Thread: Staying with someone who knows NO english

My boyfriend is from Riga and for two weeks I am staying with his grandmother, alone, shes from Russia and just visiting. The problem is I dont know that much russian and she knows NO english. I need to be able to know things like do you want to go shopping for things for our apartment? do you need to go anywhere?. I know how to pronounce everything if someone could just give me a few phrases informally.

Originally Posted by maryy

do you want to go shopping for things for our apartment? do you need to go anywhere?

Хотите пойти за покупками для дома?
Вам нужно куда-то пойти?

If you give me your questions in English, I will give them back to you in Russian.

My girlfriend's grandmother speaks very little english, no english when I first met her. Unfortunately our conversations are restriced to "zdrastvutye, come on een plees", and "хaу ду ю ду" in english and "kak u vas dela, ya xopowo" and "cpakoynoy noche, da sveedanya" in russian.

Girlfriend's mom speaks fluent english and has the hottest accent I've ever heard. We have fluid, lucid, colorful conversations but sometimes she talks about uncomfortable things although that makes me love her even more.

Advice. Learn common phrases but you really don't need to know a lot to communicate. Motions (ie waving a hand, drinking imaginary water, urinating imaginarily, smiling), combined with hand gestures, and simple phrases is more than enough to get through years with a woman who speaks little of your language. I mean, do you really need to communicate complex ideas back & forth? If so, you are barking up the wrong internet forum and should spend more time at freetranslator.com. Also drawing stick figures helps.

Word of advice: bring a dictionary and a phrase book. The phrase book (or bring more than one along if need be, I like Lonely planet's but there are other good ones) will give you the beginning of useful phrases and the nouns you need to complete such sentences. And don't neglect the utility of a good two-way dictionary so the babushka can look up words in Russian and you in English.

I agree with Katushka. I'm not clear on your level of Russian, but with a phrase book, you can just point to the sentence or question or word.