Compact English-Russian Phrase-Book

Russian is a language spoken by more than 200 million people, many of whom are monolingual, that is, they speak only Russian. Russian is spoken in Russian Federation , Ukraine , Belorussia and other republics of former USSR . One of the troubles for visitors to Russia will be the language barrier. Russian is not a language you can just pick up after hearing it for a few days. Russian language is really difficult, besides having another type of alphabet, there are a lot of unusual and uncommon sounds in Russian language and some people never get to pronounce them correctly. Also the grammar is very complicated and unusual compared to other languages. However, picking up some Russian means that if one day you happen to travel to Russia , you will avoid some inconveniences of the language barrier.

Russian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet dating from around the ninth century. Although at first glance it appears quite different, a number of letters are written and pronounced as in English (A, K, M, O, and T). Whereas other letters are written in the Roman alphabet but are pronounced differently, i.e. Y/y is pronounced 'oo' as in food and X/x is pronounced 'ch' as in the Scottish word 'loch'.

Already you are able to pronounce ' ìóõà ' meaning fly! Furthermore, Russian has no word for 'the', 'a' or 'an' so the word myxa can mean the fly, a fly or just fly.

The Russian language allows a fascinating way of addressing people to whom you have just been introduced. The person's first name is combined with a modified form of his or her father's first name.

If a man's first name is Ivan and his father's first name is also Ivan, you would call him Ivan Ivanovich (Ivan, son of Ivan), and if Ivan had a sister, she would be called Natasha Ivanovna, (Natasha, daughter of Ivan). The -ovich and -ovna suffixes are always appended to the father's first name and not to the mother's.

Therefore in order to lighter the language-barrier difficulties for those, who decided to travel to Russia and visit St. Petersburg we've created a compact English-Russian Phrase book to make your travel full of new discoveries and impressions.

We offer you to become acquainted with all parts of our English-Russia Phrase book:

1. Russian Alphabet with Trasliteration Scehem
2. Basic Phonetic Features of Russian
   
3. Basic Words and Expressions
4. Money and Currency Exchange
5. In the City
6. City Transport
7. Sightseeing
8. Shopping
9. Entertainment and Leisure Time
10. Days of week
11. Private Talks
12. Numerals
13. Slang
14. Signs