When a man gets married, the verb commonly used is жениться, which is an odd verb in that it can be interpreted as either imperfective or perfective in this meaning. The woman he marries is expressed in the prepositional case as the object of the preposition на:

Russian has several verbs that mean "to get married." To deal with them properly we have to make some distinctions:

• if we specify the couple that is getting married, then the most common verb pair is жениться/пожениться;
• if we specify the man who is getting married, then the most common verb is жениться, which can be interpreted as either imperfective or perfective;
• if we specify the woman who is getting married, then the most common verb pair is выходить/выйти used in conjunction with the adverb замуж; and
• if we want to use the most colorless, boring, adminisтrative and bureaucratic way to discuss marriage, we say вступать/вступить в брак or заключать/заключить брак.

We'll discuss each one of those phrases separately, starting today with the pair that deals with couples. When we discuss couples or people in general getting married, the verb pair to use is жениться/пожениться:

¹ You get an extra point if you are an American and recognize who these people are. Russians, of course, will recognize the first person right away.

The verb pair звонить/позвонить has several meanings, the most important of which is “to call” in the sense of “to call on the phone.” It is a completely regular end-stressed second conjugation verb:

The person you call shows up in the dative case:

Now here's the tricky part for us English speakers: when you specify the place you call, it does NOT appear in the dative. Instead it shows up in the accusative case after the preposition в if the place is a в word, and in the accusative after на if the place is a на word:

If you say both the person and the place, the person still shows up in the dative, and the place still shows up in the accusative after в/на:

The place you call can be one of several adverbs as well: сюда, туда, домой.

Last but not least, if you want to specify the number you are calling, include it in the nominative case after the phrase по телефону:

Cultural detail: although in Russia one can call the police at 02, a new number, 112, is being introduced specifically for auto accidents. The new number was first implemented in Курск and should be implemented throughout the rest of the country by 2012. (article | mirror)

The verbs значить and означать both mean “to mean.” In the following sentences they can be used interchangeably. For instance:

Although these words often completely overlap in meaning, there are times when they don't mean quite the same thing. Означать can also mean “to indicate,” whereas значить does not:

Last but not least, значить can mean “to be emotionally significant,” but означать does not bear that meaning:

One of the great things about the internet is that it's really easy to access Russian language materials nowadays. One of the most amazing sites is livejournal.com. I'm not quite sure why, but livejournal quickly became a major center of Russian blogging. When you start look at these blogs and forums, you will encounter various words and phrases that are either unique to the internet or have a curious history buried in technology. For instance someone might write «У меня сдох винт». You look up винт and discover it's primary meaning is screw. My screw died? That doesn't make much sense. And then someone tells you that винт is computer jargon for hard disk. Ah, now you understand. But why the heck would the word for screw come to mean hard drive? A hard drive doesn't look like a screw. Sure, you can turn a screw, and a hard drive turns, but that's really stretching it. It turns out that there is a good reason. One of the early hard drives, the IBM 3340, was nicknamed "the Winchester," which in Russian gets transliterated Винчестер, which got shortened to винт.

One of things you'll see quite often when you start reading Russian-language forums and blogs is ЗЫ. Once again you go to the dictionary, and this time you don't find a blessed thing. You notice that the ЗЫ is usually toward the end of an entry or comment. You notice that it is often followed by a comma or a colon. So what's the scoop? Here's the explanation. Let's say you are typing at a computer, and the computer has a standard QWERTY keyboard. And let's say you are typing in the standard Russian keyboard mapping that comes with MS Windows. The letter З is on the P key, and the letter Ы is on the S key. PS = postscript! That's right. The Russians are basically writing PS, but they aren't being anal-retentive enough to switch their keyboard to English just to write those two letters. You can see an example of this here (mirror).

There are lots of other fun vocabulary bits in Russian internetspeak. For instance a smiley is called смайлик, and the @ symbol is called a собака. Okay, readers, let's hear your guesses where the Russian word for that last item comes from. If you want to have a bit of fun, read the Russian Wikipedia entry on Компьютерный сленг internet slang. It's great!