Ну, я бы сказал — не эффективный, а эффектный. (Well, I’d say not so much effective as… effective?) My favorite Russian mind-bender: Paronyms - words that have the same root word but ...

Щепетильный: meticulous. There’s nothing like a Russian word to keep you up at night, force you to pull out a 12-pound thesaurus and a pile of reference books, and leave you scratching ...

One of the tricky places in Russian is the cognate zone: that place where English and Russian words that sound alike and have the same root hang out and dream up ways ...

Time for a pop quiz! What is гаврик? a) a nickname for Gavriil; b) a sleeping mat for dogs, a conflation of гав (bark) and коврик (small rug); c) a silly person; ...

You're standing in the entryway of your apartment building, glancing at the utility bills you've just taken out of your mailbox. You see your neighbor step out of the elevator, but before ...

In the world of linguistics, the notion that perception is shaped by language and language is shaped by environment is not entirely well-regarded.

I am going to close my mind to the horrors of the past few days and cast my gaze on the far more benign sphere of Russian adjectives.

Normal people have normal hobbies. They garden. They hike through the woods. They collect stamps. I am not a normal person.

While I was walking in the park the other day, I saw a particularly attractive little dog, whose wiggling, tail wagging and walking toward me seemed like a clear indication of friendly ...

Russia and Russians have a reputation for doing things big: big land, big hearts, big feats — the biggest, tallest, largest, longest whatever, from aquariums to hotels. Appropriately they have a few ...