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Oh boy. Does she really think she speaks Russian? It's not only her accent, its everything - word usage, phrasing, etc. Is she some kind of third-generation immigrant?

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typesbad.livejournal.com

her bio says she's from Nizhni Novgorod...

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She could have left Russia at an early age, then. What she speaks is definitely not good trained native Russian, anyway.

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typesbad.livejournal.com

well, if she left she must have gone back - both her degrees are from the state university of nizhni novgorod.. :)).

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Oh crap.

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Like our youth speaks better Russian. :)

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I seriously doubt that her bio is genuine. Nizhny Novgorod? Like hell. Brighton Beach, maybe.

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The bio doesn't say where she majored in Russian. So, it could be anywhere but Russia. :)

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oryx_and_crake

My kids, for example, definitely speak better than she, even with living outside of Russia for 11 months out of 12

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Kudos to you for the outstanding work!

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oryx_and_crake

Thank you, but this is not the point.

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Well, my point was that illiteracy (not complete, of course:) is very wide spread among our teenagers and adolescents. I think there are multiple reasons for that:
- degrading education system
- parents have (or have had) more important things to take care of than kids' performance in Russian
- telecom systems make kids write before they know how to spell correctly
- little reading (parents, teachers, games, etc to blame)
- downloading of essays instead of writing theirs
- writing essays and speeches seems to be universally poorly taught and practiced.
- maybe spell checkers (in cellphones, MS Word, web browsers, etc)
What was yours? I merely congratulated you on your ability to correct or avoid the situation in your family. And note, I didn't say *all*.

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david-us.livejournal.com

So, this is bad Russian?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGjfnt4gw5A

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Terrible.

Just within the first few seconds: you cannot say "жизнь будет по-другому" - it's not even illiterate, it's outright foreign. Plus, her accent is really strange. Brighton Beach? Maybe. Nizhny Novgorod? No freakin' way.

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This stupid "жизнь будет по-другому" might be simply due to her failure to make a quick translation. I would assume that she won't say it on her own.

Concerning the accent - probably some kind of a really problem district of Nizhny, sufounded by factories... ;)

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Sorry, "surrounded", of course.

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ALl she says is a chain of sad failures. Generally, she is a failure to speak Russian.

If factories surrounding her disctrict in Nizhny were located in Southern Brooklyn, then maybe.

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Well, I didn't manage more than 30 seconds of listening her, so I believe you.

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david-us.livejournal.com

I thought she said, "Жизнь была бы по-другому."

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That one is even less correct that the first one. You just can't say so in Russian. "Жизнь была бы другой" or "я жил бы по-другому". You cannot "быть по-другому", you only can "делать что-либо по-другому".

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In Russian the verb быть is normally followed by an adjective or a noun, that is, it describes a certain characteristic of an object. по-другому is an adverb which characterizes an action, not a thing's property. That's what's wrong in here.

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Reminds me of the Spanish "así es la vida" (такова жизнь) where the word así can stand for so/such/this way (depending on the context), that is, it can be an adverb and an adjective. Having listened to the audio from these videos, I tend to agree with the idea that she has spent a lot of time isolated from the proper Russian, enough to lose the language's logic. Pronunciation, too, can be attributed to that, although I don't know exactly how people from NN speak, so I can't judge. I've once been told that I do have a certain accent as well. And they could be right as I could've acquired some.

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This is definitely native Russian, but definitely not suitable as a sample. Her kind of speaking, her accent, her intonations - well it's probably social rather than regional - but this is not good Russian-

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just1user.livejournal.com

Her English is better than her Russian. Ж and Ш slipped away ( forward ) first of all, becoming ʒ and ʃ. But 99.9% of her TA can't even tell them from each other.

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Um... It's hard not to notice the difference between the voiced Ж and unvoiced Ш. That's the major (if not the only) difference between the two.

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just1user.livejournal.com

I mean the difference between ж and ʒ.

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How big and practical is it? Neither Russian nor English employs more than just one flavor this sound, no?

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http://users.livejournal.com/_christine/

What ever she is, she's not a native English speaker.

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Some people tend to argue about something that's only in their heads. I have not stated or proposed that she might be a native English speaker. Believe me, there is a lot of languages in the world other than English.

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