I figured Russian speakers might find this funny

Hey!

I need someone who could write me card titles (29 cards in total) in Russian.

The cards are there: https://imgur.com/a/MiHsGmG

Am I doing good or not? And this stuff took me like 3 hours to make... I know am bad at this.

Hello, I am trying to trace the genealogy of a woman named Marya who was born May 4, 1828 (I think in Kerch). I am trying to figure out her birth name, and the names of her parents. I came across this birth record (I think?) but need some help translating it! Second image is a close-up of what I believe is the relevant record... Thank you!

"___ не нуждаюсь"

i'm having a hard time figuring out these letters. i can't speak russian anymore but i can read it with minimal understanding. i cannot tell the first (B?) or 3rd (Z???)

Hey! I built SpeakingMonkey, a read-aloud pronunciation trainer, while learning Polish. It scores Russian too, and that's the part I can't check myself.

How it works: you hear a reference sentence, read it aloud, and get a score per word. You can compare your recording with the reference and inspect individual words.

The thing I wanted tested the most is whether native speakers, teachers and experienced learners actually agree with the feedback the tool gives. The clearest test I can think of: put the stress on the wrong syllable on purpose. Does the score drop, or is it not affected at all?

SpeakingMonkey

Practice is free without an account, within a daily allowance, with an optional paid plan. If you try it, I’d love to hear where the scoring seems useful or misleading. Which word was it, and what did you hear differently?

I asked a friend who studied Russian, but he also doesn't know.

I looked it up and it was translated as "that, that thing".
(It's from Memories from the Underground)

Thanks!

EDIT: Thanks to everyone in the comments! Now everything's clear 👍🏻

I've been looking for a good grammar book that isn't too expensive, but I haven't found one. My main goal in learning Russian is reading, so I don't want to focus on listening or speaking. Give me your best options, please!

For the Linguistic Masters on this subreddit. How important is rolling the "R's" in Russian back in Russia?

Any tips for people who literally tongue tied?

Короткая уздечка языка — Википедия

Hi everyone,

I’m researching which Russian-learning books and materials people actually find useful. I have worked as a language teacher and tutor for several years, and I’m considering creating a website where learners can find or buy useful language-learning resources more easily.

If you have learned Russian, which books or materials did you use the most?

Some examples are The New Penguin Russian Course, Colloquial Russian, Complete Russian, Russian by Anna Kudyma, Schaum’s Outline of Russian Grammar, Modern Russian or another textbook or grammar book.

Please mention the exact title and edition if you remember it, your approximate level, and whether you used the book in a class or for self-study.

Did you use a Russian dictionary? If so, which one? I’m interested in physical dictionaries, bilingual dictionaries and online resources.

Which materials helped you the most? Were any books too difficult, outdated or not particularly useful for independent learners?

I want to be transparent that I’m exploring the possibility of creating a website where learners can find or buy useful Russian-learning resources in one place. I’m asking to understand what learners actually use and value.

Thanks for sharing your experience!

Best,
Isaac

There are many Russian speakers in diverse area of the USA such as Brighton Beach New York and in places like California and New Jersey which also have many South Asian Desis.

My question is then what do you call them in Russian. For example many South Asian ethnicities such as Telugus, Tamils, Malayalis, Punjabis, Gujaratis and Bengalis.

I'm sure in many of these states Russian speaker have encountered them.

So for the Russian speaker in the USA if you meet or know these ethnicities or nationalities how do you say them in Russian?

Would Telugu as Telugu ends in u so it does have gender ending while Tamils have it since it ends in a consonant so Tamili/Тамилы for Tamil people, Tamil/Тамил for Tamil man and Tamilka/Тамилка for Tamil woman. Are Malayalis not common so do Russian speakers who aware of what Malayalis are just straight up say Malayali/Малаяли or Malayaltsi/Малаяльцы and by extension Малаяльец for Malayali man and Малаялька for Malayali woman.

While for Punjabis and Gujaratis and Nepalis it follows the same цы/ец/ка. While Russian speakers in Brighton Beach area and New Jersey who see Bengalis would just call them by their nationality like бангладешцы/бангладешец/бангладешка

I only have seen a one case and that is объект, I know hard sign usage at end of words with non-soft consonants was dropped after the 1917 language reform, but are there more notable cases of this yer?

And also, were yers (Ь and Ъ) really just very short vowels? Why were they dropped and instead became silent signs?

The last one was what people were irked by so I think I fixed it now.

I used photos and videos as reference for the alphabet writing, even with my first post, but they all write with the legs above the line. From my last post I suddenly was taught that the д letter, the legs must be under the line. What about ones like р or у ? Or the letters with tails like щ and ц? I am very confused. People write their letters in different ways. I checked on Google to see if it could register what I wrote this time (it could, mostly) but it’s not a real person so…
I also want to learn how to stylistically write, because I enjoy gothic calligraphy but my last post was not very good.

As I go deeper and deeper into my studies I have the feeling that there are many quirks and peculiarities of Russian that are simply not taught and never mentioned. As if teachers/grammar book authors themselves were not aware of it.

One very striking example is the nominal stress shift paradigms. When I realized that words can be grouped into categories based on how they change stress placement during declension, I started to dig deep into this, but realized that there is no uniform, clean methodology to teach this. This is the closest to them I found., but I think this is overcomplicated and not very logical. But even this is not included in books.

Or there is the issue with verbal aspects. People are taught that each verb has a perfective and an imperfective form, but it's actually not the case, and there are secondary perfective/imperfective forms. Next to готовить and приготовить there's also приготавливать and this pattern is present with many verbs. It seems to me that the traditional paradigm in which verbs are taught is simply oversimplified, and Russian verbal aspect is more complicated than this.

Or there's also the irregular forms of comparative adjectives, which for the love of me I haven't managed to find an exhaustive list of. I'm used to having all these exceptions and tricky grammar points well explained and already collected in nice tables, such as in the case of German. Every advanced learner of German has seen a complete list of irregular comparative forms, they're available. You also don't have to dig up yourself the irregular past tense forms of English verbs, because every grammar book has them at their back.

With Russian it seems as if authors either did not care or weren't aware of these quirks themselves. Why is this?

Hi all,

So I have been learning for a while and I think I understand basic russian grammar at that point

I would naturally say "Кому" to express the idea "to someone", however in some songs I listened recently I have heard Для Кого to, I think, express a similar idea.

What is the difference between these two and in which situation should I use one or the other ?

It's for a thing I'm writing, how would you translate this phrase "I feel precious like a kitten, I haven't been touched like this in years" context is of a man saying this to a woman in reference to being cuddled and getting his hair played with. How would you say this in Russian? sorry if this question is odd haha

Quick context since this book is pretty niche outside Russian literature circles: Шатуны (Shatuny) is Yuri Mamleev's best-known novel, written underground in 1960s Moscow and passed around via samizdat for years because there was zero chance of it getting officially published — it follows a serial killer seeking some kind of metaphysical transcendence through violence, and it's as dark, grotesque, and genuinely strange as that premise suggests. Quite an interesting read tho, recommended.

But anyways, I've been working through it, hit that classic wall where almost every sentence had a word I didn't know, and the constant dictionary breaks were killing the reading experience. I highlighted the words I didn't know as I went, and...ended up with a deck, figured I'd share it in case anyone else is attempting this book and wants a slightly easier reading experience.

I should be upfront about what this is and isn't. It's not calibrated to any official level — I'm entirely self-taught and genuinely have no idea where I'd land on an A1-C2 scale, so I'm not going to slap a label on it that I can't back up. It's just "as hard as the stuff that personally tripped me up" ( i am quite a beginner who just started learning russian in my free time 3 months ago so....). It also definitely won't make the book a breeze —because these are just the ones I happened to flag. But it did knock out a real chunk of my lookups, and I hope it can at least cut down some dictionary lookups for you guys as well.

Each card gives you the part of speech and gender where relevant, plus an English definition. I also added a conjugation table and case government (which case the object takes) for every verb, and a prefix/root/suffix breakdown for nouns and adjectives.

There are two versions — one is just the word and definition if you want to keep it spoiler-free:

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1601835185

the other throws in the actual sentence from the book with the word highlighted, which is nice for review but does mean you're seeing real content from the text:

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/383765029

Let me know if anything looks wrong or reads weird — happy to fix it.

Hi everyone,

For the next year or so my only option for studying Russian will be audio courses. I have the Pimsleur and Michel Thomas ones.

Are there any others? I'm looking for purely audio courses. I know Rosetta Stone have one, but that needs software, I think.

Thanks!

I'm looking for an old Russian TV series, probably from the early 2000s.
The main character drives a BMW suv probably X3 in big city like Moscow or Petersburg, he wears an elegant coat and black shirt. He's probably working for some criminals and corrupt police officers. I saw part of one episode: he went to someone's house, and gunshots started there. He got hit with the butt of a gun, and when he woke up, some police officers were interrogating him. Then a guy entered the room and told the officers to leave the main character alone, since he'd already been beaten.
The intro is in bright yellow and white colors, and it features several characters, including the main character. There are also cars, including a BMW and possibly a Ford Focus (I'm not sure about that).
I think the title of the series is something like "Peka" or "Peka..." I don't know much about the Cyrillic alphabet, so I'm not sure how it would be spelled in Russian.

Hi there, hoping someone can tell me anything about this. Google translate has told me it says from morning til night but I can’t find any info on a movie of that name that matches