Russian Blog

In May three years ago I tried to get on a bus in Omsk [Siberia] but was refused entrance by the conductor with the words: «Нет местов!» It was the first time I had ever heard a Russian make a mistake when speaking their native language and that may have been the reason as to why I was not frustrated with being forced to wait for the next bus. Instead I felt a strange sense of superiority – already after eight months of studying Russian in Russia I knew very well that the word «место» [place; seat] in genitive plural is «мест» and therefore the correct way of saying that there are no seats available would be «нет мест». Of course I had heard from my teachers at Омский государственный педагогический университет [Omsk State Pedagogical University] that Russians, like all other people, make mistakes in their own language, and some far more serious than saying местов or проблемов, but until I heard it with my own ears I hadn’t been able to believe it to be true. One of my teachers in Omsk, with whom I constantly fought on the issue of whether it is correct to say «в Украине» [in Ukraine] or «на Украине» [in the Ukraine] after the Orange Revolution of 2004, gave me a link to an excellent webpage constructed to help Russians speak better Russian: www.gramma.ru/ But don’t let that scare you if you feel your Russian is barely beyond the stage of reading the Cyrillic alphabet – it’s motto «Говорим и пишем правильно: культура письменной речи» [we speak and write correctly: the culture of written speech] clearly shows it’s for anyone who should feel inclined to so-called «ботаничество в области русского языка» [nerdiness in the area of Russian language].

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Everybody knows how to say I love you. «Я люблю тебя» is as much a given as vodka and borsch – and just as much of a cliché. But what about saying “I like you” instead? Not as romantic perhaps, and perhaps not as thrilling, either. Perhaps I find Russians expressions of liking and disliking rather meager only because I was brought up in a country that was afraid to hail its own flag whereas Russians tend to wear white, red and blue whenever the occasion doesn’t forbid them. The new learner will know how to express boundless love for everything from his motherland and his parents to coffee and soccer long before even thinking about emotions a little less heated. The verb to love, «любить», is a wonderful verb not only because of its simplicity and clarity, but also for how it interacts with those dreaded six cases. It has the logical subject in nominative and the logical object in accusative, and to illustrate this I present to you a translation of what the beginner above could express after Russian 101: «Я люблю свою родину, я люблю своих родителей, я люблю кофе и я люблю футбол».

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