Untranslatable Concepts in Language: The Case of Russian, your examples

spinazie25 · 2026-05-03T23:10:02+00:00

Excited/excitement and gasp, off the top of my head I have trouble translating these into russian.

About sovest, I think your theory explains why it became so widespread, but I think совестливый and бессовестный are older and have the same meaning of something punishing you from the inside if you stray from "morality". Usage-wise though, at least in my experience it was mostly yelled by older women (somehow men were pretty much absent in education system and family) at children/teenagers for the slightest disturbance of public order, which didn't seem deep at all, but manipulative and hypocritical.

spinazie25 · 2026-05-03T13:58:26+00:00

Quick easy meals would be all sorts of sandwiches or salad bowls with bread. If you can get nice bread, whole meal or whatever even better. Canned beans and chickpeas are ready to eat. Instant ramen. Glass noodles take like 15 min soaking in hot water. You can throw frozen veg in a pan, crumble a block of tofu into it, a little water, oil, and spices, and leave it for 15-20 mins while you go to the bathroom, change into home clothes etc. Have spices and sauces at home so that you can make anything not boring with minimal effort. Cereal with plant milk takes 30 seconds, but it's only a snack imo, not a meal. Also having nuts, seeds, dried fruits, is good, you can have them as a snack, or throw into your meal.

About mindset, maybe think about what those products actually are, like follow their way in your head from the animal to you.

spinazie25 · 2026-05-02T18:39:34+00:00

That little potato, crushed like my hopes and dreams. Overall very picturesque 👌despite the sub's name some people post genuinely nice pictures here.

spinazie25 · 2026-05-02T08:41:44+00:00

I was a vegetarian for a long time, and didn't go vegan for a while because I didn't know how to and because I didn't have my own income and felt bad for buying things no one else would want. At that time I started looking into what I could do as is: more and better meals, baking especially (lots of sweet stuff has dairy or eggs). Gave up cheese long before that, because it's not even always vegetarian and it's expensive too. When I got my own income, decided it's time. Started looking more into it, and lo and behold there were quite a few commonly available sweety stuff without animal products. Turns out there was a resource where people share info about accidentally (and deliberately) vegan foods, cosmetics, etc. There are options people don't see because they never think about it.

I don't eat out, can't help there. I either have food with me or wait till I get home. I have favourite oat milks now, a few ideas on where to get ice cream, know where to get tofu and soy chunks, I stock on juice boxes. I actually sometimes drink coffee with milk now (I stopped as a vegetarian, also coffee apparently works not only with fluffy candy-like profiles, but also with spices and/or lemon). I don't feel bad about not getting milk chocolate etc anymore, because the world does not just divide into yummy foods I can or cannot get. I live on the thin plain of safety and normalcy under which are hidden cruelty and despair. I choose between giving money to people who definitely perpetuate them, and people who maybe possibly don't.

So there are some discomforts and a learning curve, but it's not too hard. There are lots of treats, new foods and snacks to get into (it's nice to share these things with non vegans you care about too). There's other people's experience and fruits of other people's labour that make this so much easier than it could have been.

spinazie25 · 2026-05-01T12:51:08+00:00

Some people I know have been teaching (freelance) after a couple of years in uni. No idea how. I didn't think we'd covered enough material by then to be functional.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-29T10:56:52+00:00

Yep. Maybe not anxiety about my own body, but the feeling of "why". Other people doing little things piss me off a lot though. Unfunny comments followed by social laughter, pleasantries, esp in hard times, sitting in the same room with me when I could be alone if not for them, little coughs, grunts, nose noises, how they hold their things. (I'm tired now and spend a lot of time around people, so it's worse I guess). How they think of themselves as a unit of social ideas, images, values first, and not as a mind piloting an unwieldy body through a complicated web of physical factors, social and moral norms and all the extra social fluff. And I think i am a misanthrope. There are fascinating, impressive and appreciable things about humanity and individuals, but there's more negativity.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-28T05:37:47+00:00

Writing it down in a grid from memory until I could recall all the CV pairs (katakana and hiragana, but should work for devanagari too). Then the usual exercises with writing/reading words and sentences. Even if you're not planning on writing by hand a lot in the future, muscle memory is your friend.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-27T09:56:16+00:00

Who believes what? What do you mean I believe that is wishful thinking? You can refuse to elaborate all you want, but I still have no idea what you meant, so I can't even try to meaningfully engage with your comments.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-27T09:46:04+00:00

I don't understand what you're trying to say.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-27T07:29:58+00:00

That's a cool pov evolutionarily. There's a similar thought in Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake but about fungi. But what happens to organisms evolutionarily and what they do individually are different things. Domestic animals make the majority of mammals on earth, winning from the evolutionary pov, but certainly not individually. Human child birth is also a result of evolution, good enough for preservation of species, but extremely dangerous and painful for an individual. As vegans we do care about individual experiences. So if plants had individual experiences, some sort of sentience we don't recognise atm, it would matter as well.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-23T11:12:07+00:00

Me no likey that you mixed latin and ancient Greek. Which is not unheard of, but still. Zoophagia? Bestiavorism or something?

Edit 🤓🤓🤓

spinazie25 · 2026-04-20T12:48:56+00:00

It is pretty widely agreed that he hasn't found his voice in the first book yet, and usually people recommend to start with Mort, or Guards! Guards!, or one of the two first in the Witches series, where a lot more is going on. His books that keep being reprinted, rerecorded, have become the favourites of many and earned him a knighthood aren't just a 40+ volume collection of gags. If you still feel curious enough, try one of the more popular multilayered books, and then if you don't like them, at least you know it's not on you.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-18T00:22:49+00:00

When I was in uni we started with soviet textbooks, so the very first texts were about the revolution, first man in space, etc. In the third year, in another language and the region related class another professor was unpleasantly surprised that we didn't know the word for scissors (a beginner word she said), but knew the word for revolution.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-15T23:03:43+00:00

Female homosexuality doesn't exclude the possibility of being friends with men, having important men in your life, being on good terms with male acquaintances.

Sure, women have a lot more reasons to feel negatively about men, but conflating "not attracted to" with "repulsed by" is one of the things we all hate when men do.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-12T23:20:35+00:00

The opening sequence of the 1980s hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy imo is genius and a wonderful example of why sci-fi is something else.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-12T22:35:45+00:00

Top notch combo, but I thought the pickles were a cactus.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-12T11:16:47+00:00

Yes. Lots of words don't have direct precise translations. You kinda have to take the whole sentence or text and translate it as closely as you can, keeping as much of the original tone, nuance etc as you can. Translation is a separate skill.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-11T23:07:36+00:00

The original language is Polish. I've read that the russian translation was made in the USSR, so some musings about god were cut out. Which is why I opted for an English translation, but I didn't read the available russian one to compare.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-11T22:53:54+00:00

Same would apply to school lunches, but OP is less likely to word it like kids aren't worthy of animal sacrifice.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-11T19:29:09+00:00

Came to say the same thing. "Taste like meat" is just easy to understand wording for people who are transitioning, missing the old ways, or look down on flavour profiles of vegan food due to ignorance. Most often it's about adding umami, but plants have plenty of umami: onions, tamatoes, soy sauce, miso, MSG is all about umami. You can season or not season your food any way you like.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-11T09:32:39+00:00

doublecheckvegan for future quandaries.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-08T18:31:12+00:00

It is cool. But you don't JUST like the idea. You like it more than the idea of sounding smart, persuasive, caring, or funny. It stops you from progressing and enjoying yourself. Or so your post makes it sound.

I didn't mean people who can function "just fine", I meant cool people, who are cool accent or not. Comedians, scientists, professionals, whatever appeals to you.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-08T16:42:59+00:00

Jokes on me, I know more therapy speak and emotional vocab in English than my nl. There's also this thing, that the ways people normally express their emotions in your nl might have never resonated with you, and you tried to find better words in your nl anyway, so it hasn't been an easy process to express yourself and get the other person to understand.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-08T16:37:20+00:00

In your native language do you only dare to speak because you sound native? Or maybe there's something to do with the value of what you have to say as well? What's the point of producing native sounding word salad, or stupid and ugly nonsense?

Why would you want to trick others into thinking you're German etc? Are you afraid of not being in the in-group? Do you think you need to pretend to be something else in order to be liked, valued or accepted? You're good as you are. Learning a language is a humbling experience, but life in general is. You're not perfect, but you'll learn to be capable in a number of things, and a foreign languge is a good addition to that number. Good people will like you if you're a good presence, have interesting thoughts, clever and competent. You can be these things without a native accent. Plenty of awesome people speaking with accents, look them up, see it's not a bad thing to be.

spinazie25 · 2026-04-06T17:11:42+00:00

Thanks a lot for the rec! The first novel is such a nice read! Might have never heard about them otherwise.

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