2001 Russian and English Idioms

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Reference
Review: A friend showed me this book when I was in Yekaterinburg, Russia. I flipped through it, and the first thing that came into my mind was that this book was probably a cute collection of homely archaic sayings which nobody really uses. There was a Russian girl standing next to me, so I tried a couple of these idioms out on her and asked her if people really used them. She nodded and said yes and gave me a look that made me realize what an ignorant foreigner I was. My wife is Russian, and I often ask her about the idioms in this book. Every once in a while she'll tell me that a certain idiom sounds weird or that people don't really say it, but the vast majority of the idioms in this book are bona fide Russian expressions which make perfect sense to native russians. My wife's advice was that foreigners shouldn't use these idioms in an obnoxious way in order to be funny or draw attention to themselves, but to learn them well enough to use them naturally in speech, and that this would really help them to sound like legitimate speakers of Russian.

In other words, this book is an excellent reference which is filled with genuine Russian colloquialisms that you won't generally find in standard Russian-English dictionaries. Another thing I like about this book is that it isn't filled with trashy vulgar expressions, like some other books which claim to teach "real Russian." The compiler of this reference did an excellent job.

One thing that I like about this book is that there are two sections, Russian-English and English-Russian, so you can not only look up the meanings of Russian idioms, but you can see how to express many English idioms into Russian. Another helpful feature of this book is an appendix at the back which shows what various common abbreviations stand for.

If you want to enrich your knowledge of the Russian language as Russians actually speak it, without having to study a bunch of offensive slang, then this book is what you're looking for.

Rating:
Summary: From a partly self-taught student
Review: First, where I'm coming from: My formal Russian studies were long ago, and tended to be literary- and linguistics- oriented, rather than conversational. Now that there are more Russian speakers available to me (in the US), I'm working on brushing up and developing my skills to communicate with them in Russian. At this point I've selected about 200 of the idioms for memorization, and have had opportunity to check out perhaps 50 of these with native speakers.

Other than what's contained in dictionaries, this is the first and only book of idioms I've used, so I don't have other works to compare it with. It is an interesting work and I've learned a lot from it. I do have two criticisms of it, based not on what other texts might be available but on what I would like if I could have my way:

First, it is not always quite clear what the exact meaning of an idiom is. Granted that it's impracticle, in one volume, to tell enough about each of so many idioms to make a student really competent in using them all, but I've found instances that could have been a done better. While each idiom has an example of how it may be used, it occassionally seemed not a useful llustration; and there are times when one is just not enough -- either because the corresponding English idiom has dufferent meanings in different contexts, or because more than one English idiom is is given. (On page 31, for instance an idiom is translated as "Like it or not" and as "willy-nilly", and the example fits only "like it or not.)

Second, when talking with native Russian speakers, I've found that a particular idiom is not used anymore, or is formal and stodgy-sounding, or -- in at least one instance -- is used only in a particular circumstance (on p. 15, "You are welcome to whatever we have" should be used only for offering food, not offering other things.) None of these things are necessarily grounds for not including an idiom, but they should be noted in the text, and they are not.

If you're wanting to find out what someone else meant by what they said in Russian, I think that this book would be very reliable and useful. If you want to know how to say something yourself, a book like this isn't going to be really adequate anyway -- you'd need several illustrative uses of many idioms, which would mean either a much bigger book or a lot fewer idioms; but there will also be occassional misleading things here which could have been avoided.