Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.
Most of the Russian technical vocabulary is English, wearing a Cyrillic coat. Deply, commit, release, bug, murg, feature. You can read a Russian pull request on your first day and understand roughly what it says, which is why nearly every learner here starts with a terminology list and nearly none needs one.
The vocabulary is the part you already have
One backend developer I taught for two years could follow every word in his team’s standup by month three. In month seven he agreed to something in a planning call and could not afterward say what.
Recognizing every word in a sentence is not the same as knowing what the sentence is doing.
What the borrowed words hide
The terms themselves remain intact. The grammar that wraps around them does not, and that grammar carries the information you need, which is why the sentences that catch people’s attention are built from words they know.
Russian verbs mark whether an action is finished. In a technical conversation that is the difference between Uninstalled and deplied: the thing is out, or somebody spent an afternoon on it. He had been hearing both as deployed, which meant half the status updates he sat through were telling him something other than what he took away from them. Negation in front of a familiar term does the same thing. We won't be taking it apart until Friday. He passed him at speed on Friday, and he spent that week expecting a release that no one had promised. Then comes the You and you boundary, which in a distributed team moves faster than anybody explains it and never at a moment anybody announces.A term you recognize is a term you stop listening past.
These are not the hard words. They are the ones where a borrowed term sits next to a Russian word that quietly changes what the whole phrase is doing.| What you hear | What it actually says |
|---|---|
| It was deactivated | It is out, past tense, done |
| Demolished | Someone worked on deploying it |
| We're not in time | We will miss it, he said early and softly |
| We need to see | No one has looked yet |
| Overall, ok | Approved with reservations; expect comments |
| The controversial moment | I disagree and am being polite |
| Stool | A workaround the author is not proud of |
Code review reads differently than you expect
The culture of reviewing books softens with padding: maybe consider, what do you think about, nit. Russian technical review runs flatter than that, and English speakers reliably read the flatness as displeasure with them personally.The same developer sent me a screenshot of a comment on his pull request. Three words, no hedging. He had read it as hostile and spent an evening rewriting perfectly good code.
Does it work? That was the whole comment. Not a verdict but a question, left by someone who wanted to know whether the thing worked, and establishing that cost him an evening. He answered with four paragraphs explaining his design. The reply came back as one word, ok, which he read as the argument being lost. Nothing had been lost. The reviewer asked, got an answer, and closed the thread the way people close threads. Whatever Politeness is inherent in Russian grammar Has nowhere to go in three words. In short, technical exchanges have no room for it, which makes them read more bluntly than the person who wrote them intended. We're not in time usually arrives well before anyone is actually late. It’s a warning rather than an admission, and English speakers tend to hear it as either dramatic or as news that the thing has already gone wrong. One student replied to it with a rescue plan and confused everyone, because nothing had gone wrong yet. What the sentence wanted was an acknowledgment and possibly a smaller scope. That thread came to me afterward with a question about what he should have written instead. Two words, as it turned out. What we are removing asks which piece comes out, and because it takes the deadline as given and puts the decision back on the table, it arrives as a colleague solving the problem rather than a manager showing up with a plan nobody asked for.A warning about a deadline is not a report that it has passed.
If you write to Russian-speaking colleagues as well as talk to them, the conventions for the letter itself are a separate problem and worth reading about separately.The word that has no English equivalent
Stool means a crutch. In code it means a workaround the author is not proud of, and the apology is built into the word instead of added afterward. There is no neutral English term for it. Hack is admiring, workaround is bureaucratic, technical debt names a category. Russian has one word carrying the apology inside it, which is why English speakers on mixed teams adopt it untranslated within a month. This is a crutch; we’ll modify it later. is a complete sentence, a confession and a plan. The first time a student uses it correctly in a standup is usually the moment colleagues stop switching to English for him.I made the same mistake in the other direction for a year
Nobody warned me either, and my version was worse because from the outside it looked as though everything was going fine for a year, which is exactly how long it went on.
When I started working with American colleagues I read their written feedback as far kinder than it was. It might be worth checking whether this handles the empty case It's a defect report. I filed sentences like that under polite suggestion for about a year, because every one of them arrived wrapped in enough softening to sound optional. What ended it was a colleague saying in a meeting that two of us had a habit of ignoring her comments. I went back through eight months of threads that evening and counted eleven of hers that I had read but hadn’t acted on. Every one was a real find, phrased as a question or a maybe.The English review softens the sentence. It does not soften the finding.
I now read the qualifiers as packaging and the noun phrase as the message, which took embarrassingly long to learn and works in both directions once you have it. It is also why I no longer tell students that Russian technical comments are blunt. They are short. Blunt is what short looks like from the other side. At Palme School we teach adults 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
For the standups, no. For what gets decided in the messages that aren’t in English, which on a mixed team is more of them than anyone admits, yes.
Not the borrowed ones, which you already know. Learn the verb pairs around them and the four or five phrases that carry judgment: Overall, ok, Controversial moment, You should watch it., we don't have time.
Because they are short, and Russian carries its politeness in grammar that has nowhere to sit in three words. A blunt-looking comment is usually a question.
Following it comes early, because the vocabulary is borrowed. Knowing what was decided comes considerably later, and that gap surprises people.
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.
