Travel and Tourist Transactions

В кассе

A transaction is short in any language. In Russian it is shorter still, and the first time you see a Russian question written out you will think a word has been missed off. It has not. Every word below is shown three ways: the Cyrillic, a transliteration in brackets to help you say it, and the English. Read the Cyrillic first and use the transliteration only to check the sound.

Travel words in Russian

The nouns a traveller needs. Watch the last one, which does not mean what it looks like:

Match each word to its meaning

Two words that are not there

You already know that Russian has no articles: море means sea, a sea and the sea. Here is the second missing word, and together they explain why Russian sentences look too short. Russian does not use a word for "is" in the present tense.

Reading a Russian station sign

You see the question Где вокзал? written on a sign. What is it asking?

• Where is the station?
• Nothing: a word has been left out by mistake
• There is a station
• Which station?

The rule

Russian has no word for _____ and no word for _____ in the present tense. So "Where is the station?" is just _____, and "This is a ticket" is just _____. The words are not _____: they do not exist in Russian at all.

Asking for it

Three expressions turn a noun into a transaction:

Order the exchange

Put a short transaction at the ticket office into a sensible order.

• Find the ticket office: Где касса?
• Ask for what you want: билет, пожалуйста
• Ask the price: Сколько стоит?
• Hand over деньги, the money
• Later, at the hotel, ask for the ключ to your номер

Which are right?

Select the TWO sentences that are correct Russian.

• Где касса? for "Where is the ticket office?"
• Это ключ. for "This is a key."
• Где есть касса? as the everyday way to ask where it is
• Это а билет. for "This is a ticket."

На вокзале

You are at the station and then at your hotel. Choose the right Russian each time.

• First you need to find the ticket office. What do you ask?
• You want to know what a ticket costs. What do you ask?
• At the hotel you want to say "This is my key". Which is right?

Tickets and rooms in Russian

The Russian for a ticket is _____ and the railway station is _____. A hotel room is _____, which also means a number. To ask a price you say _____. Russian uses no word for "the" and no word for _____ in the present.

Arriving by train

Write in English about arriving in a new city by train. Say what you had to buy and ask, and explain what makes a written Russian question look shorter than the English one.

• Say where you were going and what you needed to buy
• Give the two questions you had to ask, and the Russian words you would use
• Explain the two English words that have no Russian equivalent in these sentences
• Give one Russian sentence from this module and its literal word-for-word English, to show the difference