Hi, everyone...

[apollotiger.livejournal.com]

I'm a Californian 15-year-old homeschooled high-school student (sophomore, I guess, although I'm on break), and I've been trying to learn Russian for a while now... still having problems with Cyrillic that discourage me when I try to get further in.

Basically, I went by the method of buying a Russian dictionary and a Russian grammar reference... and then looking stuff up online. It works okay (for me), but there are some things left unaddressed.

Mmkay. So I have two main questions:

The first is on the letter "Ы." How exactly is it pronounced? A number of websites I've visited say that it's 'somewhere between the u from put and the i from pit.' Which really doesn't make much sense to me at all. One thing that I've heard is that it's just like the i from pit... but then how does "ый" work?

The second question is on the aspect of the verb. None of the people I have (as of yet) spoken with about Russian are native speakers of English... so they can't really explain it. By the aspect, I mean the whole perfective/imperfective thing (i.e. the difference between прочитать and читать).

Any help here would be much appreciated.
Спасибо.

[EDIT: Thanks for your help, everyone. :)]

Mr Sharapova and Soviet historian NM Karamzin

[mart13.livejournal.com]

IN THE TIMES Maria Sharapova's father is once called Mr Sharapova. It's a very rude mistake because in Russian his name is Sharapov. We add "a" at the end in women's names. It's offensive to call a man Sharapova.
Nabokov said that in English we should call Анна Каренина "Anna Karenin" as "she is not a balerina". If Nabokov lived today, he would probably add: "and not a tennis player".
In the same issue of The Times I saw a funny misprint: "Sharpova" (they tried to make her name more English and turned a strange "sharap" into a well-known root "sharp").
A few weeks ago I found in The Times a quotation from a "Soviet historian N M Karamzin". Karamzin, a monarchist, died 90 years before the Revolution and can never be called a Soviet historian.