russian

I’ve tried a lot of fonts for Cyrillic. My favourite is Georgia. As a non-native Russian speaker, there’s something about serif fonts, either on-screen or in print, that makes the text so much more legible.

The Russian letters ё and e have a complex and troubled relationship. The two letters are pronounced differently, but usually appear the same in written text. This presents complications for Russian learners and for text-to-speech systems. In several recent projects, I have needed to normalize the spelling of Russian words. For examples, if I have the written word определенно , is the word actually определенно ? Or is it определённо ?

I was puzzled by this sentence on the BBC Russian Service: Нет свидетельств тому, что на нынешних выборах дело обстоит иначе. ББС Мошенничество на выборах в США? Проверяем факты в речи Трампа It means “There is no evidence that in the current election things are any different." but the puzzle isn’t the meaning, it’s the grammatical case in which the author has placed the demonstrative pronoun то , which is dative here тому .

While Russian text intended for native speakers doesn’t show accented vowel characters to point out the syllabic stress (ударение) , many texts intended for learners often do have these marks. But how to apply these marks when typing? Typically, for Latin keyboards on macOS, you can hold down the key (like long-press on iOS) and a popup dialog will show you options for that character. But in the standard Russian phonetic keyboard it doesn’t work.

Semelfactive verbs, a special class of perfectives. (Applies to Russian, but also to English grammar, too.)

I’ve recently discovered the L-R system of language learning and have been setting up to learn it. The idea is that you begin with long texts - novels, for example - in your target language (L2) and follow a systematic approach to reading and listening. L-R system in a nutshell Here are the steps: Read the text in L1 (your native language) and become familiar with it.^[I rephrased this intruction from other sources that say “read the translation” because what if the text itself if a translation?

A pervasive, but unusual feature of Russian grammar.

A method of searching the official Russian language National Corpus using Python and SQLite.