AlexPGP's Corner

From a post by mutual LJ friend bekar (who takes the most marvelous pictures of Paris), I clicked a link to take a test of one's knowledge of Russian vocabulary:

Итак, ваш запас: Весьма похвальный результат, указывающий на вполне приличное владение языком

Пройти тест

The good news is that I turned in "a very commendable result, indicative of an altogether respectable command of the language." I feel, however, that as a native English-speaker, I had a secret advantage: despite the fact that all of the words in this multiple-choice quiz have doubtless been run past the eardrums and eyeballs of native Russians, a great many of the quiz words have Latin roots, which sort of gives the game away, at least to me.

* * *In other news, I've got Sandy talking to Twitter and Jott. This should be interesting.

Cheers...

I lied about going to sleep... went to check out the friends' page, and again, Russian text displays like UTF-8 having a bad hair day.

So... a little test, using a paragraph from a "story" on Lenta.ru:

По данным британской газеты The Independent, захват британских моряков Ираном стал ответом на неудавшуюся попытку американских военных захватить на севере Ирака высокопоставленных сотрудников иранских спецслужб.

According to the British newspaper The Independent, the seizure of British sailors by Iran was a response to an unsuccessful attempt by the US military to capture high-ranking Iranian intelligence officers in northern Iraq.

Can I read the Cyrillic after posting? (We already know The Independent is full of it, and is trying to recycle January's news, but I digress...)

Cheers...

UPDATE (moments after posting): Hmmm. No problems reading this post. So why am I having the same problem (правильно) on two different machines using different browsers?

UPDATE (4/3/07): To clarify, I had no trouble reading my post, but still had problems reading Cyrillic on my friends page, unless I clicked on a special link I have that displays only a subset of posts by friends (leaving out communities). In any event, today, everything seems to display correctly, everywhere.