Привет! I was wondering about the word for "you" in

Привет!
I was wondering about the word for “you” in the question “How are you?” In the word “живёшь” does the “B” make a “G” sound or a “V” sound?
Thank you.

1 Like

I’ve written several times and I write again and again: every language has its own structures - and if you translate them ‘word by word’ into your own lqanguage, you’ll receive some very strange phrases!..
For example: ‘es gibt’ in German doesn’t mean ‘it gives’, like in wordly translation- it’s noncense!
In Russian WE CAN SAY in differ ways for English ‘How are you?’- Как дела? Как у тебя дела? Как у вас дела? Как живёшь? Как ты живёшь? Как вы живете? Ну и как у тебя? Всё путём?
‘You’ can be ‘ты’ или ‘вы’. Живёшь- we say ‘в’. We never say ‘г’ instead of ‘B’; but we say ‘-ово, ево’- instead of written’ -ого, его’ at the end of the words.
Good luck!

Hi ! =))) The word-for-word translation of ‘Kak zhivyesh’ is ‘How are you living?’ I know it sounds absolutely strange in English, but this is a type of phrase that sounds extremely strange in nearly every language being translated word-for-word! :wink:

As for the sound ‘V’ seeminly pronounced as ‘G’, the reason is, ‘V’ when followed by a certain type of vowels is palatalized, which sounds very much like ‘G’ ! =))

Don’t take languages literally. This is a big mistake I’ve seen in language learning is to use English logic to decipher foreign languages. This often doesn’t work especially Russian! I asked a question a bit ago about the syntax of a sentence. I knew you couldn’t translate each word individually though I was curious why you could speak like Yoda and still have it completely proper.

cock (lol) zhheevyosh’?

1 Like

@bastowells122 - there is a pretty handy text-to-speech program here:

And of course, google translate has a similar option.

@pauler - I read in another post that you might know one or two words in the Russian language. What does it mean when a guy holds up a bottle of Vodka to his friends and says “Живём!” Is it like “Let’s live it up!”?

1 Like

Hi ! =)))

Wow, now you really got the idea! =)))) Exactly! =)) You may either build your sentence as Yoda-san speaks, or with a word order of Japanese, which is the same, i.e. verb is the last word in the sentence, or just in my Tagalog, where verb is the first word of the sentence! =)))

The reason why you still have a completely properly built sentence is, nearly each word, in all these three languages has markers which indicate the function of the word in the sentence, hence, let you freely shuffle the words within a sentence, while in English, the function in the sentence is strictly denoted by the place of the words in the sentence! =))

1 Like

Hi ! =))) That’s a very Russian reality question, a really gorgeous one! =)))

Its word-for-word translation is ‘We are living on!’ but the implication will really make you laugh! =)))

It’s not just by chance that a guy holds a bottle of Vodka and shows it to his friends! =)))

The original implication is, when after yesterday’s heavy drinking they have ‘the day after’ or hangover, the most popular way to overcome this condition is to take some alcohol next morning so that after its effect we could at least live on ! =))))

P.S. Russian is my native, after all, and my major in diploma! :wink:

Nice! If anybody is interested, it comes from this video, around 11:50
http://rutube.ru/video/d76b60e9abfb6e5885c98f50c9635164/

1 Like

Ahahaha, wonderful! =)))

The doctor refused to take this bribe, so the bottle remained with him! :wink:

But the overall language of this series is in real thick Russian! =))) Some implications are rather hard to get at first! :wink:

1 Like