Russian for Remote Work. The Vocabulary Nobody Warns You About

Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.

English carries politeness in words you can add. Please, thanks, just, maybe, sorry to bother you. They bolt on without changing anything inside the sentence, which is why an English speaker learns politeness as a list and why that habit is the first thing to break.

Your politeness does not survive the trip

Russian mostly does it inside the grammar. The thing that matters most is not among the words you can add, and a phrasebook can’t show you a choice you have to make in the verb.

So the message arrives correct and socially wrong, and nobody tells you.

Four months. That is how long one of my students worked on a distributed team before anybody told her, and the conversation happened at all only because a colleague ran out of patience on a Friday afternoon and said the thing everyone else had been leaving alone. You write like a form, she said. Then she apologized for putting it that way, which made it worse.

A correct sentence in the wrong register is not a small error. It is a different message.

What actually goes wrong in writing

Three things go wrong, and none appears in a vocabulary list. Start with the imperative. English softens instructions with padding: could you possibly, when you get a chance. Russian softens them by changing the verb form, so translating the padding produces something servile or impatient depending on how much of it you used.

That same student built a nine-word request out of four separate softeners, each of them correct and each taken from a different page of the same phrasebook. She read it aloud in a lesson and stopped halfway through on her own.

The padding you would add in English is the thing that makes you sound wrong.

Next comes aspect, which quietly announces whether you consider a thing finished. Two forms of one verb separate having reviewed a document from having spent time looking at it, and colleagues read the difference even when you did not intend one. She also wrote once that she had been looking at a contract. Her manager read that as still looking, waited two days and asked again, and she had in fact finished it on the Tuesday. Neither of them knew where the misunderstanding had come from until she showed me the thread. Then comes the ты and вы boundary, which in a distributed team moves faster than anybody explains it, never at a moment anybody announces, and usually while you are looking at something else. One American engineer held the formal address for eleven months with a team that had switched after the second week. Nobody corrected him. He figured out what had happened when somebody forwarded him an old thread and he saw the change on a date he could point to. In what I have seen, it shifts after a call rather than after a message, which learners discover by switching to ты first, the harder direction to take back.

The six that carry most of the traffic

I went through a year of my own work messages before writing this, which is a smaller sample than it sounds and the only one I have. The right column is the part worth keeping. Each phrase softens inside the grammar. None of them needs English scaffolding, and adding it is precisely what makes a learner sound wrong.

I did not see it from my own side either

For years I wrote to parents in Russian the way I write to anybody. Short, the point in the first line, no run-up, and it never occurred to me that this was a choice. Then a mother replied to two of my lines with four paragraphs, and the length was not the interesting part of it. The interesting part was that she had answered a question I had not asked, about whether her daughter was doing badly.

Nothing in my message said that. Nothing said anything else either, and into the empty space she put the worst reading on offer, and that is what an empty space is for.

A short message is not neutral. It is a blank the reader fills in.

These days I write to parents differently, at a cost of roughly fifteen seconds a message, which is the cheapest fix anywhere in this article.

The call is a different language again

Meetings run faster than your comprehension, and everybody knows it except the person who’s in one and still hoping to catch up by concentrating harder.

What you need there isn’t vocabulary. Three sentences buy you time without conceding anything, and they are the same three every time: repeat that, slow down, and I will follow up in writing. One student kept all three on a sticky note at the edge of his monitor for most of a year. He told me about it apologetically, the way people confess to a crutch. Then he said the middle sentence was the only one he had ever needed. A phrase assembled under pressure never gets used.

In a meeting, fluency is the ability to interrupt yourself gracefully.

What happened to the woman who wrote like a form

We went through eleven of her messages in one lesson, printed out and laid in order across the table, which is not how I normally teach anything.

By the fourth message the pattern lay on the table in front of both of us, and I did not have to point at it. She had been translating her English politeness one word at a time. Would it be possible, whenever you have a moment, sorry to bother you. In Russian each of those lands as a small formal apology attached to an ordinary request. Eleven of them in a week, all to the same four colleagues. Read together they describe somebody very junior, or somebody quietly miserable and hoping nobody minds. I thought I was being nice, she said. She had been. The register simply carried a meaning she had not chosen. Six weeks later she told me a colleague had asked whether something had changed at her end. Nothing had, except that she had stopped apologizing for asking people to do their jobs.

Nobody corrects your register. They just quietly adjust their picture of you.

It works identically in the other direction. Your Russian colleagues won’t tell you either. They’ll decide you are cold or oddly deferential, and neither is a thing anybody says out loud. At Palme School we teach online, in groups of up to eight, two forty-minute classes a week, and the first two lessons are free. You can book those here, and there are printable materials for learners in our resource library.

Frequently asked questions

What Russian phrases do I need for business meetings?

Fewer than you think, and the useful ones buy time rather than convey content: a request to repeat, a request to slow down, and a promise to follow up in writing.

Is my Russian email too formal or not formal enough?

If you are translating English politeness word for word, probably too formal and slightly odd with it. Russian softens inside the grammar, so English padding is what makes it sound wrong.

When do I switch from вы to ты with a colleague?

In what I have seen, after a call rather than a message, and when the other person does it first. Staying formal too long is recoverable. Switching early is not.

Do I need business Russian if we all work in English?

Only if you want to know what is being decided in the messages that are not in English, which on a distributed team is more of them than anybody admits.

Palme School: Russian for bilingual children · Conversation school · Free materials

Lily Rozberg has been teaching for sixteen years, first English in Russia and now Russian to bilingual children across the US and Canada. She writes for Palme School about heritage language, reading, and the things report cards do not measure.