GET D!RTY Next time you're traveling or just chattin' in Russia with your friends, drop the textbook formality and bust out with expressions they never teach you in school, including: - Cool slang - Funny insults - Explicit sex terms - Raw swear words Dirty Russian teaches the casual expressions heard every day on the streets of Russia: What's up? kak de-LA? I really gotta piss. mnye O-chen NA-do pos-SAT. Damn, you fine! blin, nu ti i shi-KAR-nii! Let's have an orgy. da-VAI u-STRO-im OR-gi-yu. This is crappy vodka. d-ta VOD-ka khre-NO-va-ya. Let's go get hammered. poi-DYOM bukh-NYOM. I'm gonna own you, bitch! ya te-BYA VI-ye-blyu!
This is an interesting and humorous book of Russian idioms. Most of them I would never dream of saying, but a few might come in handy, and I hope that if I ever hear a few of them, I'll know to ignore them or respond properly.
My job is one that takes me to Russia, but everything is ususally so polite, professional and formal, I doubt that I'll need this book much. Still, it's a popular one among my colleagues and I found it to be quite entertaining.
Funny. Stupid and funny. You can't possibly take this work seriously. And it does give a lovely, colorful insight into the mind of the people living in the largest country in the world.
About 5% of the Russian in this book has orthographical errors, but I still found it extremely helpful. As someone who has lived in ex-Soviet states for the past year, the cultural tips were true to form, especially the sections about cultural differences in ideas about health and friendship. Another pro and another con: the curse words are both hilarious and mostly accurate, but the authors fail to mention that cussing in Russian is taken way more seriously than cussing in English. I read this before going to Russia because I thought it would win me points with my language partners, but apparently cussing in Russian is seen as low-class and offensive (especially coming from women) and it generally just embarrassed whoever I was with when I tried to use a phrase I'd learned from this book. The sections about drinking, greetings, sex, etc are all helpful regardless of the funny but unusable cuss word sections, though, so I'm still giving it 5 stars.
slabo wyjasnia znaczenie slownictwa, zapis wymowy okropny. znaczna czesc wyrazen to cringe i nikt ich nie uzywa (no chyba ze jacys boomerzy, ale tak to sie dzieje ze slownictwem, ze czasem odchodzi do lamusa).
While it provides an interesting variety of current slang, the pronunciation guidance is poor and only occasionally is there more than a phrase or word in English followed by a phrase or word in Russian. Almost all of this stuff needs contextual and other explanation to be useful. The phrase collections are organized by topic in English so there is no looking up a Russian phrase possible (no index).
The section on slang and abbreviations used by Russians on the Internet is perhaps the most useful section, or anyway is for me since I read Russian discussion lists etc while having no plans to visit Russia itself.
The authors, apparently by virtue of writing a book mostly about obscenities, seem to regard themselves as hip and amusing - this comes out particularly strongly in the "about the authors" blurbs. But alas they express little that is amusing in the book, which would certainly be possible given the topic, and apparently have zero sense of irony.
And why they included the section at the end on food words as part of a book titiled "Dirty Russian?" Well, I guess when you are drunk or stoned and not using your newly acquired crude phrases for various sexual acts, you might get peckish as the Brits say. And it helps to fill up the book rather than explaining the phrases that precede this section more fully.
Aside from racial slurs, terms related to prostitution, and slang for heroine and cocaine, i thoroughly enjoyed this book! Very fun to learn the things your professors wouldn't dare teach you in class, and you won't be in Russia long enough to learn from locals. I'll refer back to this one frequently!
Good for learning a few new phrases and brushing up on my Russian sentence structure or what I believe their sentence structure to be. It's a reference book, really.
It bothered me a little that the transliteration appeared before the phrase in Russian. Regarding the contents, I don't think I'll ever use any of the phrases but at least I'm familiar with them.
A bit more thorough and much more useful than the guide I received at the Defrnse Language Institute back in the 1970s! I was gifted this by one of my dearest friends, who suffered with me at DLI.