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he gives it to john

29th December 2007 permanent link

Tim Ferriss’s keys to rapid language learning: Sentence Five in Russian. (Sentence One, Sentence Two, Sentence Three, Sentence Four, Sentence Six)

He gives it to John
Он даёт его Ивану

“On dayot yevo Ivanu”. He gives it to John.

1. Third person singular verbs are normally with “-т”
2. “т” can, now she tells me, be written either like a latin “m” or like it is printed. Whereas there are no exceptions to the handwritten “д” looking like a latin “g”
3. The other non-phonetic spelling irregularity: “его”/“it” (accusative) is written with “г”/“g” but pronounced in modern Russian as “в”/“v”. My wife explained some rules for some other places where this crops up but I didn’t fully grasp them at the first attempt. Apparently in archaic Church Slavonic it’s still pronounced as it’s written.

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