"Красная площадь"
Translation:Red Square
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My Russian Instructor at DLI was a history buff. He talked about how Russian words were created from a root/base, with one or more prefixes or suffixes added as needed to convey the meaning. (I owned a book on Russian roots, it helped a lot).
Anyways, Red/красный was considered the most beautiful/красивый color so it shares the same root.; but, (according to him), here is the interesting part:
When Красная Площадь was built, it was called that, but it meant Beautiful Square...
The meanings of the two words swapped over the years.
Roots of the Russian Language - An Elementary Guide to Wordbuilding
When I came across a new word in the newspaper I'd look up the root and compare the difference in meaning when the prefix and/or suffix was changed. A simple example early in Duo's Russian course: писать, записать and написать
Off the top of my head there's also: списать, описать, прописать, подписать, выписать и расписать.
Once you become familiar with the more common prefixes and suffixes and start to see more roots, your ability to 'guess' from context goes way up.
1020
It is an advice to familiarise yourself with word roots even in app Elevate, for people learning english as second language.
And by my experience (while learning English), Oxford like dictionary with explanations in the same language, instead of translations work great while learning.
78
I keep mixing up krasnyi and krasivyi. Does any-one have a good trick for keeping them straight?
465
Maybe that 'красный' is the shorter word of the two, and its translation is 'red', which is shorter than 'beautiful'.
1860
Krasni sounds quite like Kransky A sort of sausage. Imagine taking a giant bite and blood dripping everywhere making a big red mess
Only Красная is a proper name [I'm wrong here], площадь is just a square. It is not capitalized in wiki as well: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BF%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%89%D0%B0%D0%B4%D1%8C