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Learning Russian vocab | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| rmel Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4246 days ago 20 posts - 24 votes Studies: French, Russian | Message 1 of 5 14 May 2014 at 10:32pm | IP Logged |
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I am learning Russian and interested in how words are made up e.g. in Russian the word delat and dela have the same root. I believe I'd be looking at something like etymology and/or morphology for this. Could anyone comment on this and would anyone know what book(s), sites etc would be best?
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| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4258 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes  Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 2 of 5 14 May 2014 at 10:58pm | IP Logged |
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George Z. Patrick - Roots of the Russian Language
I feel like a parrot because I keep naming this book over and over but I wish I had anything else, this is the only answer I have to your needs. People who know other books, please, input. Edited by Henkkles on 14 May 2014 at 11:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5604 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 3 of 5 14 May 2014 at 11:08pm | IP Logged |
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If I have such questions, I use my Этимологический словарь русского языка М. Фасмера. But it really does not help me much to learn a new word, when I know the Slavic cognates, it's proto-Slavic origin and its Church-Slavonic form.
For your purposes a book like "Roots of the Russian Language: An Elementary Guide to Wordbuilding" written by George Patrick may be better suited. PS. Oh, Henkkes was faster to recommend this book! Edited by Cabaire on 14 May 2014 at 11:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 5 14 May 2014 at 11:41pm | IP Logged |
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I have the book by G.Z.Patrick, but I'm not particularly impressed. The problem is that it tends to omit even the most elementary grammatical information - like indicating whether verbs are perfective or imperfective or whether words ending in ь are maskuline or feminine. OK, there are cases where both the imperfective and the perfective verb are mentioned, but this isn't done in a consistent way.
The problem with ordinary dictionaries is that they don't show derivations based on different or no prefixes together, and they won't point out the relationship between for instance намёк (hint) and мечта (dream). 'Roots..' does point this relationship out, but the article is only found under "мек-" - a reference from "меч-" would have made that information twice as easy to find. I had great expectations when I ordered the book, and with that title it could have been really useful, but the sorry fact is that I almost never opens it. Unfortunately I can't point to a better organized alternative, and by its very existence it makes it more difficult for others to publish one. Edited by Iversen on 14 May 2014 at 11:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Kronos Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5266 days ago 186 posts - 452 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 5 of 5 15 May 2014 at 1:44am | IP Logged |
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A more recent alternative or complement to the well-known book by George Z. Patrick would be Leveraging Your Russian With Roots, Prefixes, And Suffixes by Gary Browning, David K. Hart, and Raisa Solovyova (Slavica Publishers, Bloomington, 2001).
This one also teaches by lots of examples rather than grammar. Unlike Patrick it includes a nice list at the end giving English or Latin correspondences/cognates to the featured Russian roots, if there are any. Book at Publisher's site Sample pages at Scribd.com Book at Amazon.com Book at Amazon.co.uk 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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