English and Russian both have special comparison forms for adjectives and adverbs, which makes them seem sort of similar. In English the comparative form often ends in -er, and in Russian it often ends in -е or -ее:

But here is a curious thing: if you want to say how many times someone or something is faster, richer, taller or older, then in English there are two constructions you can use. One of them uses an “as...as” phrase without a comparative form, and one of them uses a comparative form with a ‘than’ phrase.

In Russian you always use the comparative form. The word for ‘time’ in this context is раз, which has an irregular genitive plural ‘раз’, and the number must be preceded by the preposition в, which in this context works with the accusative case of the number:

Oh, let's try a few more.

¹ If you look at the Wikipedia article on Joan Collins, you will see her name transliterated as Джоан Коллинз, which has an unpronounced ‘а’ and an unpronounced extra ‘л’, which have been added under the influence of English spelling. That is a *bad thing*. Dear Russian Wikipedia authors, please do not fall under the terrible influence of English spelling. You have a marvelous tradition in Russian of spelling things much more closely to their pronunciation. It is why the Russian application of Cyrillic is superior to the English application of the Latin alphabet. Notice that the author of the Kira Knightley article didn't make that mistake. Please maintain your excellent and sensible tradition, and, eight hundred years from now, when we English speakers finally have a sensible spelling reform, you can taunt us with an alphabetic “I told you so!”

In English when you want to say how often something happens and the period over which it occurs, you can use two constructions. The first uses no preposition, and the second uses the preposition ‘per’:

In English the ‘per’ version sounds more formal and stilted, and the prepositionless version sounds normal. In Russian the prepositionless version is not an option; you must use the preposition в:

At first glance it might seem that год is in the nominative case, but that is because it is a masculine inanimate noun. If we see a feminine noun in that context it is clearly accusative:

If you want to ask how often something happens, then the phrase to use is как часто:

That last example is interesting because you could rephrase it with minutes and skip the preposition:

Note the interesting use of the plural form of каждый before a number greater than one.

One of the few Russian words that every American knows is космонавт, which of course is spelled ‘cosmonaut’ in English.¹ It is a perfectly regular noun that declines like this:

The космо- part is from Greek κόσμος, which meant universe (and nowadays ‘space’), and νάυτης sailor, thus a космонавт is a universe sailor, i.e., a space traveller. In English cosmonaut and astronaut are diffferent only in that the word cosmonaut applies to people of the former Soviet Union or of the countries that succeeded it. Astronaut is more general. It sounds perfectly normal to say “Yuri Gagarin was a Russian astronaut,” but to say “Alan Shephard was an American cosmonaut” sounds ironic.

In 1995 the French decided that astronaut was much too American a word to describe their own astronauts, so they coined the word spationaut. I'm rather amused at the attitude, particularly since the word astronautique was first used in French back in the 1920s, long before Americans decided on the word astronaut in the late 1959.² And then the Chinese, not to be outdone by the Americans, the Russians and the French, decided they needed their own word as well, so in 1998 the word taikonaut was coined from the Cantonese word taikong ‘space’ to refer to Chinese astronauts.³

Whew, can political correctness get much correcter? Now I have to distinguish cosmonauts from taikonauts from astronauts. And with great glee I can now call French astronauts “spacey-o-nauts.”⁴

¹ The other two Russian words every American knows are vodka and czar.

² See an interesting discussion of the orgin of the word on http://www.collectspace.com/.

³ For commentary on the usage of the word taikonaut see this Wikipedia article.

⁴ Note to Russian speakers: in colloquial American English ‘spacey’ means ‘inattentive’ or ‘irresponsible,’ so spationaut when deliberately mispronounced as spacey-o-naut sounds mildly derisive and may evoke a chuckle from American listeners.

In February of 1995 my maternal grandmother died. I flew from Washington to Arizona for her funeral, where we all remembered her kindness and love. It is never a joy to deal with death. The pain of losing those we love cannot be overestimated. But after the funeral we headed north from the town of Oracle, and as we drove we saw a double rainbow in the sky. I had the feeling that somehow despite her death, the double rainbow somehow meant that everything would be okay, that she was somehow okay.

The Russian word for rainbow is радуга. It is a regular second declension noun (assuming you know the seven-letter spelling rule):

* If you are a careful student of Russian, you may want to write «Она была такой доброй» using the instrumental case. That is proper, grammatical Russian. In conversational Russian, however, predicative phrases with strong emotional coloration sometimes appear in the nominative case. In this context where one is reminiscing about kindness and death, the strong feelings make the nominative possible.

The word мы means we. It declines like this:

I often encounter the word in sentences like this: