Russian Reflexive Verbs and Talking About Free Time & Daily Routine

You will learn

• to talk about how you spend your free time
• to describe your daily routine
• to describe the flat (apartment) you live in

and you will be given information about place names and the way they have changed.

Study guide

🔊 Dialogues: Sports and Free Time

1. Does Volodya take part in sports?

плавание swimming

2. Sasha takes part in sports too, when he has the time.

3. How does Anna Ivanovna spend her free time?

вечерами in the evenings
в выходные дни on days off
дача small cottage (see Did you know? in lesson 7)
цветоводство flower cultivation
клубника strawberries
кустарник bush
наверно (or sometimes наверное) probably, I suppose
опята (pl.) a type of mushroom, опёнок (sing.) agaric honey

Practice what you have learned

1. Larisa is telling a colleague how she spends her time. Listen to their conversation, then mark the correct answers.

2. Inna, a sports instructor, stops a few people on the street and asks them some questions. Listen to their responses, and write under each picture what sport the person plays and how often.

New word: бассейн swimming pool

I.

II.

III.

3. Your name is Syeva, and you have a wide range of interests. Andrei will guide you.

🔊 Dialogues: Daily Routine

4. Tamara doesn’t seem to have any free time.

бабушка grandmother
в обеденный перерыв in the lunch break
снова again
вставать (я встаю, вы встаёте) to get up
готовить (я готовлю, вы готовите) to prepare
мыть (я мою, вы моете) посуду to wash the dishes
заниматься стиркой to do the laundry
ложиться (я ложусь, вы ложитесь) спать to go to bed (lit. to lie down to sleep)

Practice what you have learned

4. On your recording you will hear three people describing their families. Listen carefully, then find the picture which corresponds below.

a)

b)

c)

5. Valya and her neighbor have quite different lifestyles. The descriptions they gave of their daily routine are given below, but they are all jumbled up. Listen to your recording and then write down who does what in the correct order.

I. Valya —› —› —› —› —› —›

II. Oleg —› —› —› —› —› —›

🔊 Dialogues: Describing Your Apartment

5. Aleksandr Aleksandrovich describes his home.

Practice what you have learned

6. Listen to Vladimir Nikolaevich’s description of his apartment and then spot the mistakes in the following notes.

7. Three people who are each hoping to exchange their own apartment for another one are looking through the advertisements in the Bulletin of the Apartment Exchange Office. Each finds one promising advertisement. Listen as they describe their present accommodation, and match each to the appropriate advertisement.

меняем (одну квартиру) на (другую квартиру)
we will exchange (one apartment) for (another apartment).

To use

To understand

The particle -ся is added to a verb to make it reflexive, i.e. to indicate that the subject is doing the action to himself or herself, or that there is no object after the verb. Заниматься means ‘to occupy oneself (with something)’, while занимать by itself means simply ‘to occupy (a place, time etc.)’. You have already met other verbs ending in -ся, e.g.:

There is no object in this sentence — the shop ‘opens itself’! However, the shopkeeper would say:

Verbs with and without -ся

Many verbs form such a pair: without -ся the verb takes a direct object, with -ся it does not:

Examples

There are other occasions when reflexive endings are used, but for the moment we suggest that you simply try to remember the very common verbs mentioned here.

Endings

Do not be daunted by the new endings. The verb itself changes as you would expect (see grammar in lesson 9). To make it reflexive, you add -ся if the previous letter is a consonant or -ь, and -сь if it is a vowel. For example:

The past tense also follows this pattern:

8. Fill in the missing verb.

9. In this exercise sometimes the verb is missing, sometimes the noun.

Up till now we have introduced only printed Russian. However, Russians write rather than print, and since you will probably wish to correspond with friends you make, it is worth spending some time becoming familiar with the handwritten script. Here is the alphabet with both printed letters and handwritten:

Here are some common words, both printed and handwritten:

театр

ресторан

газета

журнал

кофе с молоком

As you can see, some letters look quite different. Practise writing them and try forming whole words.

10. On retiring Natalya Aleksandrovna was given a card with the following signatures. Can you make out the names of her colleagues?

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

11. A young student called Tonya was asked to write a letter to a friend’s brother who is studying Russian. Read her letter, then correct the mistakes in the statements below.

You will need to know: Жду ответа, ‘waiting for your reply’.

Tonya asked some questions at the end of her letter. How would you answer them?

💡 Did you know?

What’s in a name?

The question may seem well-worn, but to Russians it is of immediate importance. Changing names of places, institutions etc. has taken on symbolic, as well as practical, significance.

In the first decades after the revolution of 1917, a large number of cities, towns, villages, streets etc. were renamed. Usually they were named after some revolutionary figure or group. Most famous is, of course, the city which Peter the Great founded. As you have read in lesson 12, from 1703 to 1914 it was called St. Petersburg. Then, in 1914, to make it sound more ‘Russian’, it was renamed Petrograd, only to be changed again in 1924 to Leningrad, in honor of Vladimir Lenin, who had just died. In 1991 a referendum on the question of the city’s name was held and a majority voted for the restoration of the first name St. Petersburg. While officially the name is Saint Petersburg, Russians normally call it simply ‘Petersburg’.

Under Stalin, renaming took on absurd proportions as the dictator and his retinue named squares, streets, towns and mountains after themselves.

The problem here was that when these people fell from favor, the names had to be changed yet again. Those reading about the famous Battle of Stalingrad, the turning point in the Second World war, may have been bemused to find no trace of the city on maps. This is because after the denunciation of Stalin in 1956 it was renamed Volgograd.

Only the most notorious in Stalin’s following received the ignominious fate of having their names erased from history. The names of others, such as Zhdanov, were retained until late into the 1980s.

This form of self-worship did not end with Stalin’s reign. Brezhnev also used it both for himself and as a reward for ‘his’ people.

Since the 1980s and particularly following the demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) at the end of 1991, many old names have been restored. Kalinin is now Tver once more, Gor'ky is Nizhny Novgorod.

In Moscow many of the main streets have also reverted to the old names: улица Горького is again Тверская, and проспект Маркса is Охотный Ряд (now split back into Okhotny Ryad, Teatralny Proyezd and Mokhovaya). It must be added that some names never really changed as far as the people were concerned. While authorities called the square close to Red Square площадь 50-летия Октября (50th anniversary of October (revolution) square), Muscovites among themselves continued to use the old (and ‘new’!) name Манежная.

All this once meant that asking a passer-by could well be more efficient than trying to follow a map!

Today, of course, navigation apps such as Yandex Maps and 2GIS make this far less of a headache than it once was — they are constantly updated and even show former names. Still, older Russians will often use the historic names in conversation, so it is worth knowing both.

Your turn to speak

On a trip to Russia, you are introduced to a school teacher, Tatyana. Practice what you would say to her about your interests and pastimes, where you live, work etc. Once you have had a try, turn on the recording and listen to what she says about herself.

Useful phrases:

FAQ