Шаг за Шагом

Russian Songbook

In the course of my recent meanderings through the Russian musical landscape I've relied heavily on the University of Pittsburgh's Russian and East European Summer Language Institute's Russian songbook. What a great resource. I'll have to add it to my resources typelist.

Missing Verses

So, I've worked out which two verses weren't translated (not difficult even with my woeful vocabulary) - the third and the fifth. Here they are, along with my rather vague translation:

Так живя без радости, без муки,
Помню я ушедшие года,
И твои серебряные руки
В тройке, улетевшей навсегда...

So lives without happiness, without suffering,
I remember the fleeing years,
And your silver arms
In the troika, flying away forever…

Дни бегут, печали умножая,
Мне так трудно прошлое забыть.
Как-нибудь однажды, дорогая,
Вы меня свезете хоронить.

The days fly by, multiplying grief,
so it is hard for me to forget yesterday.
Somehow, one day, sweetheart,
You .... to bury me.

I can't get свезете to fit sensibly but it obviously agrees with Вы. Multitran tells me the verb means to take or bring, I'll have to pass on that one.

I mentioned that the song was known, in English as 'The Endless Road'. In Russian that's 'Дорогой длинною', which translates more strictly as 'The Long Road', so there's a bit of poetic license in there maybe...

пока !

Those were the Days

I was indulging myself recently by listening to Sandie Shaw singing 'Those were the Days' (yes, better known as a Mary Hopkins' song) on YouTube and read in one of the comments that it was a Russian song. After a bit of googling I confirmed (in one of languagehat's posts) that it was indeed, much to my surprise, Russian in origin, not the most recent lyrics but certainly the tune.

Apparently the lyrics were written in 1917 by Boris Fomin in conjunction with the poet Konstantin Podrevsky. "Endless Road", as the song was called, became immensely popular.  Here are the original lyrics with thanks and appropriate acknowledgments to this site:

Ехали на тройке с бубенцами,
А вдали мелькали огоньки.
Мне б мне, соколики, за Вами,
Душу бы развеять от тоски.

Дорогой длинною, да ночью лунною,
Да с песней той, что вдаль летит звеня,
И с той старинною с той семиструнною,
Что по ночам так мучала меня...

Так живя без радости, без муки,
Помню я ушедшие года,
И твои серебряные руки
В тройке, улетевшей навсегда...

Да, выходит, пели мы за даром
Понапрасну ночь за ночью жгли
Если б мы покончили со старым
Так и ночи эти отошли

Дни бегут, печали умножая,
Мне так трудно прошлое забыть.
Как-нибудь однажды, дорогая,
Вы меня свезете хоронить.

В даль родную новыми путями
Нам отныне ехать суждено
Ехали на тройке с бубенцами
Да теперь проехали давно


You rode on a troika with sleigh bells,
And in the distance lights flickered..
If only I could follow you now
I would dispel the grief in my soul!

By the long road, in the moon light,
And with this song that flies off, ringing,
And with this ancient, this ancient seven-string,
That has so tormented me by night.

But it turns out our song was futile,
In vain we burned night in and night out.
If we have finished with the old,
Then those nights have also left us!

Out into our native land, and by new paths,
We have been fated to go now!
...You rode on a troika with sleigh bells,
[But] you've long since passed by!

The observant among you will note that there are 6 verses in Russian and only 4 in English. My next job is to work out which ones have been translated (not a big ask) and then translate the two that weren't translated in the first place.

Обещания, Обещания

Promises, promises ... On November 13th 2005 I promised you some Russian words with German etymologies ad I always keep my promises - eventually. Hopefully I've got that word - обещания -  'promises' - correct, it's been a while since I used the Cyrillic keyboard and I've still got no idea what case that's in or much idea of any other grammatical niceties but here goes.

Yes, after wrestling with my new job for nearly 18 months and focusing on precious little else,  it's time to divert some of my thought processes into linguistic matters - and get some balance into my life. All work and no play etc etc.

So here we go, let the vocabulary expansion programme begin.

почта - post-office
конфета - sweets
лагерь - camp

That's it, I can't remember any more and I'm not about to go ploughing through my Russian etymological dictionary in search of them either.

On the subject of German, I've always been intrigued by the Russian word (and other Slavic languages come to think of it) for German - немец - literally dumb or speaking indistinctly and a wonderful ethnic comment on the massive difference between the Germanic and Slavic language groups.

До Свиданя

Well, that's it. What with my new job (which is very mobile and unsettled at the moment) I'm barely in a position to maintain my old blog without pretending that I can sensibly post to this blog as well. Something has to give and this blog is it. I'll leave it up for a while longer but its days are numbered.

I haven't given up on Russian yet but I'm struggling to devote a lot of time to it. It took me many years of study to get a French degree so I am particularly persistent in these matters and will not give up. Linguistically, I feel as if I've made one of those treks up as far as the comprehension base-camp. Much of the hard work is yet to come but you can see the summit of fluency from there and that's encouraging.

In all honesty the alphabet is now second nature and much of the grammar didn't prove to be difficult (I'm partly fooling myself here by consigning all the case endings into some sort of lexical variation category).  It's the vocabulary which has proven to be the main stumbling block. I know that repeated usage will overcome that problem but I'm simply not using the words enough for them to stick at the moment. Not totally true, the verb сообшать (to report) stuck last week but at the rate of one word a week I'll be dead before I'm fluent at that rate.

Enjoy your  studies, everyone. It was fun while it lasted. Thanks to all those who hepled me out once or twice. До свиданя !

Etymological Dictionary

Yes, I'm still alive, shock horror, and a very  Happy New Year to my miniscule readership. Time has been in very short supply of late, so much so that learning Russian, let alone blogging about it, has become exceedingly difficult. The principal problem is my new job which has invoiled a new routine and lots to learn, challenging and very enjoyable so far but it has come at something of a cost to my ability to focus on Russian and, inevitably, at a cost to my ability to then blog about it. Anyway, my interest level is still high so I'm optimistic that I can continue to learn, albeit slowly.

Just before Xmas I acquired a copy of Terence Wade's Russian Etymological Dictionary. It may be stretching the point to call it an etymological dictionary since it is really only a vocabulary sampler, focussing on many words of foreign origin or unusual etymology. Despite that minor shortcoming (if you were after a comprehensive etymological dictionary you'd be justified in complaining) it's eminently well put together and even readable in some measure (if you're a weird kind of person like myself that actually reads things like dictionaries etc).

Today's word of the day is потный -  sweaty, just like Bundaberg at the moment.

Happy New Year !

Well, here we are at the end of 2005. Where precisely did I get to with my fledgling attempts at learning Russian ? Not as far as I would have liked but I've made progress. I can look at a sentence and disassemble it grammatically to the point that I can generally translate the gist with the aid of a dictionary. To be honest I haven't so much learnt Russian as Russian Grammar but that's a function of my personal preferences and approach. Only through a much more diligent and repeated approach will my vocabulary and ability to 'memorise' correct case endings develop. Vocabulary has been the killer and I'm not sure whether that's a function of my declining number of brain cells or the relative lack of Germanic or Romance look-alikes or both.

The CDs I bought, 'Take Off in Russian' proved a major disappointment. The learning curve was just too steep. One minute I could follow the leasson, the next I was drowning with only a few familiar words to cling to. Too hard by far. It was relatively cheap and, of course, you only get what you pay for. Perhaps the answer here is a new course with an audiovisual emphasis - straight audio learning has never been a successful method for me.

Anyway, it kept the mind entertained and challenged and that has to be a good thing. It only remains for me to wish all fellow bloggers a Happy New Year - I'd also do it in Russian but this computer simply won't co-operate.

Pathetic

It's been a month since I last posted anything on this blog - quite pathetic. In my defence I'll just say that life has been very busy. I've had a couple of interviews and been offered and subsequently accepted a new position here in sunny Queensland, this time a bit nearer the coast, Cairns to be exact.

I gave some serious consideration to enrolling in a Certificate in Russian which can be done externally through Sydney's Macquarie University but with the pressures of a new routine and new job I thought that might be just a bit too much. I'll review that option come the end of next year.

While trawling the web to find out the Russian for Merry Christmas I bumped into this site which I'd not previously visited. Browsing through the site there are numerous ads for Russian brides but, not withstanding that, there are about 15 pages of very useful basic phrases which would really round out anyone's basic conversational skills especially if courtship and love is your objective ! Perhaps the best aspect is that many of the phrases have sound file links so you can actually hear the phrase. Top marks, a great site and a useful resource.

French Loan Words

I've slowly come to the realisation that there are quite a few French loan-words in Russian. In the interests of boosting vocabulary I thought I'd make up a bit of a list of those I've bumped into during my reading (which doesn't include reading the dictionary). I won't pretend the list is exhaustive:

• Душ
• Шезлонг
• Тротуар
• Велосипед
• Этаж
• Этюд
• Реклама
• Витрина

There are also a few German words which I'll look at next time. Can anyone point out some obvious ones that I've missed ? These are a real breeze to add to the vocabulary if you've studied French before.

Slowly Growing

A couple of nights ago I caught up with an old friend and the Russian lady I mentioned in a previous post.  Last time we met I was a bit overawed and completely dumbstruck but this time I was determined to have a go and managed to construct a few phrases (If I said they were meaningful sentences, I'd be lying). We discussed all sorts of things in a mix of my tragic Russian and her rather good English, although she's very reserved and reticent to say too much for fear of sounding silly (and she thinks she's got a problem !). In the course of our chat, before my friend turned up and we went out for tea, I picked up a few phrases and words which should prove useful in the future:

погода - the weather, what else would an Englishman start talking about !

жаркий - hot, because it was, disgustingly so. A useful word to describe North Queensland at this time of the year !

сегодня и вчера - today and yesterday. I have no trouble remembering завтра, but those two won't stick, or wouldn't. Simply using them and thinking about them has helped a lot. сегодня is tricky, pronounced sye-vod-nya, presumably having something to do with сеи, this and дня, day. Apparently сего is also acceptable. Вчера is presumably a corruption of вечер somehow which would make sense.

всегда поздно - always late, in reference to my mate who always is, reliably and inevitably so it would seem. поздно is pronounced poz-na. Don't ask me where the 'д' went.

рука - arm or hand. I asked here about this especially because my dictionary gives the same word for both. I'm still confused about how you tell the difference. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

Later on we strolled along the Strand in Townsville, a humid warm breeze drifting in from the Coral Sea, vey different to the Black Sea, черно море, near her home in Russia.

Thus, slowly grows the vocabulary.