Ok, Ready? Cool.
I didn’t actually notice that many mistakes this week, like I do think the level is quite high this week. Hats off to you, very well done!
A few things I have noticed that came up regularly are things like certain words, where you tend to use the Russian version in that you have one word and the following word is in the genitive case in Russian so you translate it as ‘word of…and whatever’.
Often in English it doesn’t quite work like that and instead of one word, word in the genitive case or ‘of…whatever’, that second word goes like this and it becomes one word.
So one example I heard, ‘style of life’, becomes ‘lifestyle’.
Do you see? And things like, um, there’s a shop here called ‘дом книги’ – ‘house of book’ literally, but it would be ‘bookhouse’ in English. Do you see?
Another issue I have noticed, which is probably quite a big topic, is verbs of motion. In English verbs of motion are a lot simpler than in Russian.
Another issue I have noticed, which is probably quite a big topic, is verbs of motion. In English verbs of motion are a lot simpler than in Russian.
In Russian you have a lot of ‘unidirectional’ and ‘multidirectional’ and various prefixes that determine whether you are going to somewhere, you’re arriving, you’re approaching, you’re exiting, you’re entering…like, there’s so many, and it’s quite hard for me to learn them.
But when you translate them into English they often come out wrong. So for example, you often say ‘when I come to a country’. It doesn’t quite work; it’s ‘when I go to a country’, ‘when I travel to a country’, ‘when I arrive in a country.’ Things like that. You use the word ‘come’ in too many instances where it’s not appropriate.
So, ‘when I…when the train comes from wherever’, that doesn’t work. It’s ‘when the train goes from’ or ‘leaves from’. There are significant differences with that, you know whenever you have the prefix при in Russian, it doesn’t always translate as ‘come’ or ‘arrive’; it can translate as ‘leave’ or ‘get to’ in a lot of instances.
So just be aware of that, you know when you’re thinking in Russian and you’re trying to say words in English, don’t always assume that it means ‘come’, because things like ‘приходить’ can mean ‘come’…but not always. OK?
The other one I’ve noticed is the use of the word ‘reach’, and I think this comes from when you have the prefix ‘до’ in Russian, um so you know ‘доехать до’ whatever. In a lot of cases that is translated as to get to somewhere.
You know, a train can reach a destination but you get to a destination, you arrive at that destination, you’ve finished your journey kind of thing. You can reach a place but it’s not as common, it’s more ‘to get to somewhere’ or like ‘to get as far as somewhere’ sometimes. But I’ve noticed a lot of errors with that, in using ‘reach’.
Cause you have to remember that the word ‘to reach’ has another meaning as well, it’s like, ‘to achieve something’ yeah, ‘to reach a certain level of knowledge or awareness’, something like that.
It’s not always to do with getting somewhere. But yeah, I’m sure that there’s other mistakes with verbs of motion that probably come up but ‘to come’ and ‘to reach’ are the most common ones and just be careful as to how you’re translating them because when you use при and when you use до, it does not automatically translate as ‘to come’ or ‘to reach’, ok? So, yay.
That’s all. Ok. Finished, done, complete, over…!