Сегодня в лингафонном кабинете ELEMENTARY RUSSIAN (Урок 6, неделя 2 Unit 6 Week 2 Elementary Russian)

Сегодня среда! 

Привет! Как дела? У меня всё хорошо! Или нет...

1. Spend TEN MINUTES practicing our vocab quiz on Memrise. Then take the quiz (just a reminder, this is a closed book quiz)
 
2. Почитаем!  read this article (did you know that you can subscribe to NYTimes through Stetson and ERAU libraries?) for some cultural insights about the question, How are you?...  In my experience, it's mostly true, though younger Russians understand that you're not really asking how they're doing when you ask... How do you do?

3. А теперь... Review quickly counting by tens. Listen to this recording and read along with the numerals from below. Listen a couple times...

NB a couple things: Thousand in Russian is тысяча. That word's etymology traces back to *tuHsont-, a proto-Indo European root that also gives us thousand.  So, like сто hundred (like cent), there's an historical connection between тысяча and thousand. (Without geeking out TOO much, the really old word in Russian for thousand was тьма, which now means, like, "darkness" or "gloom"... which is what tuhsont meant, too... You get a lot of stuff, and it looks like a cloud, like gloom! Russian stopped using тьма to mean a thousand a thousand years ago... COOL!) 

In Russian (as in English) the word is a noun. Think about, for instance, the difference between: "Ten cats sat in the room" and "A thousand cats sat in the room." Weird, isn't it? That's because thousand is a noun in English. 

The word for thousand, тысяча, is feminine, so you get однА тысячА; in 2, 3, and 4 thousand, the word тысяча is in the genitive singular form, две (feminine form of 2) тысячИ, три тысячИ, четыре тысячИ.

Five thousand and higher, the word тысяча is in the genitive plural form, тысяч. (You don't yet know that form! Все ХОРОШО!)

4. PRINT OUT OR DOWNLOAD THIS LAB WORKSHEET or grab it from the lab table. Do упражнение А, writing down the prices of the items (it's on the second page of the lab worksheet). The challenge here is to figure out how many thousands and hundreds each item costs. You'll hear the word тысяча in various forms; the forms aren't as important as the numbers in front. 

Then, come back to the first page of the worksheet! Work some more on the use and formation of the Genitive case. Do oral drills 7,8,9. Do them in writing. Pen or pencil or just type in the word document. Have them checked by our tutors. 

Anyone interested in poetry, history, politics... try giving this poem (from like 1917) a shot...

Скифы
Мильоны — вас. Нас — тьмы, и тьмы, и тьмы.
Попробуйте, сразитесь с нами!
Да, скифы — мы! Да, азиаты — мы,
С раскосыми и жадными очами!

Александр Блок

Mmmmmm... Блины! East Slavs eat a lot of pancakes. Everyone should eat more pancakes.