Your first subject

DID YOU KNOW? First person tetris.

I ended up taking Russian again this term even though the class that I'm TAing conflicts two days a week. I'm really excited! At the end of last term I really felt like I was beginning to get a handle on Russian and I was really sad that I'd have to miss it for a little bit. So far the class been working out really well, but then again, apparently we have a quiz on Friday, so I guess I should hold off on my judgment until then.

Today our teacher, who makes me want to look up "silver fox" in Russian, described to us the verbal adjective, which looks like the gerund but is NOT the gerund ("I'm a linguist, and seriously, what is a gerund?"). Apparently in English the -ing form of a verb can have a lot of different functions, while in Russian each of these functions has a unique ending. He illustrated this with three example sentences:

to form the progressive aspect:
"He is smoking a cigarette."

in a participial clause:
"Smoking a cigarette, he remembered his troubled youth."

as a verbal adjective:
"The children ran through the smoking leaves."

These are all good examples of the respective verb functions--the second one even allowed a tangent about dangling modifiers, since the participial clause always modifies the subject (he is smoking, not the youth!). And, as promised, the professor showed us the Russian ending for the verb in each of these situations.

But seriously, what kind of person comes up with these as examples? The first one: it's 2010 and we're at UC Berkeley; you can't say the word "cigarette!" The second one: okay, fine, I guess that's what you would do while you're smoking a cigarette. The third one: WHAT? Why are children running through smoking leaves? Is this a thing in Russia? Or anywhere? Did you do that as a child?

All of this was to illustrate a sentence from Eugene Onegin that went something like, "The poured tea, to which Olga was an instrument, ran into shining cups." Or, rather, "Olga poured the tea into shining cups" but backwards. It made me think of how AWESOME $100,000 Pyramid would be in Russian. In the English version, if you wanted to get your partner to say "things that flow" and you said "the generously poured wine" or "the pumped pipe-contained water," the jerk in the booth would buzz you and Dick Clark would sympathetically tell you that your clue for the $200 level was "too descriptive," then suggest that you should have said "a stream, a chart, a good presentation." In Russian you could just say two words for "the poured tea of Tatyana, to which Olga was an instrument" and everyone would know what you were talking about.

Please comment with the best "in Soviet Russia" joke you can think of to end this entry.