Russian Words With No English Equivalent

Every list of untranslatable Russian words contains the same three or four, and they are usually offered as evidence of a mysterious national soul. The useful version of this is duller and more practical. These are ordinary words that do a job English spreads across several words, and most of them are not poetic at all. You will hear ничего forty times before you hear тоска once.

A word on the respellings below. Russian stress moves around and is not written, and an unstressed о is read as an a, so the spelling and the sound drift apart in ways no respelling can fix. Capitals mark the stressed syllable, which is the one thing worth getting right. What a respelling cannot show at all is the soft sign, the difference between a hard and a soft consonant, and that difference is real. Treat the respellings as a starting position and correct them by ear.

What follows is in the order you will actually meet these words: the ones you will hear on your first day, then the famous ones, then the ones that carry a judgement and can get you into trouble.

Ничего means nothing. It is also the answer to how are you, the answer to an apology, the thing said when someone drops a glass, and a mild compliment. The literal meaning and the everyday meaning have almost nothing to do with each other, and the word is common enough that mishearing it will cost you whole conversations.

Note the pronunciation. The г in this ending is read as a v, which catches out anyone reading from the page. As an answer to как дела, ничего is neutral and honest: things are going, nothing to report. It is not enthusiastic and it is not a complaint. As a response to someone apologising, it is the exact equivalent of no harm done.

If you learn one phrase from this page, make it that one. It is what you say when someone bumps into you, arrives late, or spills something, and it works in every register from a friend's kitchen to a customer service counter.

Давай is the imperative of the verb to give. It almost never means give. It means come on, or let's, or fine then, or go on, depending entirely on the tone it is said in, and it is the most common way Russians end a phone call between friends.

The thing to absorb is that давай by itself, said with a falling tone at the end of a conversation, is a complete goodbye. A learner who has only met it as let's do something will keep waiting for the rest of the sentence. There is no rest of the sentence. It is also strictly informal. Ending a call with your landlord or a government office that way is the sort of thing people notice.

These three are not famous and none of them will appear on a list about the Russian soul. They are the ones you will genuinely need in the first week, because English simply has no single word for any of them.

English needs a clause for this. Russian has a verb, and it is used constantly: about catching a train, finishing a report, getting to the shop before it shut. Успеть is neutral in register, so it is as much at home in a news broadcast as in a text message.

A Russian day can be день, which is the daylight part, or сутки, which is the whole rotation. Hospitals, visa forms, left luggage offices and parking signs all count in сутки. The word exists only in the plural, which is why it looks odd the first time you meet it on a price list.

Авось is the one on this list that is about an attitude rather than a thing. Doing something на авось means doing it without preparation and trusting that it will somehow be fine. Russians use it about themselves, often with a shrug and often ironically, and the phrase русский авось is a stock piece of self-description. When you use it about someone else's plan, you are saying that plan is reckless.

Тоска is the word everyone quotes. Nabokov, translating Pushkin, gave up on finding an English equivalent and wrote a paragraph about it instead, and his description is still the best short one: an ache of the soul with no clear cause at the deep end, and boredom at the shallow end. The important part for a learner is that the shallow end is where the word lives most of the time.

So the word is not reserved for grief. Somebody stuck in an empty office on a Sunday will say тоска about the office, not about their life. It does carry weight, though, and it is heavier than bored. If you want to say you miss a specific person, the ordinary verb is скучать, not тоска.

Пошлость is the other word from the famous list, and it is the one most likely to be used wrongly by a learner who has read the definition. It is often glossed as vulgarity, which is too narrow. It covers cheapness pretending to be taste: the sentimental, the self-satisfied, the tacky thing that is pleased with itself. Nabokov wrote about it at length in his book on Gogol and concluded that English had nothing that covered the same ground.

The noun is bookish and belongs in criticism and argument. The short form пошло is what people actually say, about a wedding photograph, a song, a proposal staged in a restaurant. Understand that it is a real criticism and not a light one. Calling something пошло in front of the person who chose it is not a soft comment.

Хамство comes from хам, a boor, and refers to a specific kind of rudeness: contempt delivered by someone who knows you cannot answer back. The clerk who does not look up, the official who enjoys the queue. Sergei Dovlatov wrote an essay arguing that the word has no English equivalent precisely because the combination of rudeness and impunity is what makes it what it is.

Recognise it in complaints and in journalism. Be much slower to use it. Calling a person a хам to their face is an insult with no cushion on it, and as a foreigner making a judgement about how Russians treat each other, you are on thin ice from the first syllable. The same applies to пошлость and to авось: all three are words Russians use about their own culture, and they land differently coming from a visitor.

Two more things not to do. Do not use давай with anyone you are being formal with, and do not answer ничего to a compliment unless you mean to be lukewarm about it. Ничего about your own work means it turned out passable.

Standard Russian is remarkably uniform over a very large area, and every word on this page is understood identically from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok and across the countries where Russian is widely spoken outside Russia. None of them is a regionalism.

The regional splits are in ordinary nouns instead, and the Moscow against Petersburg pairs are the famous ones. A kerb is бордюр in Moscow and поребрик in Petersburg. The entrance to a block of flats is подъезд in Moscow and парадная in Petersburg. The shawarma sold on the street is шаурма in one city and шаверма in the other. People argue about these lists for entertainment. Nobody will fail to understand you.

Russians do not answer the phone with a greeting from the standard set. They answer with алло, which exists for this purpose and nothing else, or with a plain да, or with слушаю, meaning I'm listening.

The end of the call is where давай does its work. Ну давай, пока is the standard close between friends and family, often repeated two or three times before anyone actually hangs up. In a work call you drop it and use до свидания instead.

In writing the register splits hard. Ничего, успеть and сутки are fine anywhere, including a formal email; сутки in particular is the word official documents use. Давай belongs only in messages to people you know. Тоска in writing reads as literary rather than casual, and пошлость reads as an essay word. A formal email opens with Здравствуйте, or with Уважаемый followed by the person's first name and patronymic, and none of the words on this page belong near that opening.

Learn ничего and ничего страшного first, because they will come up on your first morning and they smooth over almost anything. Add давай so that you recognise a goodbye when you hear one, and успеть because you will need it the moment you are late for something.

Тоска and пошлость can wait. They are worth understanding, but they are words you should hear used ten times before you try using one yourself.