Speaking Russian

Russian is a beautiful, but complex language. I’ve learned that at this point, as long as I have the vocab, people will at least understand and the grammar will come with time. Someday I hope to get the grammar down. Russian uses many words from other languages, but I’ve noticed insane amount of English words. I’m sure there are many from other languages as well, but seeing as English is my language, those are the words I notice. Anyways, So many Russian words are English words spoken with a Russian accent or modified slightly so that they can write it with the Cyrillic alphabet. If the word is a verb, they add ovats to the end of it. Sometimes when people are talking to me, I’ll understand everything except the word that is taken from English and they will have to repeat it over and over, and then out comes the dictionary and then I feel dumb because it is exactly the same in English as Russian. Maybe I just expect it to be something different? For instance, my tutor was telling me about her dog and I told her I didn’t understand what kind of dog it was, but it was a Dalmatian, and she was saying Dalmatian the whole time, but I didn’t catch on. This also works the other way, when I hear words that I think are cognates, but really mean something very different. This has caused me a bit of confusion in class.