Studying bad words

Ok. Here is a totally fictional story.

Mrs. Jane Doe learns Russian. On an excelent web site italki she comes across with Mr. John Doe who is a native Russian speaker (really? John Doe? Well, Ok). Then... this and that... Friends forever and so on....

Jane: -Could you teach me something?

John: - No problem, you are welcome!

Jane: - I heard a lot about Russian offensive vocabulary. I really want to swear in Russian! Help me!

John: - Okay, take a look at this! @$**^~ and ***~~~??/ and ///**^##~~ then **^^$~~

Jane: Oh, I see! ***~~~??/   @$**^~   ///**^##~~ It is so **^^$~~ cool! **^^$~~

Then they go on swearing like sailors in private and have lots of fun. (To be exact - not like sailors, rather like schoolboys who have just found out cool adult words, to be honest.) Anyway... Then what? Would they be banned by administration? No?

And what if John Doe starts a discussion on such kind of topics and uses these cool words? Would it be OK for you?

Fake language

Here is the story.

Even some news web sites in RuNet tell us as if in Minsk some language teacher was arrested. He was blamed for teaching fake Chinese to his students. Actually that was some language which was invented by the teacher himself. The students had been sure that they were learning Chinese for about six years. As they had no opportunity to check up their Chinese skills they had just to believe their teacher while he did not know Chinese at all.

This story is a total fiction to be sure... Or not? Do you think it could be possible? Isn't it too hard to invent and teach a language? Maybe it would be much easier to teach the real true Chinese?

Native speakers with poor language skills

It is a ticklish topic, but still.

As a native Russian speaker I often read notebook entries written in Russian. I almost never correct them. Actually I corrected just one entry being inebriated and careless. (Sorry, dear That Entry Author! I am a bad person - I have always known it! Sorry, sorry, sorry!)

But anyway. Here is the reason not to correct notebook entries. All native speakers get their full green skills bars here on italki. It looks like they are masters: they are the best at reading, writing and so on. But in fact Russian is so hard that many native speakers cannot avoid mistakes. Moreover our Russian language skills differ from each other very much. Some Russian people of italki are professional offline language teachers while others are so poor that I could say they hardly can write in Russian. I suppose they even hardly can speak Russian either. But they have got the same full green bars too, they correct notebooks entries with no hesitation.

That is their right I think. Even many non-native and not fluent speakers try to correct these entries. It is a good language practice after all. The problem here is that the  poor non-native speakers see only those full green bars and nothing more about their correctors meanwhile some corrections are just rediculous indeed. A none-native speaker can not see the skills of his native speaking corrector unless this corrector is a teacher at least here, on italki. 

Maybe there should be some test to check out the level of user abilities at one's native language here on italki? Or this would be too sophisticated to provide tecnically? Anyway every student here should know that native speakers sometime make a lot of mistakes correcting someone's notebook entries. For language skills of native speakers differ from each other. This works with questions too by the way. And with other languages, not only with Russian, I suppose.

That is why every answer here should have this acronym: IMHO. And that is why I do not like correcting notebook entries: I am not always sure of my language skills. 

Orphanage in Russia: children with no fate

There is a special charachter in Russian fairytales. Named Кикимора (it is a big deal to look for any legit tranlation into English, I suppose). Кикимора lives at the morass and essentually steals people's children. Then she turns them into monsters eventually. Once a baby got to Кикимора - it got cursed and has no fate.

But Кикимора is not what I am talking about. I'd like to tell something about Russian orphanage.

Accordingly to statistics we have 654 000 orphans here in Russia. For a state having population of 150 millions people it is a lot, I think. It can be population of Russian oblast center. 84% of these children are orphans despite they have their biological parents. Those parents cannot take care of their children for different reasons, but most of all the children are just forsaken. Maybe the parents are afraid of lack of money, maybe they don't feel any support from the government, maybe the child is ill and needs some special care... No matter. I don't want to judge anybody and I don't know what those people feel leaving their babies to... to whom?

Who takes care of these children? It is up to our state and government, but let us be honest: in today's Russian society nobody cares of these children. Teachers and nursemaids in our orphanages are not too much interested to correct someone's mistakes. The education system for orphans is really obsolete, dated. Children get not adapted to real life there. Orphans are awfully alike with packs of wolves in Russia. They live in a weird community, they are having weird relationships to each other. They often can steal, can hit or even torture somebody, but they  even cannot serve themselves. They have no profession, they got no education. They got nothing to live except some little money which is given them as they leave orphanage. They come to our life like some animals from a wild forest who have never known love and caress. 

And my words are proved with the same statistics. Here is the chart about Russian orphanage-leavers:

40% of them get junkies or alchoholics

40% - criminals

10% - come to suicide.

And only 10% get adapted to a common life in our country. That is just terrible for everyone knows: our children are our future. We are giving our children to Кикимора for the moment. And she turns them... She turns thousand of children into monsters.

So now about my question. I want all you to know: I am not a teacher. And I've not done anything about this situation. I have two children myself and I know how hard it is sometimes to bring them up and  take care of them. But I really wonder: Is this situation with orphans a world-wide trend? Or maybe something is wrong  with us in Russia and we have to do something as soon as possible?

Thanks for paying attention.

Dwarfs and gnomes

Could anyone explain me the difference between these two words? Are gnomes some magic and fairy creatures while the dwarfs may be just common little men?

I've seen two series lately. The first one was "Game of thrones" and one of its characters was a little man who had often been called "dwarf" and "imp" in offensive way. The second serie was "Gravity Falls" and it had a pack of personages living in the forest, having some magic skills and named "gnomes".

But there were no gnomes in "Game of thrones" and no dwarfs in "Gravity Falls" anyway. That has a reason, I think.

Может кто-нибудь объяснить мне разницу между этими двумя словами? - Являются ли gnomes какими-то волшебными существами, в то время как dwarfs  могут быть просто обычными человечками?

Я недавно видел два сериала. Первым был "Игра престолов" и одним из его персонажей был маленький человечек, которого часто называли "dwarf" и "бес" с целью его оскорбить. Второй сериал был "Гравити Фоллс" и там была стая персонажей, живущих в лесу, имеющих некоторые магические навыки и называвшихся "gnomes".

Но  не было никаких gnomes в "Игре престолов" и никаких dwarfs в "Гравити Фоллс" в любом случае. Я думаю, на это есть какая-то причина.

Cat nibbles cords

   Here it is. I'm sick and tired of this cat's mischievous actions. Leaving my little flat in the early morning I see it looking at me forlornly. "Bye-bye, Kitty!"

  So, what would my family see coming back in the evening? My wife's favourite home flowers are just dug out and scattered around the floor. Every phone charger is nibbled and hardly works and the children's nebulizer has a nearly eaten cable. Also some cookies having been recklessly left ON the kitchen table are to be found UNDER that table being totally inedible.

   All this is OK, but the situation with phone chargers is just unbearable. "Well, it's time to charge my phone, here is a charger... Doesn't work! Another... The same thing! What a heck!" And I almost hear the cat giggling somewhere around me.

   I tried to make a trap: set a plug into outlet 220 V and left a cord on the floor with no devices. I know, it is cruel and no good, but somehow the cat put two and two together and didn't touch the cord with high voltage. So, every cord at my place has already been nibbled. And I have no idea when and what device will be next to die. It is cat against me. And seems that the cat is quite close to its victory. BTW: I do feed the cat. Really.

An ordinary story: about another cat Cats are accustomed to be the most popular story heroes in the Web. Probably the reason is that cats are unable to be insulted and they really don't care. Anyway, here is another cat story. When I was younger and lived at my parents' place, we never brought any cats home. But the cats were coming to us themselves, especially in Winter. And we could never turn them away for my parents lived at the very edge of the town. The houses are small here and have no warm basements. This cat turned up under our window on a January night. The animal was just crying and obviously it was about to die. Even doubled glass of the window could not muffle its awful screams. The temperature on that night was 35 degrees below zero. My father took the cat, fed it and gave it a place to live in the barn, with pigs. Though the barn was rather warm, we were sure that the cat would not survive. But it did. Yet in the Spring it walked in our yard as a landlady despite it had lost its ears. It appeared to be a she-cat and she has awfully fierce nature. She could not stand any patting and never purred. Also she hated children crying and hearing this sound she always tried to make them stop. She fought hounds and rats bravely and all the local little stupid dogs had to keep silence in presence of her. This cat was a nightmare for all other neighbor cats for she often deprived them their food. My father had some hard conversation because of this animal: people were complaining that the cat had been stealing cucumbers from their greenhouses. That was not a cat, that was a gloomy dark creature. She should be named "Disaster" but somehow her name would be "Солнышко" (Sunny). Do not ask why. The terrible this cat was, but its end was much more terrible. Finally she attacked our big chain dog and was tore up to the death during this crazy onslaught. Well... That's all, folks. Another cat story with no happy end.

Level of your languages

I am not any proffesional linguist, I am just a common russian native speaker working as an engeneer. I defined the level of my English as "upper-intermediate". Surely, my Russian is at "fluent" level: having read authentic novels by Dostoevsky and all other things of this kind. 

But I'd like to say: there is no way to get perfect at any language. The very first words we try to learn are words of our native language. And all our life we have been learning more and more words, we have been  conceiving grammar, we have been trying to get really fluent over and over. We have been trying and doing all theese even though sometimes we do not notice this stuff at all.

And we can never get "super-fluent" for the daily practice never stops. 

So, all this talks are about our native language: the real fluence is not to be reached. As for foreign languages, they work in the same way. If you use them, you make daily progress. But if you make mistakes - it's really OK. That will happen all the way during the learning, even when you talk your native language. We study languages not to be perfect at them. We do it for being able to say and hear something new, to make the world big and intresting.

That  is all I wanted to say everyone who is upset with their language hardships.