Russ-lish and Eng-ian

One of the things that has been both incredibly endearing and entirely hilarious has been listening to the mis-steps of Expats in their attempts at Russian and those of Ukrainians speaking English.

On one of our first trip to McDonalds, Arun was trying to order us a medium-sized french fry.
"Kakoi?" she asked Arun, indicating the various sizes of containers.
"Uhhh...." Arun fumbled.
"Bolshoi?"
"Nyet!" Arun was at least relieved to be able to rule out the largest size.
"Malinchi?"... "Small?" she translated into English for him.
"Nyet!" Arun ruled out again.
"Oh!" she said with recognition, "In-the-middle!"
"Da!"

And bingo- we got our in-the-middle sized fries. Very fun!

On the flipside, there have been some hysterical mistakes on our part as well.
One evening, we went out to dinner with a large group of Arun's coworkers at a Ukrainian Restaurant. Dave was trying to join us and asked for the name of the restaurant.

Our fellow diner flipped over the Menu and said, "Oh, we're at Mihio's!"
The rest of the table burst out laughing.
The letterings on the menu cover were in Russian and spelled out the word, menu.

Some other common Ukrainian-English phrases and words that have struck me are:

• The pronounciation of the word 'clothes' (which we rhyme with hose or shows, but they pronounce with two syllables: clo--thes which rhymes more with bogus.)



• Using the phrase "make pictures" rather than "take pictures" but in many ways I love the word 'make' here because it seems more like an artistic creation.



• Using the word "many" instead of "a lot."

I'll end on one note- and its that I am grateful to all the Odessites who have put up with my attempts at speaking Russian over the past 6 months. I have mixed up "Ribyonik" with "Rabushka" and "Palitinza" with "Leiznitza" and numerous other vocabulary brain-freezes... and people have only been understanding and appreciative at my feeble attempts.