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Lesson Transcript

Привет Всем. С Вами Светлана. Hi everybody! I’m Svetlana.
Welcome to RussianPod101.com’s Русский язык за три минуты. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Russian.
In the last lesson, we learned how to ask different kinds of questions in Russian. In this lesson, we will continue answering the question “When?” with different, very useful phrases and words to express the time in Russian.
There are a lot of time-related adverbs both in English and in Russian. But lets get down to the most common ones. Here we go.
Сегодня. “Today”. One more time, slowly
[slowly] Сегодня.
Вчера. “Yesterday.”
[slowly] Вчера.
Завтра. “Tomorrow.”
[slowly] Завтра.
Let’s try to put them in a sentence.
Сегодня солнечно. “It is sunny today.” This is a very interesting example, because, in this sentence there is no subject or verb. We built the sentence using just two adverbs. In Russian, we call it an impersonal sentence. We`ll have a closer look at these in our next lesson.
Meanwhile, let me give you another example using time-related adverbs. Try to answer the question we had in our last lesson: Когда ты придешь? “When will you come?” The answer could be either “today” or “tomorrow”, because the question is in future form.
А: Когда ты придёшь?
В: Завтра. or
А: Когда ты придешь?
В: Сегодня.
To talk about something that happened “yesterday”, which is ВЧЕРА in Russian, we need to put the verb in its past form and build the sentence in past tense. For example –
Я видел его вчера. “I saw him yesterday.”
So how do we refer to events that are further in the future? For example, the day after tomorrow or in a week. The “day after tomorrow” is literally translated in Russian as Послезавтра. Here, завтра is “tomorrow” and После is “after”. Very easy.
Послезавтра.
To say anything other than that, we need an adverb, Через, which means “after” or “in”. For example:
“In a week.” is Через неделю.
“In 3 days.” is Через три дня.
“In a month.” is Через месяц.
To talk about the events in the past, we will use the adverb Назад which literally means “some time ago,” “in the past”, or “back”. Let’s say:
“A week ago.” Неделю назад.
“3 days ago.” Три дня назад
“A month ago.” Месяц назад.
To say “the day before yesterday”, we use the adverb Позавчера, which consists of two words – вчера which is “yesterday” in English and the word Поза which is derived from the adverb позади, which means “at the back” or “behind”.
Позавчера. Literally, “The day behind yesterday.”
Okay. That’s it for this lesson.
Now it is time for Svetlana’s tips.
Unlike some other cultures, Russians, generally, have a very relaxed attitude towards time. Being late up to 15 minutes is a normal thing in Russia. They probably won’t tell you the actual reason for the delay, but will most likely think you’ll know it was a traffic jam or a train delay.
Yet, at the same time, Russians can get really irritated waiting for somebody. So they would probably expect you to be “Минута в Минуту” which literally means “to be exactly on time like you had agreed”, precisely “on the agreed minute” Very confusing!
Okay guys, that’s it for this lesson. We’ve learned some useful adverbs related to time.
Do you know how to say “It is sunny” or “It is windy in Russian?” If not, join our next Русский язык за три минуты lesson where we will talk about weather and some impersonal sentences. See you soon.
Пока Пока

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