The
Winter Olympics are coming soon (Feb. 7) in Sochi, Russia! If you’re one of the
fortunate ones who has tickets and a hotel room, you’ll more than likely need
some kind of guide to cope with the Russian language. If you’re single and can
strike up a close relationship with an English-speaking Russian sweetheart, you
need read no further - you’re all set. Aside from that, however, it would be a
very good idea to have a phrasebook at the ready. And here’s one that will help
you out faithfully in just about all the situations you’re liable to encounter.
It gives you not hundreds, but thousands of phrases, terms and individual words
for making acquaintances, socializing, carrying on simple conversations, coping
with everyday living, responding to emergencies, and, best of all,
understanding and discussing all of the Olympic sports. Or, outside of the
Olympic venues, engaging in the various winter sports. In the phrasebook you’ll
find a wealth of material on downhill skiing, slalom skiing, cross-country
skiing, ski jumping, biathlon, snowboarding, figure skating, speed skating, ice
skating, bobsleigh, ice hockey, curling and other winter pastimes. This is the
first Russian phrasebook to cover all the winter sports in one work.
What
you’ll especially like about this phrasebook is that you don’t have to stumble
around through categories to find things, as in other phrasebooks. The material
is organized like a dictionary, with phrases and terms grouped under the
alphabetized key word(s) that they contain. So, for instance, if you want to
say “How’s the snow there?”, you just go to “snow” and there it is. The Russian
equivalents are first given in their Cyrillic form and then in their English
phonetics, which are in blue font. In front of every key word there’s an
asterisk. This is for search purposes. When you search for, say, “ski” in a
reader, without the asterisk, you’re going to get every instance of “ski” in
the entire book. This could possibly run into the hundreds. When you add the
asterisk before the word (*ski), however, you get only the main listings (for
the noun and for the verb).
The
phrasebook also provides you with the Russian translations of many professions,
so that you can tell Russians what your job is. This is something that
phrasebooks rarely include.
Following
the main phrasebook section there are 11 appendices. These include the Russian
alphabet & phonetics, Russian grammar, cardinal & ordinal numbers, clock
& calendar time, the metric system, adult heights & weights, clothing
sizes, a large Russian-English glossary of food & drink, and a
Russian-English glossary of signs & labels. Russian grammar is intricate,
to put it mildly, so it will greatly enhance your ability to understand
Russians, if you’re aware of at least the major points. Such as that even your
own name can be in six different grammatical cases.
Most,
but not all, of the questions in the phrasebook are of the yes-or-no variety.
The word “why” is included, but I can’t recall that we made any phrases out of
it. You probably wouldn’t want to hear the answer to why.
Winter sports, as you might imagine, are enormously
popular in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus all the time, not just during the Olympics,
so if you plan to visit any of those countries in the winter season, this
phrasebook can be extremely valuable to you.