My plan to welcome our newest blogger Neil to the team pretty much blew up in my face. Since he’s going to be doing some really cool blogging on Russia and in celebration of his first few posts here I figured I would learn a little Russian online to stay in the theme of things. I only wished to find a simple “hello” or “welcome” to greet him and to pass onto you potential travelers. Things didn’t go as smoothly as I had imagined. Russia has that crazy Cyrillic alphabet, which is fine, however I couldn’t find any sites that provided the phonetic spelling of the word in an alphabet I’m familiar with. Even when I played with the translation dictionaries I was given a set of characters that made no sense to me. For these reasons today’s lesson will work a little different than the last.
Today’s word is a Russian word used in Russia:
Groceries
The picture above is a sign found in the country somewhere that says ‘groceries.’ It looks awfully long and I have no clue how to pronounce this one. Sorry guys. There seem to be several great methods for learning this challenging language online, especially if your interest goes as far as reading and writing the alphabet. Check out Master Russian first. They have numerous excellent sound files and the text is clear and easy to read. Learning also goes beyond your Russian A, B, C’s at their site as they have crosswords, literature, proverbs, folk music, and homework help. Other good sites include Learning Russian and this Ectaco Translation Dictionary. Click here for two language book rec’s on Amazon.