Thanks everyone, you're peaches. That clears up the "to pray" question for me. So, theoretically, could you say "Я молюсь за того, что друг найдет работу"? Or would that construction sound weird?

Quote Originally Posted by Pravit
Maybe you should go to the Moscow Mosque(I like that name ) and ask if they have any free Russian Qur'aans. The mosque in my town was handing them out like crazy the other day at the international students expo. Lemme see if I remember the 5 pillars in Arabic correctly...mmm...
ash-shahadaat
as-salaa'
al-ramadaan
az-zakaa'
al-hajj

Lindzi, have you ever read the Qur'aan in the original Arabic? If so, you would know it is impossibile to preserve the grace of the original in translation to any language. In addition to that I would say the grace of it is really impossibile for any non-native Arabic speaker to understand(unless they live and speak it for decades)

Since in English they're just direct translation and sometimes differ depending on how they were translated, I would assume you'd translate them directly into Russian too.
I have not, unfortunately. I'm still stuck on learning the alphabet. I learned the Russian alphabet in like two hours, but there's something about Arabic that my brain can't seem to process. All the dots and such like just kick my ass. I can sort of sound words out at this point (if they contain the letters that I've actually managed to memorize ), but it's still really halting. It sounds so beautiful when other people read it, though. I know I can't appreciate the meaning much (yet), and I've been told that no translation can do it justice, but the English translation of the Koran that I read was so gorgeous that if the original is that much better, it's worth learning Arabic just to read it.

I'll steal someone's Arabic-Russian dictionary and look 'em up, then. I suspected it'd just be direct translations of the Arabic words, but sometimes religious translators like to get all high-faluting.