above all the readers of a higher social sphere. It’s primarily from them that you won’t hear a single decent Russian word. Rather, it’s French, German and English words, very likely, that they’ll dish out in quantities far greater than you could possibly ever want, and they’ll even dish them out with every possible pronunciation preserved intact. In French they’ll talk through their noses and make their ‘r’s guttural; English they’ll pronounce the way a bird would, and they’ll try to look like a bird, and even make fun of anyone who can’t look like a bird. But the only thing they can’t dish
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