Ask me anything about the Soviet Union/ Former Soviet States

[2dimes]

Sounds pretty good. Maybe your role is to make sure they not have bad accents.

Are there yaks?

Haven't seen any. Plenty of cows, pigs, chickens and stray dogs though!

Are you sure the yaks are not used to fill those dumplings? I bet they would be delicious.

[Baron Von PWN]

Sounds pretty good. Maybe your role is to make sure they not have bad accents.

Are there yaks?

Haven't seen any. Plenty of cows, pigs, chickens and stray dogs though!

Are you sure the yaks are not used to fill those dumplings? I bet they would be delicious.

Could be! but I suspect the filling is pork.

[2dimes]

Is it spring there yet?

[tkr4lf]

How difficult is it to learn Russian? I suspect the simple fact they use the Cyrillic alphabet makes it 10 times harder than learning another European language that uses our alphabet.

Are there any weird language quirks?

Speaking of Cyrillic, have you got to the point that you can read it fluently, or do you still have to mentally translate? Or is that even applicable here? I mean, when learning a different language, many people will at first translate each word into their native language in their mind, but eventually get to where they read the sentence and understand it without having to mentally translate it. Have you reached that point?

[Baron Von PWN]

Is it spring there yet?

Kindof. It's like Canadian spring, slowly getting warmer with random cold snaps/snow storms. We had a good foot of snow on Saturday, but its been raining since.

[Baron Von PWN]

How difficult is it to learn Russian? I suspect the simple fact they use the Cyrillic alphabet makes it 10 times harder than learning another European language that uses our alphabet.

Are there any weird language quirks?

Speaking of Cyrillic, have you got to the point that you can read it fluently, or do you still have to mentally translate? Or is that even applicable here? I mean, when learning a different language, many people will at first translate each word into their native language in their mind, but eventually get to where they read the sentence and understand it without having to mentally translate it. Have you reached that point?

It's probably as difficult as any other. I don't think the alphabet is all that tricky, it actually shares quite a few letters with ours so we half know it to start out.

I find the Georgian alphabet much more difficult. გამარჯობა! I can barely work it out.

If I know the words that are written I can read it fluently, without mental translation. Unfortunately my vocab remains limited so I can't really read a large text yet.