Posted by Josefina
Wisdom is meant to be shared with others. No piece of advice given to me proved to be so wise in regards to learning Russian as the one I am about to share with you today. Back in the days when I was biding my time in Sweden after studying one semester in Saint Petersburg and before heading out into the wild unknown in Siberia, I managed to spend an entire week attending classes in Russian Language at Gothenburg University’s Department of Slavic Languages. (Little did I know back then that I was to receive my Bachelor from that very same department roughly three years later without attending any more classes, but that’s a whole other story!) The professor who taught Russian grammar told us this during our first class: “If you’re only going to buy one book about Russian language while in Russia, let it be a «толковый словарь русского языка» [Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Language], and I bet you’ll never regret it.” I put his words to the test as soon as I arrived in Omsk and the first thing I aquired at the book store was a big green dictionary of some 940 pages by С. И. Ожегов and Н. Ю. Шведова for 220 rubles. It proved to come in handy so often that I brought it with me back home to Sweden, and bought yet another one just like it when I moved to Yekaterinburg, this time black and for 10 rubles less. If you’re going to Russia, be it for a short period of time or to study a couple of months at a Russian university, it is now also my most wise advice for you to bring one of these babies back home with you.
Don’t loose hope as you get lost in the prolific literature directed at Russophiles; though constructive reading as Helen Yakobson’s “Conversational Russian”, Insight Guide’s “Russia”, “Colloquial Russian: The Complete Course for Beginners”, Michael Bunyon’s “Life In Russia” and Culture Smart’s “Russia: Customs & Etiquette” may be, it’s the book in the background that takes the beneficial cake: the green «Толковый словарь русского языка» [’Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Language’]!
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Posted by Josefina
As I was sitting down to write today’s post about grammar (the subject was actually rather interesting, and something that could be useful for most, but I guess it’s nothing ‘pressing’, as it could probably wait a day or two) I surfed through my usual Russian language news sites, and came across many horrendous titles about the current war. And I come to wonder, even though I should know; «Что происходит в Грузии?» [what's going on in Georgia?] What strikes me the most is the difference between what the Russian media writes about it, and what you can read in, for example, English-language papers such as The Moscow Times. Are there really two wars? In one the Russians are bombing Georgia, and in the other defending themselves from being bombed by Georgia? In this confusion I thought I would turn to you, dear readers, and ask a very important question - where do you go to read Russian news? Do you visit Moscow Times? Or do you prefer Russia Today? Maybe you read Russian papers online, like Комсомольская правда, Известия or Русский репортёр? What English-language sources are best for information about Russia? In a situation as this one it would be good to know where you, Russophiles like me, turn for information. It is of course not imperative to have any kind of point of view, or even opinion, on this conflict, as it is very complicated, but I would like to know what kind of sites, maybe bloggs you read in times like these. This article that I found today, called “Conflict Opens Front In Media”, I can highly recommend to anyone who’d like to read something about how the war is portrayed on Russian TV.
Posted by Josefina
Despite making the unforgivable mistake of forgetting to post my text to go with the picture in the last post, it still received more attention than all the other recent, more grammar-related posts. After all, even though we’d all really like to speak better Russian, it is no secret any more that it is this country’s literature and writers that make our hearts beat a little bit faster. And after reading through your comments on the death of Александр Исаевич Солженицын [Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn] I realized that we all have a personal relationship with this writer, our own point of view on him, a love affair of sorts with his works. I remember when I first started reading «Один день Ивана Денисовича» [“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”] in February 2005, just after arriving in Omsk, and the family that I lived with caught a glimpse of it. The mother’s first reaction was to ask me: «Почему ты читаешь эту книгу? Это очень грустная книга.» [“Why are you reading this book? It is a very sad book.”] I tried to explain to her that it was interesting to me, that I wanted to know about the past and that I had heard many things about the book, as well as about its author. My words didn’t make any difference to her, as she seemed to have made her mind up about him a long time ago about him – he was not her cup of tea (today [070808] Moscow Times published an interesting piece that throws some light upon how Russians themselves look at Solzhenitsyn: “Solzhenitsyn’s Troubled Prophetic Mission”). As for me, Solzhenitsyn holds a special place in my heart not so much for what he wrote, but for what he meant to my grandmother. She owned all of his books in Swedish, and when she passed away last year I was left with his entire production in translation. I made a promise to myself to read them all in time, but for now he is of importance to me mostly because he was my grandmother’s favorite writer.
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I was just commenting on the fact that the term itself is a problematic one, in the context of what I said about Jews reading the Christian Bible. Sorry if I was unclear."
