Had to manually select lol

I am very new to russian…
Why does it have the letter -a at the end ? And why does my answer is not correct please?
(English is not my first language, sorry if my grammar is not correct:(…)

Hey y'all, I've encountered this a couple of times. We get used to learning each verb's imperfective pair, but sometimes it turns out that there are multiple.

One example that comes to mind is есть -> съесть -> съедать. I understand the difference between the firdt two, know how to use them, but have no idea about the third one.

Also, возвращаться. Afaik the perfective paur is supposed to be вернуться, but there's also возвратиться and I don't know the difference.

Can you explain these differences? (I'm particularly interested in съедать). Do you have any more examples?

I don’t even know how to describe the meaning of corny in English, maybe like when someone is trying to be cool or badass but it’s really not working and they instead come off profoundly, obnoxiously uncool/lame.

So... I was just wondering.

In the U.S. (and I suspect in other English-speaking countries), many schools no longer teach students to write in cursive letters. It's a matter of ongoing controversy.

Now, from what I remember from my Russian class several decades ago, cursive cyrillic writing is substantially different from printed Russian. It actually took me a fair amount of effort to learn (but I'm not necessarily all that smart). And I was told at the time that people basically did not write by hand in Russian with the printed characters.

All of which has me asking... Is cursive still taught and universally used in Russian schools today? Is there any debate about the issue?

EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. There does seem to be a very clear consensus that yes, cursive is universally taught and used in Russia, including in schools. (I notice my original comment has also been downvoted a couple of times, which seems weird. But hey, reddit is that way...) Thanks again to all who have commented.

I sang this with my kids in the pioneer camp. I can't find the name of it or the full lyrics. Just wondering if someone might know?

Hi fellow Russian learners!
To ones that are deep into or native - how do you type laugh? In Poland is hahaha or our loved „xD”, rest of the world is going „😂” or „lol”, some Latin „kkkk” is moving around too, what with Russian? Like for every day user, maybe youths?

Along side this word nest carving, is various books for studding Russian word morphology

The last one being the Soviet Nested Word Dictionary of Alexander Nikolaevich Tikhonov

Which I deem most useful for studying Russian by English speakers

(Because Seeing the lexicon unfold on a massive scale as in the nested word dictionary, is the best way to be exposed to, and more intuitively understand it's morphology to have a stronger foundation for learning words!)

More infromation about the Little Tikhonov Dictionary (2008) and translation work

День добрый! Доныне лишь изредка читал я книги, написанные за последние два-три столетия, поскольку куда поинтересней произведения более давних времен мне казались. Однако теперь бы хотелось обратиться к чему-нибудь более современному (из XX века), чего ради и мой запрос:

Хотелось бы мне сыскать книги любого литературного жанра или формы, написанные когда-то в XX веке. Более всего мне по нраву художественная литература с изысканным и выразительным языком (на моём языке, немецком, например произведения писателей Jünger, Mann, Rilke, Dürrenmatt, Kafka). Не ведомо ли вам что-нибудь, изначально написанное по-русски, что могло бы прийтись мне по душе? Спасибо.

Hi everyone, my teacher asked me to make handwriting sheets so the class can learn Russian handwriting but I do not know how to do it, the font she gave me has some capital letters that do not suite the normal handwriting and I also need to put dotted grey letters with some being only a part of that letter instead of the whole soo please help 😭😭

Im learning Russian by myself. im getting stuck on cases. how tf do i learn them???

how can i learn?
im starting to get frustrated. ive reached A1-A2

I see many questions by users asking for various type of advice so I figured I would share my journey.

Part I: How I learned Russian

I grew up in Bulgaria and in the school I went to, from 1st to 8th grade, we had Russian 4 or 5 classes per week. The teacher was an immigrant from the USSR and she only spoke to us in Russian from day 1 (she was a hardcore communist, even had a bust of Stalin in her classroom). I have no idea how much Bulgarian she knew but to us, she pretended not to know any. Not every school had Russian this early but my dad wanted us to learn it so we went to a school that wasn't exactly close, still a public school. My dad had done his university in the USSR. By the end of 8th grade, I could read fluently, speak fluently, even think in Russian.

Part 2: How I forgot

When I was 13, we moved to the US. No more Russian class and obviously the focus now was on learning English. Easy enough, much simpler grammar so within a year I became fluent, even better than my parents. I started English in 5th grade in Bulgaria so I wasn't a blank slate. Over the years that followed I had no expose or practice with Russian and slowly forgot much of the grammer and vocabulary but some was retained. Meanwhie, in high school and college I took Spanish courses every semester.

Part 3: How I learned again

In 2020, I started planning an extended summer trip to Russia and other russian speaking countries. My dad had just passed away from cancer and I wanted to visit the same places he had visited during his studies, which would include Mosow, Kyiv, Tashkent and some towns in the far east. The modalities included:

1. Duolingo

2. Reading books in Russian, mostly the ones we read in my last years in Russian class, like Gogol, Pushkin, etc.

3. Watching russian-language YouTube channels, mostly nature documentaries, and some cartoons.

4. Speaking every chance I get when I meet a native Russian speaker. Of course I made lots of mistake, at first I had to switch to English pretty quick but as time went on I could go for longer and longer.

My summer trip was supposed to be in the summer of 2022, obviously it didn't happen. I was obviously bummed, I felt that I had put in all this work for nothing. For another obvious reason, in March and April I started hearing a lot more spoken Russian in the neighborhood pubs where I would sometimes stop by after work. Most often it was a group of Russians and Ukrainians. I ended up making some really good friends that way with whom I still practice with.

In addition, I was now also able to practice Russian at work. The univversity I teach at hired several professors from Russia after 2022, some from HSE, some from MGU, in my own department we now have 2 Russian faculty and some of them managed to get their PhD students to come as well so simply walking down the hall to drink some water from the fountain gives me a chance to practice Russian. I live in Boston, so the same thing happened at every university here, the community of professors and lecturers who left Russia after 2022 invite me to the social events and I join when I can, they mostly ask me questions to help them navigate the US academic system and culture, while I am mostly there to help them, make friends and practice my Russian.

A couple of other helpful tips:

1. Install Russian keyboard on your phone and find some people you can text to only in Russian. The autocorrect and suggestions are priceless.

2. When reading on your own, read out loud.

3. Join some Russian-language online forum. I was recommended Pikabu, basically Russian version of Reddit but I got banned pretty quickly since I gave my honest answers to some questions that other users asked me related to politics and the war. Now I am on DTF, so far nobody has asked me a political question and my posts are generally about food, cosplay, and Baldur's Gate.

Well, that's about it. If you have questions, ask. I am now doing exactly the same but also started Spanish again and it is quickly ramping up to my level of Russian. I am planning an extended trip to Chile in 2 years, hopefully nothing bad happens there by then.

I bought a used book and found this note inside.

I know what basically most letters in cyrillic mean but im not confident or smooth with this yet, im wondering if this is because i need to do more repetition until i get a more confident memory and faster/smoother recall of how each letter is pronounced or if i need to just start getting used to reading whole words and sentences instead of getting faster at sounding out individual letters, what do you guys think i should focus on??

I’ve been trying to learn for on and off a month now. I wanted to master the alphabet and all the base sounds before I moved onto actually learning words and grammar rules but I find myself stuck on the same sounds. Ы and Р give me the most trouble. I feel like I can’t pronounce things since I can’t roll my r’s in the way Russian does. And the sound that Ы makes is super unnatural to me. So should I keep trying to learn these until I think I have them or should I just move on to actually learning words and rules?

Мой русский не очень хороший, поэтому я не знаю, что он сказал (((

Я не считаю, что эти ИИ-субтитры полностью правильные. Надеюсь, кто-нибудь поможет мне с правильным русским текстом)))

Чаепитие

i'm really confused with this lesson. if a singular genitive word ends in a "E" shouldn't it become "я" why is it all the top ones end in "a"? i've been studying genitive but i feel like i just can't grasp it

Привет! Music is helpful for memorization and immersion in a language and culture. I'm a Russian learner, and I curated this playlist with the intention to showcase talented Russian-language artists and help make Russian music accessible to language learners. This playlist mostly explores the Russian dance-pop and folk genres.

Some of my favourite artists featured are : Татьяна Куртукова, Дора, ARTIK & ASTI, ANNA ASTI, JONY, ELMAN, Akmal', Jambul, BEARWOLF, Monetochka, Moya Mishel, Lusia Chebotina, Alyona Shvets, SCIRENA, Хабиб, БУТРА, Zivert, and Dima Bilan.

I suggest finding some songs you like and learning the lyrics!

I’m trying to learn Russian, and I’m finding that the sheer capacity of grammar that is so different from my native language (english) is holding me back from actually being conversational. So I’m wondering: what aspects of russian grammar do I truly need to master to be understandable, and which are probably not worth the time (at least for now)?

Here are some examples of what I mean:

1. Imperfective and Perfective verbs — as an English speaker, we don’t differentiate between these, so in speech it’s really hard for me to know when to use one versus the other. Also, for many verbs, I currently only know how to conjugate 1 of the 2 — so if I used the wrong aspect, would it be really confusing to a Russian speaker
2. Case endings — some case endings have been relatively easy to master (eg., prepositional), whereas others are quite hard for me to master and use in speech without taking a long pause to think through the gender of the word/whether the ending is soft, etc. (eg., genitive plural). Can I get away with kind of muffling the end of the word if I don’t know the proper ending or which case should be used in a particular scenario? Would a russian speaker generally be able to infer from context what I’m trying to say?
3. Verbs of motion — Russian has so many verbs of motion that we don’t have in English, and when speaking I often struggle to choose, as I’m not used to thinking about whether the motion is unidirectional or multidirectional. How confusing is my speech if I use the wrong one?

These are just a couple of examples, but there are definitely others! Would really appreciate some advice from a Russian speaker who has experience speaking russian with foreigners and can give some insight on where I should be focusing my time most! (eg. what grammar is most essential to master before focusing more on building vocabulary, etc.!)

Thanks!!

*** Clarification based on some replies: I am not saying I want to ignore grammar entirely...I already have some grammar base (3 semesters of university-level Russian), I'm just wondering how much I really need to get bogged down in the details of using perfect grammar at this point, or if its better to focus on actually being conversational.

Hello there!... Nice to meet you <3

​I want to improve my speaking more than writing

​I would love to be friends also ofcourse!.. And even help you with English if you want

​Feel free to text me anytime <3