A question especially to the native speakers of English: do you know what "gormless" means? I somehow have no memory of even encountering that word before last night, so I'm trying to find out how commonly known it is. I've already looked it up, so I don't need anybody else to look it up for me; just tell me if it is familiar to you ( Read more... )

…or maybe of the human brain in general?

That weird feeling when you suddenly discover that you can translate little bits of text of average difficulty from Russian into Bulgarian with such an ease that it frightens you, after all that time when any translation from Russian cost you an awful lot of effort…

Putting an article together is still ( Read more... )

...to realize that it's easier for you to write the first draft of an important email on paper? Shall I feel pleased that I'm now confident enough to try to write in Russian without a spell check, or upset with how old I am? :D ( Read more... )

I’m one of those few persons on the planet who don’t have the patience to watch TV, but documentaries about animals and/or plants are an exception. So I turn on the TV in the other room now to have something to watch (or at least listen to) while I’m knitting something that didn’t require my absolutely undivided attention. There is digital TV there ( Read more... )

How do you call a cat, any random cat, to come to you? Do you say "Here, kitty-kitty" or "Kitty-kitty-kitty" or something else?

I'm especially interested if there is some difference between American English and the other versions.

This question arose on the dark side of the Moon the Russian section of LJ, and I suddenly realized that I'm not very ( Read more... )

This little book completed its epic travel from Russia to my home on Monday. :) It's a present from Ivan ivansim, postal expenses and all, for which I'm very grateful. He saved me a lot of logistics - and all the possible extra costs of paying from abroad and in a foreign currency.

It's The Jester's Cap by Daria Wilke villlka. Alas, there is no translation of ( Read more... )

I managed to compose a message consisting of two complex sentences in Russian without a single mistake of any kind the other day. I'm getting better at that language. :)

(But then I managed to make three spelling mistakes in one word in the draft of a comment to hettie_lz's journal tonight - two due to Bulgarian influences and one due to my inability to ( Read more... )

This is just to amuse my Russian readers with my latest desperate attempt at a real-time chat in Russian without a spell check (I was discussing with a native speaker my even more desperate attempt to translate a little educational brochure about LGBT people from Bulgarian into Russian, which he proposed to edit into normal Russian ( Read more... )

Two ads I got when I visited a Russian news page: the ad on the left says that homosexuality is a mortal sin and a certain Orthodox Christian site can help you get rid of it. The one on the right is for a gay dating/hookup site.

Well done, Yandex! :D


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It turned out that I can translate from Russian into Bulgarian with English-influenced punctuation. :D

I didn't do it on purpose, of course. But I somehow managed it very systematically throughout the text. The end result was pretty idiosyncratic.