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igenlodeI bought myself a present -- the matching volume to the Oxford English-Russian Dictionary that I purchased from new at the start of the 1990s :-)
At the time they were extremely expensive, and I made do in the Russian-English direction with a couple of free dictionaries that turned up as jumble-sale discards: the invaluable 1970s miniature Pocket Oxford Russian-English Dictionary, a reduced version of the full-size edition containing 'nearly 30,000 words', and an ancient Moscow-printed Русско-английский словарь (presumably brought back by one of my parents' peace-activist friends) of 34,000 words, "not primarily intended for the reader whose native language is English".
However, forty years later I was finally able to treat myself to the missing volume of the full Oxford dictionary at what turned out to be a ridiculously low price, now that all second-hand booksellers are online (no, I didn't buy it from Amazon). Given the current cost of postage I suspect that I paid mere pennies for the actual book; of course, you get the delivery you pay for, and the postman simply shoved the heavy volume through the letterbox, where it fell and split the (already damaged) back corner further. The actual spine is fine; it's just the patent plastic 'flexi-binding' cover, which I suspect becomes brittle with age and was never intended to be subjected to being dropped on its edge from a height of several feet!
But the interior is exactly what I was hoping for; it is the same format as the pocket edition, with the handy cross-referencing of different verb forms for non-native speakers, but far less compressed, with related words listed one underneath each other instead of assembled into a single consecutive paragraph. And the typeface is considerably larger, which makes it a lot easier to read in low light! Text typeset at 5 lines to 10 millimetres makes my eyes ache, especially when it's in Cyrillic, which has very few ascenders and descenders to distinguish the shapes of the letters.
I have put a strip of brown parcel-tape down the damaged edge; since it is plastic, at least I don't need to worry about the disastrous effects of decaying Sellotape-glue on paper/card. (Never 'repair' any paper item using Sellotape if you have any intention of storing it long-term :-( ) And I shall just have to support the spine carefully in my hand when reading, which I always tend to do anyhow out of long habit with these 'flexi-bindings'.
[Edit: my Collins flexi-back pocket German dictionary from 1998 has also split in the same place. The little Collins Gem dictionaries from the 1970s are fine.]
Meanwhile I have half an uncaptioned documentary remaining to decipher by ear :-)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RTu6sH8P9w4
(The first half had auto-generated Russian subtitles, and offered an auto-translation of them at yet another remove of accuracy. But it cut out at the one-hour mark in the middle of the programme. I managed to find an alternative upload with the full broadcast in it, but that one is completely without AI subtitling whatsoever... which is the point at which I'm always grateful that I make a point of listening *without* the subtitles first, so that (a) it doesn't come as so much of a shock when whole sections drop out for technical reasons, and (b) I'm getting practice in Russian audio comprehension without any 'training wheels' at all, which is significantly useful in those (not infrequent) cases where there is no alternative!)
At the time they were extremely expensive, and I made do in the Russian-English direction with a couple of free dictionaries that turned up as jumble-sale discards: the invaluable 1970s miniature Pocket Oxford Russian-English Dictionary, a reduced version of the full-size edition containing 'nearly 30,000 words', and an ancient Moscow-printed Русско-английский словарь (presumably brought back by one of my parents' peace-activist friends) of 34,000 words, "not primarily intended for the reader whose native language is English".
However, forty years later I was finally able to treat myself to the missing volume of the full Oxford dictionary at what turned out to be a ridiculously low price, now that all second-hand booksellers are online (no, I didn't buy it from Amazon). Given the current cost of postage I suspect that I paid mere pennies for the actual book; of course, you get the delivery you pay for, and the postman simply shoved the heavy volume through the letterbox, where it fell and split the (already damaged) back corner further. The actual spine is fine; it's just the patent plastic 'flexi-binding' cover, which I suspect becomes brittle with age and was never intended to be subjected to being dropped on its edge from a height of several feet!
But the interior is exactly what I was hoping for; it is the same format as the pocket edition, with the handy cross-referencing of different verb forms for non-native speakers, but far less compressed, with related words listed one underneath each other instead of assembled into a single consecutive paragraph. And the typeface is considerably larger, which makes it a lot easier to read in low light! Text typeset at 5 lines to 10 millimetres makes my eyes ache, especially when it's in Cyrillic, which has very few ascenders and descenders to distinguish the shapes of the letters.
I have put a strip of brown parcel-tape down the damaged edge; since it is plastic, at least I don't need to worry about the disastrous effects of decaying Sellotape-glue on paper/card. (Never 'repair' any paper item using Sellotape if you have any intention of storing it long-term :-( ) And I shall just have to support the spine carefully in my hand when reading, which I always tend to do anyhow out of long habit with these 'flexi-bindings'.
[Edit: my Collins flexi-back pocket German dictionary from 1998 has also split in the same place. The little Collins Gem dictionaries from the 1970s are fine.]
Meanwhile I have half an uncaptioned documentary remaining to decipher by ear :-)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RTu6sH8P9w4
(The first half had auto-generated Russian subtitles, and offered an auto-translation of them at yet another remove of accuracy. But it cut out at the one-hour mark in the middle of the programme. I managed to find an alternative upload with the full broadcast in it, but that one is completely without AI subtitling whatsoever... which is the point at which I'm always grateful that I make a point of listening *without* the subtitles first, so that (a) it doesn't come as so much of a shock when whole sections drop out for technical reasons, and (b) I'm getting practice in Russian audio comprehension without any 'training wheels' at all, which is significantly useful in those (not infrequent) cases where there is no alternative!)
no subject
Date: 2025-07-27 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-07-31 08:31 am (UTC)Offset by the fact that the head-word you are looking for is actually guaranteed to be at the start of a line, though, rather than potentially buried halfway through a paragraph of related derivatives...