Yearlyglot

I’m noticing a troubling theme in the language-learning and language-blogging community: people who are looked to as subject matter experts, time and time again, encouraging their readers and followers to forego grammar.
I’m deeply troubled by this.

While studying Russian last year, I remember learning the word почему means “why” and then later learning the word зачем and that it also means “why”. In the absence of a clear definition at the time, I just made the assumption that it’s a stylistic thing and started swapping them in use to try… continue reading

One of the most difficult barriers in language study is the disconnect between the words and pronunciations you learn in a book and those you hear in daily speech.
In English, we write “I am going to…” but we say “I’m gonna”. We write “what do you think?”, but we say “Whaddya think?” This same… continue reading

One of the many (seemingly neverending) details about Russian that can be confusing to a native English speaker is understanding the choice of prepositions in Russian. But once again, you’ll find that the concept is actually quite easy once you learn to think like a Russian!

Last week I was in Uzbekistan, and I wrote about that a few days ago. I recently finised editing the video I had taken while I was there, and I’ve compiled a short report about my visit.

If my posts have seemed canned for the past week, or if you’ve noticed a lack of follow-ups on your comments, it’s because I’ve been away for the past week in Tashkent, Uzbekistan…

In a comment on a recent post, someone pointed out that he was learning Czech and that my Russian posts are helpful even though he can’t understand any of the Russian words that I write. Today, I’d like to show everyone how easy it is to learn the Russian alphabet and start understanding those things I write.

Last week, I took a moment to discuss verb aspects, in hopes of clearing up those scary words perfective and imperfective. Today I want to share the amazing formula with which Russian verb become perfective or imperfective.

Perhaps one of the most exciting facets of the Russian language — and one of the many reasons why it is my favorite language — is the logical construction of words using prefixes and stems.

In spite of the fact that I’m focusing on Italian, I wanted to take a break for a moment to talk about one of the many things I love about the Russian language. When learning the days of the week, I find it helpful to understand where the names come from. In Russian, this ended up being super-easy!