A talented student
After having studied Russian for 2 1/2 years, I spent a semester in Moscow. One of the most challenging aspects of the Russian language is that there seem to be practically no patterns to govern where the stress on a syllable goes and accents are not written. Russians simply know where the accent goes.Apparently, some words can be spelled exactly the same but mean totally different things depending on stress. So one day in class, I wanted to say that I did my homework yesterday: Vchera vecherom ya napisal domashneye zadaniye with the stress on the middle syllable of napisal. My professor burst into laughter. She informed me that I most likely meant to say: ya napisal ... with the stress on the last syllable. Just by getting the stress wrong I've actually said 'yesterday I urinated my homework'. Oops.
Sent by: Jason
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I'm sure that was funny for the professor to hear that yesterday you urinated your homework.
Maybe she just had not much experience of teaching foreign students and didn't get used to those "common" mistakes. But I'm sure she didn't mean to offend you and the thing that she was laughing represents her positive attitude to the students.
Besides in learning every language it is easy to make a mistake... probably I just did some here in this message. We all had to face the same problem and move on. We are all in the same boat!
When you're a native speaker of Russian you never think of those words similarities, we were perhaps told to pay attention to it at school, but then it just never occurs to us, that e.g. plachu with different stresses means different things, we just never make a mistake here. For learners of Russian these tricks really present great difficulties.
I had the same problem with napisat'. I used it repeatedly for about an hour in front of about 10 Russian speakers. There seemed to be some smiling, but no-one told me until the end. The problem is that I mix with a lot of Polish people, and that seems to be similar to the correct way to say it in Polish. I have also spoken about the 4 gardeners of the Apocolypse (sadovnik as opposed to vsadnik). I'm sure we will all continue to say more funny things for a long time to come.
As a Russian native speaker I totally agree with Maria. We all do mistakes. You should try to do more listening exercises ... watch Russian movies for example ... Soon you'll get used to it.
Russian is my mother tongue, but back in school I received C in Russian and B in English (very strange). I am horrible with grammar rules. The other difficulties can be with pech - to bake (verb) and pech - the stove (noun), and so on..
In 1990 I was visiting my Russian boyfriend in Moscow. One day we went on a trip to Zagorsk - today called Sergiyev Posad - the site of the greatest of Russian monasteries. Back from the trip that day I told my boyfriend's mother about the things I had seen, for example lots of priests: ...i ya tam videla mnogo pop. She suddenly burst into laughter. What I actually said was not "I saw many priests there" but "I saw many bottoms"! The mistake was in the gender. I'd used the feminine instead of the masculine. I should have said mnogo popov!
Believe me, only highly educated people make no mistakes in Russian. I'm a native Russian and I can always find some new mistakes in my own or my friends' language. In fact, foreigners just do the most frequent mistakes. For example, for all those above mentioned mistakes you can find rules in the Russian grammar. So it's just a question of time and developing a feeling for the language.
That was not a very friendly way for the professor to react. Wrong stress is very common among learners of Russian.
I'm glad to say that my Russian teacher also has a sense of humour - laughter definitely helps when you're learning a language. I bet you will never, ever make the same mistake again.
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