Adapting your English to her Russian (or Ukrainian)

Whether you are lucky to deal with a girl who speaks any English, or misfortunate to use a machine translator, these 5 rules would save you and your dates or correspondents a bazillion of nerve cells. The difference in grammars and lexicons may not only prevent understanding, but create quite offensive effects in interpretation.

1. One word – one meaning. And the meaning should not change through combination and transposition of the words. This stumper is especially demanding to users of translation software. At the current level of mass-available technology, it is endowed but with basic vocabulary (far-fetched professional word stocks, if included, result in even more confusion) and not yet able to discern context.

Even face to face, relying on the enire range of non-verbal information, miscommunications may take place. Here are the most common (pardon me those already in the know):

• “I want us to be lovers”. – In Russian, the agent derivative from liubov (love) – liubovnik (paramour), liubovnitsa (mistress) – strictly denotes a non-wed affair or adultery. “To be in love”, “to love each other” sounds so less pragmatic, more romantic.
• “What are we doing tonight?” – NIGHT in Russian is the time that’s usually spent sleeping, in the literal or sexual sense. Hanging around at nights is a popular accusation. For PM pastimes, there’s“evening”, even if it ends next morning.
• “You look beautiful today” – Only today?!
• “How are you today?” – What the interrogation?
• “You’re funny” – could be interpreted as ridiculous. Better say she’s fun, or makes you laugh, or has great sense of humor etc.

To test a phrase or a program itself, you can run the text into Russian and rerun it into English. It’s up to you to use the ware for reading, but not a bit courteous to process your writing. A girl ignorant of machine translation may just shrug or shudder at the result. And even a linguist, without the original text, would have a hard time decoding what you have meant to say.

Stop Chinification: One of my teachers thus tagged the pervasion of constructions verb + postposition. “My cousin has passed out three times. – 3 diplomas? – No, he has graduated, then got drunk into oblivion to commemorate it, and in the hospital he died.” Have I confused it with passed away? Well, this is the case with simple’n’similar things! )

2. Avoid vernacular, catch phrases, meme words. Where could she have learned them? Schools teach English by the past century’s textbooks and dictionaries. Courses are mostly staffed with local people and focused on standard language, too. The common background of books, shows, films is prevalently of domestic production, and those we share are translated and dubbed if not recast. (Translators also can err and guess; actors change intonations, sometimes by mistake, and always in the national manner.) She may listen to same songs yet hear just music and voice. As one of the growing minority of women who’ve long worked in international business, I can tell that work environment is not too rich in daily idioms, either.

Just pick regardful words. To a Russian ear, MAD means psychotic, not just angry. CRAZY also has long used to be a homemade diagnosis. DRUGS imply heroin et al. FIGHT is nothing other than physical combat. If you call so your quarrel or scandal with an ex… you are SCREWED, maybe even publicly at black list boards. By the way, profane connotations equate a word to foulest Russian swearing. Anyone PISSED OFF? Look up this post.

3. Execute (?) not (?) reprieve? My curriculum of English lacked punctuation, and now, as I observe native texts, I just derive one rule, “Spare commas”. ) The point is, that in Russian sentences, which I mimic in this section, different logical parts are more often separated by commas. Some rules just serve legibility and expose the writer’s literacy. Else, lack or presence of a comma has critical importance, like in the jocular example, quoted in the subtitle. If you were to take only one lesson of Russian in your whole life, cram on Punctuation. It’s like road signs: symbols uniform and seemingly universal, but could be placed differently in different countries, and this changes a lot.

A frequent example: “No, thanks, Nataly”. No matter, how well she knows English, her mind is accustomed to Russian logical structures. “No thanks” – minus one comma – is readily understood as “Don’t thank me, Nataly”, “nothing to thank for”. Omit both commas, and it may read, as if you called her “Nataly, who never thanks” or otherwise, more artificially, a “never-thanked” one. A line like this is especially tricky in an instant messenger or SMS.

4. Play a BBC anchorman. Only at slower speed, please. Even her teacher might have never heard native English speech, save for a few library tapes. So, regional accents, swallowed sounds and words may be real communication killers. These Russian women, who look listening so intensely, don’t want to feel dumb and to irritate you with re-asking every word you utter. So you never know how many times she has missed the sense until it comes to acting upon it.

Some ladies quit, or assume a non-motivating manner, even earlier. This may occur if a woman is too upset with her language practice proving insufficient (which happens to every one and hurts to a varying degree), or if her English-as-second-language is better than the man’s.

Don’t play down. Simplifying, “to make it easier for the baby”, often comes to a degree that feels as if one of you is retarded. But what’s your target audience? You won’t like a life of stooping to a girl who lags far behind your actual sophistication. In turn, every Russian woman wants a man she’d be growing up towards. I recall one email: “…I live in Switzerland, it’s a small country in the middle of Western Europe.” Felt so wicked replying with a vivid overview of Swiss places I’ve enjoyed. :) Another guy, “I would like us to know more about each other, maybe we could try to know each other better, yes?” was just begging for a “No!”

5. A smile has evolved from a grin. Sometimes amity and aggression are easily confused. E.g., “Look at you!” as an intro to a compliment has no equivalent in Russian language, but there’s “Look at yourself!” as a rude retort to criticism. Reverse cases, too, are innumerable. Let’s just mention an old quote that treads on a modern kibe: “What a woman wants, that’s what God wants”. (That’s from French. “So God wants flowers, marriage and a talk?!” – Russians speculate.))

A Russian proverb says: “In every joke, there’s a part of truth”. Humor gets tricky when one isn’t sure if the other is kidding, informing or lying, or when a subject chosen is deemed inappropriate. Here are some sorts of jokes to avoid around a Russian woman:

• Jokes that look like promises, allude to feelings prematurely or put them to doubt. Here’s an example and my expanded comment on it.
• Self-misrepresentation (at utmost, “axe murderer” or “when I’m in Forbes”).
• Making fun of her or of people she values – at least until you know each other enough to know she won’t take offense. But an episode when she was great can produce a sweet “our” joke.
• Slighting others: “one’s momma” jokes – intolerably low taste; pronouns like “that bastard”, “hi S.O.B.” – look like personality disorders on the mass scale.
• Physiology. Leil Lowndes in “How to Make Anyone Fall in Love with You” posits that sharing secrets like, say, a problem with greasy hair introduces a little more intimacy. Uhm, not cute, rather nauseating (and please don’t go further into detail if something “makes you pu… sick”). Your body – your business. More about manners
• Picking at awkward trifles. Just help the neighbor naturally, or pretend not noticing like a blue-blood gentleman should. “What were you doing under the counter all this time?” – An American waitor would answer back, like, “Are you jealous?” But a local one – as well as your tablemates – would get rather bewildered, why care make a scene out of that something he has dropped.
• Mocking, especially for no evident use, especially at someone puzzled, chagrined, addressing a non-positive context, etc. “The next time we talked, she tsked. I tsked as a joke and she freaked again… and when I would say that it was only joke, she would say, “Stupid joke”.” – From Marriage Scams: Relationship Help
• Politics and talks of the town. She might have not watched so much of The Simpsons as to remember a character named O.J., ) and foreign judgments of her national affairs can make her defensive against the apparent “Colonialist Condescension” or out of shame for being associated with disgraceful practices of those in the limelight. Could be especially sad if you’ve speculated on insufficient or, in her opinion, incorrect information. In turn, Russian humor takes no care of political correctness – may it not shock you.

Finally, mind body language. Spontaneous hugs and pats, even if your new acquaintance (not yet a girlfriend) does not suspect you of sexual overtures, may still displease her as unexpected intrusion into her private space.

Related posts: 3 First Mistakes in Emails and IMs to a Russian Woman

Joking to a Russian woman: skating on thin ice

Related comments: On “sullenness” and overstatement in expression

On public hugs

Sincerely,

© Comrade Natalia

(please link to this page if making some use of this info ;)