прекрасный vs. КРАСИВЫЙ

[ayelienne]

Hi!

I've got a quick question for you all: I've got a russian word a day calendar, and today's word was: прекрасный

I know that КРАСИВЫЙ also means 'beautiful', but I'm not sure what the difference is, and why I would use one over the other - can someone explain?

Thanks! :)

(no subject)

[yers.livejournal.com]

Welcome everyone!

To begin with, here's a great link for everyone who doesn't have a Cyrillic keyboard:

http://www.translit.ru/

You type in Latin, and Cyrillic characters come out.
However, since it uses VBScript, it only works with Internet Explorer. But there's another one, http://www.cifirica.ru, which is a little less user friendly, and sometimes glitchy - however, it's the original, the almost legendary Lat2Cyr convertor which has been around for years, so it's not to be lightly spoken of. :)

I'll come back tomorrow with some hopefully interesting stuff of the did-you-know type. Meanwhile, feel free to share impressions, ask questions, and everything (...и всё такое).

So far there are two native Russian speakers in the community, centralasian and myself. We've already got into a small debate over a tricky case of punctuation, and found that neither of us is 150% sure. This is certainly going to be fun.

Yours,

Nikolay

Romanisations

[corriel.livejournal.com]

( Here we go, it wasn't as long as I thought to come up with. )

Russian and Church Slavonic

[yers.livejournal.com]

aIn its development, Russian has been heavily influenced by another language - but the influence is difficult to notice. That language is Old Bulgarian, also called Church Slavonic.

In the Middle Ages, Church Slavonic played exactly the same part in Russia as Latin did in Western Europe: it was the language of the church as well as that of scholarly thought. Which is why, just as English tends to express abstract concepts with Latinisms, Slavonisms totally prevail over native Russian words in any serious text. In fact, most of the long words Russian is notorious for - like достопримечательность and времяпрепровождение - aren't, strictly speaking, Russian: they are either direct borrowings or neo-Slavonisms coined by scholars.

Now although Russian and Old Bulgarian are both Slavic languages, one is from the Eastern and the other from the Southern group. Here are some examples of how you can spot a word of Church Slavonic origin:
( Read more... )

There's more to that... but it's getting boring, and I, an entirely self-styled linguist, am getting myself on shaky grounds. What's important is this, whenever something about the Russian language seems to you utterly inexplicable and illogical (and it will, it еще как will!), it might be useful to remember that Russian is really two similar old languages blended in a modern one. And if you're prepared to sacrifice a lot to your passion for languages, learn Church Slavonic. It has a few extra past tenses, and is properly written in a panic-instilling alphabet called Glagolitic, but paradoxically, after centuries it still remains the most lucid of all Slavic languages, and it's as majestic as Latin.

One more Russian to this group

[dragoman.livejournal.com]

Just to add that I'm one more native Russian speaker - and also linguist and a teacher.

I'll be glad to help you to learn Russian.

If interested in my real name - I'm Anton.

(no subject)

[lexabear.livejournal.com]

Hello! Figure I'll do a quick intro. I'm in my 4th semester studying Russian, and I'm excited about there being an LJ community for non-native speakers. To give an idea of my relative facility with Russian, I'm just starting my first "real" translation, reading Chekhov's <<Пари>> (reading via the pause-every-five-seconds-to-look-up-a-word method). So I can help out beginners with basics, but I intend on asking some questions myself!