1/8 

Thank goodness i'm not in Moscow drinking Red Stripe and abusing the locals … i'd be sussed in no time

I got 3/8

El Loro posted:

BBC short quiz where you need to link the English name of the 8 World Cup teams of the quarter finals with the Russian equivalent:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/44709624

 

I was able to get all 8 though don't know any Russian through a certain amount of logic and a bit of guesswork.

That's what I used and it still only got me 3 

I got 8/8, but then I can read Cyrillic. 

Well, sort-of: well enough to get by, anyway.

 I can't remember which FM it was, but I was talking on this site a while back about working briefly in Bulgaria. Before heading over there,  a colleague who'd spent some time in Russia (and ended up marrying a Ukrainian), gave me what I still consider some of the best travel advice I've ever received, which was to "learn Cyrillic". His point was that I could only learn a few words of Bulgarian in the time available, and most people I'd meet at the hotel, work, etc would all speak English anyway. However I could learn Cyrillic on the flight over, and if I could phonetically read the language, I could manage road signs, shop signs, menus, etc. The thing is that a lot of key words in Eastern Europe phonetically sound very close to their English equivalents (e.g. in the quiz, the Russian word "Англия" sounds roughly like "Anglia"   ). If they don't, you'll often find that instead they're very close to the French equivalent, as there's historically been a strong French influence on Eastern Europe, and Russia in particular. Some of the Bulgarians I worked with assumed I'd been to Russia because I was able to read a lot of the local signs, etc: e.g. "hotel" and "restaurant" are pretty close (with some allowance for local pronunciations) in Russian and even closer in Bulgarian...

I’m impressed Eugene 

I got 5/8. It was a complete fluke as the only one I recognised was Russia

I also got 8 out of 8 as I can also read  Cyrillic and have studied Russian and Greek - to mention but a few!

The way I worked it out through logic was:
1 Link Russia with the only answer where the 3rd and 4th character is the same
2 Then from that I could see what letter represented R from that there's only one answer where the second letter is an R and the first and third letter are the same so that makes Uruguay
and I continued with that to then get France, then England, then Brazil, then Belgium, then Sweden and finally Croatia.

Fluffy, next try Georgian

My grandfather learned some Tibetan and helped one of the lamas in Tibet (not the Dalai Lama, but one of the junior ones) to escape when the Chinese escaped. He was a philatelist and so the lama gave him a complete collection of all the stamps that Tibet had issued  It wasn't a big collection as only 24 different ones had ever been issued

Had a look at Georgian - might take a couple of days to get to grips with it!

El Loro posted:

Fluffy, next try Georgian

 

My grandfather learned some Tibetan and helped one of the lamas in Tibet (not the Dalai Lama, but one of the junior ones) to escape when the Chinese escaped. He was a philatelist and so the lama gave him a complete collection of all the stamps that Tibet had issued  It wasn't a big collection as only 24 different ones had ever been issued

That’s fabulous, El. What a great piece of family history 

Extremely Fluffy Fluffy Thing posted:

I also got 8 out of 8 as I can also read  Cyrillic and have studied Russian and Greek - to mention but a few!

Well done, Fluffs

Extremely Fluffy Fluffy Thing posted:

Had a look at Georgian - might take a couple of days to get to grips with it!

or a bit longer

El Loro posted:

The way I worked it out through logic was:
1 Link Russia with the only answer where the 3rd and 4th character is the same
2 Then from that I could see what letter represented R from that there's only one answer where the second letter is an R and the first and third letter are the same so that makes Uruguay.

Those who remember the Cold War might be able to cut a few corners there. 

The Cyrillic for "USSR" was famously "CCCP". Now the first "C" is a red herring, of course, but from the rest you can assume C = S and P = R.

Also, a lot of people know that "P" is the Greek character "Rho", because of the Christian "Chi Rho" symbol:

And then of course anyone who's done a lot of maths and physics will have picked up a lot of Greek characters too...

Sorry @Eugene's Lair, I disagree. The first C is not a red-herring, but STANDS FOR the Russian word SOYUZ, which means Union

Sojúz Sovétskix Socialistíčeskix Respúblik.

Extremely Fluffy Fluffy Thing posted:

Sorry Eugene, I disagree. The first C is not a red-herring, but STANDS FOR the Russian word SOYUZ, which means Union

 

Sojúz Sovétskix Socialistíčeskix Respúblik.

Oh I know - I just meant that "C" doesn't equate to "U". It's the one word in the name where you have to know a bit of Russian, because the word ("Soyuz", as you say), isn't close to it's English equivalent, so a direct Cyrillic to Roman conversion doesn't quite work.

Ah right, get you,