Assorted grammar books

Six months in, and I'm still persevering in my quest to re-learn Russian grammar while currently working my way through three textbooks in parallel, from the 1930s, the 1960s and the 1990s. Extra textbooks = extra exercises = more practice... and also alternate ways of explaining things, some of which may make more sense/prove more memorable than others.( Back-formations of imperfective verbs )

I managed to reach Part II of the 1930s book, meanwhile, which consists of 'every-day' period English conversations ( Read more... )

I'm able to spot a few fairly obvious typoes here and there, which is gratifying: Проставте Ваме имя is pretty definitely an error for Проставте Ваше имя (possibly the author's handwriting ;p) And I'm interested to see the 'poetic' instrumental endings in -ою and -ею in apparently everyday usage here (за едою, которую мне дают по утрам); I wonder when they went out of fashion. (It's a useful distinction, the absence of which I rather regret, since it means that *all* the feminine oblique case-endings are now basically the same; good for fudging things while composing answers in Russian, but not good for understanding the function of words in a sentence!)

I was, however, pretty puzzled by the appearance of sporadic hard signs after the preposition в, also presumably an archaicism. ( I couldn't work out any pattern )

Meanwhile I'm exceedingly perplexed by my own historic marginal note in the 1990s textbook reading, cryptically, adverbs like noble gases...! ( Read more... )