Thread: Help with Russian homework

Marcus -- To me, the mistakes that Гильермо makes are clear proof that he's doing the work himself with his own brain, rather than simply being lazy and plugging English expressions into Google Translate or Babelfish!

For example, Google Translate would never give you Моня зовут, but that's a totally natural error for an English speaker who's just beginning with Russian, because in English we don't make a distinction between "hard consonants" and "soft consonants".

(I can't count the number of times I've seen beginners trying to "fake it" on Russian forums with machine translations -- this does NOTHING to help you learn, and it's so much better to do the work yourself and not be embarrassed about making mistakes!)

P.S. Although люблю гуляю is wrong -- like kozyablo said, it should be люблю гулять, with a plain old infinitive after the verb "I love" -- it strikes me as somewhat similar to constructions like пойдём пообедаем (literally, "let's go let's have lunch", instead of пойдём пообедать, "let's go to have lunch"). You can also compare it with the totally normal English "try and stop me!" (instead of "try to stop me").

So, although люблю гуляю ("I love I am strolling") is grammatically incorrect, it's not a very strange mistake to make, in my opinion.

Originally Posted by Throbert McGee

Marcus -- To me, the mistakes that Гильермо makes are clear proof that he's doing the work himself with his own brain, rather than simply being lazy and plugging English expressions into Google Translate or Babelfish!

For example, Google Translate would never give you Моня зовут, but that's a totally natural error for an English speaker who's just beginning with Russian, because in English we don't make a distinction between "hard consonants" and "soft consonants".

(I can't count the number of times I've seen beginners trying to "fake it" on Russian forums with machine translations -- this does NOTHING to help you learn, and it's so much better to do the work yourself and not be embarrassed about making mistakes!)

P.S. Although люблю гуляю is wrong -- like kozyablo said, it should be люблю гулять, with a plain old infinitive after the verb "I love" -- it strikes me as somewhat similar to constructions like пойдём пообедаем (literally, "let's go let's have lunch", instead of пойдём пообедать, "let's go to have lunch"). You can also compare it with the totally normal English "try and stop me!" (instead of "try to stop me").

So, although люблю гуляю ("I love I am strolling") is grammatically incorrect, it's not a very strange mistake to make, in my opinion.

Throbert, as a former faker (you know it!), I'd just like to mention how terribly bad google perevodchik is... recently i've seen it translate "vtornik" as -- Friday? That almost seems like purposeful sabotage.. One might be better off to guess at Russian words by watching rocky and bullwinkle, than to trust google perevodchik..

But if you're going to use a perevodchik (I know *you* won't, but some of us intractibly lazy learners will) I would suggest PROMT (www dochka online-translator dochka com) .. in addition to MUCH cleaner translations (though far from perfect) it also gives detailed dictionary entries for words whose definition is not clear-cut.. which is nice for me because as I'm trying to increase my vocabulary, I find a LOT of russian words that don't exactly fit under one definition... anyway, this is digression but i thought it might be helpful..