Tag Archives: book

“Bukvar” – Learn the Russian alphabet like a 7-year-old native!

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The question of learning the Russian alphabet – or Azbuka, as it’s called in Russian – is one that occasionally pops up.

At the first glance, it may appear hard – 33 letters, half of which are unfamiliar or have a different reading from Latin. But that’s only at the first glance. The first-graders in Russia can do it, and so can you! 😁

Enter “Bukvar” – the letter learning book for the afore-mentioned first-graders. Its approach is to present letters not in the alphabetical order, but rather in such a way that new letters can be combined with the ones already learned to build more and more complex words and sentences. That way the learner builds associations between the shapes of the letters and the sounds they make in the words.

A foreign student can draw on most of this methodology. One part of the learning process that will require a work-around is the expected native-speaker fore-knowledge of how certain words sound.

After a very short introduction on the linguistic notation used in the book, the plan is to present one new letter per day, with the explanations of the reading and of the example images used in Bukvar – this will be a great opportunity to learn new words while connecting the new letters to a context.

This image covers the symbology. It’s something you can come back to as a reference throughout the book.

Another aspect of learning new letter is writing. Though few of us actually write using a pen nowadays, when learning new letters, writing makes for a good additional venue of memorisation – you start associating hand movements and strokes with the shapes of the letters. Here are two writing templates used by schoolchildren in conjunction with Bukvar’. I managed to find the versions that I myself used in the distant 1980s 😁

Template 1 — Template 2 (the 1985 edition, originally found here)

You can skip over the first 4 pages (they tackle hand coordination and fine motion of writing) and start on page 5, practising the letters as they come.

Another letter recognition aid that I created for this course is the complete alphabet, where each letter is shown using several different typefaces, some closer to the printed version of the letter, and some – to the handwritten one. The images from this aid will be given as we learn each new letter, but you can download the whole set for future reference.

Don’t try to take it in all at once, but rather take one letter per day, and play with it.

And now, imagine, that you have just come to your first day at school – on the 1st of September – and are getting into the learning mood by leafing through the first pages of Bukvar, thinking how wonderful it will be to when you can read all the words…

To help you get into the mood, here are two postcards – from 1956 and 1959 – greeting you on the 1st of September!



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“Rus” – a story by S.T.Romanovsky with an interesting linguistically-historical revelation

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First, a little about S.T.Romanovsky (1936-1996)

Stanislav Timofeevich Romanovsky is a Russian writer, since 1963 – a member of the Union of Journalists of the USSR, since 1972 – a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR.

Born on September 19, 1936 in the city of Yelabuga of the Republic of Tatarstan, the writer spent his childhood and youth years here. In 1949 he graduated from Yelabuga school No. 1 named after Lenin, then in 1954 – the Faculty of History and Philology of Kazan State University. After graduation, he worked as a literature teacher at the Yelabuga Library College. Since 1957 – Editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Ulyanovsk Komsomolets”. In 1964, by decision of the Komsomol Central Committee, he was transferred to work in Moscow as executive secretary, and then deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine Rural Youth. The decade for “Rural youth” was a period of prosperity and popularity. According to Romanovsky’s recommendations, for the first time in “Rural Youth”, the stories of V.M. Shukshin, with whom he was friends and whom he greatly appreciated, were published.

…

Throughout his life, Stanislav Timofeevich carried love to his native land, to Yelabuga, dear to his heart, to his beloved Kama region. In the story “River Pearl” he writes: “You can’t love the whole earth with the same force – it won’t work, you won’t remember it all. But the fields, forests, rivers, springs, ravines and small depressions that are dear to my heart, I love with burning strength and tenderness.” In many books you will find amazingly true poetic descriptions of our rivers – Kama, Vyatka, Toima, Kriishi, Tanaika, Karinka, Anzirka, Umyak and even small channels, streams, you will learn a lot about more than 50 lakes on Yelabuga and Tanaevsky meadows, visit the Big and Small forest, wander around Tanaevsky and Mortorsky forests, get acquainted with different ravines, hills, hills.

Romanovsky’s heroes and characters are in love with their region and are doing everything to make our city and villages more beautiful, fields fertile, meadows abundant in grass, rivers and lakes clean and fishy, forests healthy, inhabited by animals and birds. In many publications in the newspapers “Republic of Tatarstan”, “Novaya Kama”, “Star of the Fields”, etc., the name of Stanislav Romanovsky was mentioned more than once along with such famous Elabuzhans as I.I.Shishkin, D.I.Staheev, N.A.Durova.

The reason I am making this post is for one short story with very far-reaching and important linguistic and historical implications. The story is called simply “Rus”. In modern Russian “Rus” is synonymous with “Russia” as a more poetic form of naming that vast land. But there is one more, older, meaning to this word (which will not come as a surprise to those, who listened to Lada Ray’s Forbidden History & Forgotten Origins Earth Shift webinars).

I found the story published on a site dedicated to children’s books, which is excellent as it is children’s books that build a person’s future love for history and a person’s morale compass. I wrote about it earlier in “Stolen Sun” children’s rhyme by Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky as a moral code of conduct

RUS

The word “Rus” has also another meaning, of which I did not read in books, but heard first-hand from a living person. In the north, beyond the forests, beyond the swamps, there are villages where old people speak in the old way.

Almost the same as a thousand years ago. Quietly and peacefully, I lived in such a village and gathered old words.

My hostess Anna Ivanovna once brought a pot with a red flower into the hut. She says, and her voice trembles with joy:

— The flower was dying. I took it out to rus — and it bloomed!
— To rus? I gasped.
— To rus, the hostess confirmed.
— To rus?!
— To rus.

I am silent, I am afraid that the word will become forgotten, that it will fly away — and won’t be there any more, and the hostess will deny mentioning it. Or did I hear it right? It is necessary to write down the word. I took out a pencil and paper. For the third time I asked:

— To rus..?

The hostess did not answer, pursed her lips, offended. As if saying, how much can I ask? Two mass services are not served for the deaf. But she saw the chagrin on my face, realized that I was not mocking, but I needed this word for business. And the hostess answered, singingly:

— To rus, sokolik (translator note: a caring way of saying “falcon”, used when addressing a younger lad by an older woman – similar to “deary” in English), to rus. To the selfsame, honest rus.

Ever so carefully, I ask:
— Anna Ivanovna, won’t you be offended by my importunity? I want to ask.

— I won’t, she promises.
— What is rus?

Before she even had time to open her mouth, the host, Nikolai Vasilyevich, who was silently warming himself on the stove, barked out:

— A light place!

The hostess took hold of her heart from his barking.

— Oh, how you scared me, Nikolai Vasilyevich! You’re ill, after all, and you don’t have a voice… It turns out that your voice came through.

And then explained it to me in all detail:

— We call for rus a bright place. Where the Sun is. Yes, everything that is bright or light, that’s what we call it. A blond guy (translator: “rusyj” lad). A blonde girl (translator: “rusaja” lass). “Rus rye” is ripe. It’s time to harvest it. Haven’t you ever heard of it?

“Stolen Sun” children’s rhyme by Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky as a moral code of conduct

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I was leafing the other day through the children’s books from my childhood. Many of those books are actually from my mother’s childhood, so two generations grew up on them.

It is no secret that a person’s moral compass is calibrated and adjusted during one’s childhood, and depending on which books the parents read to their offspring (or don’t read at all), so will the person become in his grown-up life. I was lucky to have grown up on Russian fairy tales and the children’s rhymes and short stories of the Soviet authors. One such rhyme-book drew my attention yesterday, unconsciously, for no apparent reason.

Rereading the words, parts of the rhyme still sitting in my memory from when I learned it by heart in my childhood, I understood why. This is a poem by Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky – “Stolen Sun”. The Russian text can be read and listened to at the Chukovsky Family site, and I will present an un-rhymed translation of the verses at the bottom of this post. But why did it draw my attention?

It presents a clear concept of what to do in a dire situation – big or small, and it sets some premises for the child to learn to live by:

  1. realise that there is trouble
  2. get your act together
  3. try to negotiate with the wrongdoer
  4. and only if diplomacy fails, resort to force

And this is exactly what we see playing out on the grand geopolitical scale. Since 2007 Russia went though points 1 to 3 and is now resorting to the undesired, but unavoidable point 4.

Here are the photos of my mother’s book from 1958 with English translations below the corresponding pages. You can click on the images for the full-size versions.



The Sun wandered across the sky
And ran behind a cloud,
A hare peeked out of the window,
It was all dark to him.

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