but rather pronounce the word syllable by syllable, with all the unstressed vowels pronounced stressed. For instance, the word хорошо is pronounced [хəрашо], and to clarify the spelling we might have the following conversation:

Theoretically one could tell a Russian «Скажите это слово по буквам» “Tell me that word letter by letter,” but Russians will never say that to each other, and they will never tell each other how to spell a word letter by letter. (Well, maybe if they have a terrible phone connection, but never face to face. And even if the phone line is bad, they won't use the names of letters, but rather words that start with those letters.)

So for the most part Russians tell each other how a word is spelled «по слогам» “syllable by syllable.” Another phrase that nowadays means “syllable by syllable” is «по складам». That phrase actually has a bit of history. In olden days people were taught to read each letter out loud, naming the letter, and then combining each group of letters into a syllable. The names of the letters reflected the old names of the letters, not the current names. For instance, if someone wanted for some reason to spell «бабо», they would say:

буки азъ - ба, буки онъ - бо

where буки, азъ, and онъ were the old fashioned names of those letters.

For a discussion of чтение по складам see this article at gramota.ru.

No discussion of marriage would be complete in the twenty-first century without addressing однополые браки same-sex marriages:

In the Russian context this immediately poses a conundrum because the most common marriage words are gender specific: the Russian word used to describe a man getting married can be morphologically paraphrased as “to wife himself upon,” and the word that describes a woman getting married can be morphologically paraphrased as “to go out husbanding after.” So a foreigner might be tempted to put together sentences like:

Nope, the Russians won't say it that way. Well, a comedian on stage might, but certainly no one would ever say it with a straight face. The муж- and жен- roots produce too much gender dissonance. Actually that's a problem in English, too. My buddy John won't refer to his long-term partner Adam as his “husband” because “What does that make me, the wife?” Considering how well you cook, John, yeah, I think it does make you the wife. Get over it.

So how will the Russians refer to this? Not surprisingly, they can use the verbs that have no gender-specific roots, e.g. вступать/вступить в брак and заключать/заключить брак. What perhaps is surprising is that if both partners are the subject of the sentence, the verb жениться/пожениться mostly works, too. In other words all these phrases sound grammatically fine:

Here are some examples from the Russian-language press:

Other phrases that are used in discussing the issue of same-sex marriage are:

The most neutral of all the the marriage phrases is вступать/вступить в брак which means to enter into marriage, to get married. By “neutral” I mean that the subject of the verb can be a man or a woman, and the context can be religious or non-religious:

(BTW, if you want to read an article that seriously makes that last claim, you can find it here.)

The phrase заключать/закючить брак “to contract a marriage, get married” means about the same thing as the вступать/вступить в брак, but I've noticed that it seems to be particularly used in contexts where the legal complications of marriage are involved or where the legal implications of marriage are involved:

Last but not least the verb состоять “to be a member of” is often used with the word брак in offical contexts to ask «Вы раньше состояли в браке?» “Have you ever been married?”

* This is an example of what happens when we try to translate a Russian sentence too literally: it comes out strange sounding and wooden. Long Russian sentences, especially those with participial phrases or verbal adverbs, sometimes need to be broken up into two or more sentences so that they sound natural in English. A better translation would be something like: “Boris Berezovski has married Annika Ankiverina, a native of Latvia. This is his third marriage; the previous two have not been dissolved.”

When a woman gets married, the verb commonly used is выходить/выйти, which is irregular in it's conjugation:

The verb in this meaning is always used with the adverb замуж, and the man she marries appears in the accusative case after the preposition за:

¹ Americans get extra points if they can identify these folks.