In Russian language, there are some words related to housing that emerged in the later Soviet time. Here is the explanation of those words and some country-specific information.
Some types of Soviet houses and flats
“хрущёвка”
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In Soviet and Russian schools, we always have been using 5-mark system. The highest mark is 5 and the lowest mark is 2. The mark 1 is, in theory, the lowest school mark, but it is almost never actually given.
Here are some informal words that we use sometimes for the marks: Full text »
The word “service” has several meanings. If you translate it into Russian, you must use different words in different contexts.
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Give-take #1
In incentive statements, we sometimes use the verb “давай”/”давайте”. In such cases it means something like “come on”.
For example, we want to hurry, invite somebody, etc.
Examples:
“Давай, начнём уже наконец” (“Come on, let’s start after all”)
“Давай, приходи к нам” (“Come over to our place”)
If we want to urge somebody to give something to us, there is an interesting contradictive expression: “давай, бери” or “бери, давай” (the 2nd one may imply a little discontent).
That is the word “давай” may mean “give” (smth to me), the word “бери” means “take” (smth) and so we get something like “Hey, Vova, give take that stuff!”. 
This “give take” means “take” (“come on, take this”).
There is an interesting form of negation in informal Russian speech: “да нет”. That literally means “yes no”. This expression may be used:
* when а question admits positive or negative answer and the negative one is given:
Example:
- Он пойдёт с нами?
- Да нет, врядли он захочет.
* in a discussion:
Example:
- Здесь пройти проще.
- Да нет, вот здесь дорога короче!
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This blog is intended to help English speakers learning Russian.
Russian is my native language and I will write about some interesting and funny things about the Russian language.
I will explain some details of grammar, colloquial expressions, slang (how could we do without it?) and words associated with Russian history and culture.
These notes are rather for intermediate level and higher. You will unlikely find such notes in an ordinary teach-yourself book.
I hope this blog will be useful for all learners of Russian and useful for me, because it gives me special practise in English when I try to explain you some features of the language, Russian expressions and shades of meaning.
