So, last night, Jessica and i cooked dinner for our 2 Thai friends and our 2 new Russian friends! It was so much fun! We made tacos – our best effort to give them a taste of Texas – and also fried rice. It was great dorm style fun… the 6 of us all gathered around Jessica’s desk to eat the wonderful meal. haha. We talked for a while – in Russian 😀 , then had ice cream and other sweets for dessert, then played some ping pong! I always love a chance to practice my Russian, especially if it involves food, friends, and ping pong!

This week in Russia is called Maslenitsa – the week before Post. In English terms, basically it’s like Mardi gras before Lent. On the weekend, everyone goes out to the countryside and celebrates… by eating a lot of blini – russian pancakes, and sledding and playing lots of fun little games and drinking a lot of vodka… In general, people here love their vodka… I’m not sure why, personally I think it’s disgusting, but it’s whatev I guess. Anyway, the point of that story… our Russian friend Natasha invited us to go have blini and celebrate with her on Sunday! I’m pretty excited!

Now, on another note, here are a few things I’ve realized about my Russian language skills:

A. There’s a LOT of Russian words that have 6 or more syllables… I never thought about it before, but those are LOOOONG words, no wonder I still have a hard time pronouncing them somtimes. Here’s a sample:
– fotografirovats
– to take a picture/photograph
– akademiicheskaya – the metro station near my school
– politicheskii – means polytechnic – and part of the name of my school (Saint Petersburg State Polytechnic University)
– avtomaticheskii – automatically
– ispolzovatsya – to use

B. I have AWFUL grammar when speaking. Here’s one thing you have to understand about the Russian language…
1. You of course always need to conjugate your verbs – a pretty normal thing – the root of the word is the same, so not a huge deal.
2. For every verb, there’s actually 2 verbs… In Russian, they come in pairs. So you have to know which one to use.
3. Russian has this thing called verbs of motion and theres several verbs that mean “to go” but you use all different ones if:
*if you’re walking
*if you’re driving
*if you’re flying
*if you’re only talking about going one direction
*if you went somewhere once and already came back
*if you go somewhere regularly but aren’t there right now
*if you are going somewhere and not coming back
4. Everything is either feminine, masculine, neuter, or plural and EVERYTHING in the sentence has to agree.
5. Russian is a case language – there are 6 cases – meaning the endings of nouns and adjectives change depending on HOW they’re being used in the sentance. In different situations word cat (koshka) might look like this: koshka, koshky, koshkye, koshki, koshkoi, koshek, koshkami, and koshkam.
Not that you care at all, but my point is there’s a lot of endings to remember. Anyway, give me a couple sentences to translate and i’m pretty much amazing at it – i can get all the forms right, but speaking – i’m so awful… apparently I think really slow.

C. I am getting pretty good at understanding… I’m to the point where if someone is talking directly to me, I can mostly understand at least the main point of what they’re telling me. I don’t understand even close to all the words, but at least enough to know what’s going on! It’s harder to understand other people having outside conversations cuz you don’t have the amazingness of context — which can do wonders for understanding.

Me, Jessica, Vishy, Prang, Natasha, and Nadia eating dessert around Jessica’s desk!

(posted from laureninrussia.blogspot.com)

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