DCS Russian Vocabulary Study Material

I enjoy learning new languages, and have made a start on learning enough written & spoken Russian to enjoy DCS in greater depth.

I've found a number of Russian Military Vocabulary resources, but they tend to be encyclopaedic in size (e.g. https://fas.org/irp/world/russia/sovmil-glossary.pdf).

Does anyone have any RUS-ENG resources specific to DCS? For example:

- names of switches, gauges, warning lights (perhaps extracted from LUA files or such?)

- a précis of radio procedures / brevity codes from in-game

- basic military vocab as used in-game

It's not efficient for me to learn Cyrillic script in isolation; I find I get the best results in the first stages of learning a language with a non-Roman writing system by starting with basic vocab. Thanks for your time :)

Some common words/abbreviations that help a ton when learning Russian cockpit layouts

Stuff common all around the cockpit (these are all abbreviations):

вкл - on

выкл or откл - off

откр - open

закр - closed

Basic flight instruments are usually pretty obvious, but just so you know:

скорость - velocity

высота - altitude

Stuff found on engine and other systems' instruments etc.:

давление - pressure

топливо - fuel

масло - oil

воздух - air

гидросистема or гидро - hydraulics system

двигатель - engine

кислород - oxygen

Electrics:

аккумулятор or just акк - battery

генератор or just ген - generator

ток - current, amperage

АЗС - circuit breaker

Let me know if this is the kind of stuff you want.

Brilliant! That's exactly what I'm after, thank you for taking the time to provide that. If you've got anymore to add that would be fantastic.

Brilliant! That's exactly what I'm after, thank you for taking the time to provide that. If you've got anymore to add that would be fantastic.

I'll try to find time to do more (maybe with some examples) after work.

As in my previous post, I've bolded all Cyrillic text. Some of the letters are similar and otherwise it might have been hard to tell when I'm using Latin and when Cyrillic font.

This time instead of a list of terms without any context I'll focus on one particular class of systems - the humble ADF. Why? Because it's the most ubiquitous nav aid on Eastern aircraft. Every "red" aircraft in the game has one, from the MiG-15bis all the way to the Ka-50.

The Russian acronym for ADF is АРК. Read it ARK. The full term, literally translated to English, is "Automatic Radio Compass", which makes it quite easy to remember. Automatic Radio Compass, ARC, ARK, АРК. Get it?

Common phrases you're going to find on АРК panels (some will also apply to other radio equipment):

громкость - volume.

канал and plural каналы - channel(s).

ближний and дальний - inner and outer. Usually if the ADF has two channels, one will be called inner and the other outer. The idea is, you tune them to the inner and outer NDBs at an airport for non-precision approaches.

Modes of operation:

компас - Literally "compass". This is what they call the main operating mode.

антенна - Literally "antenna". A test mode, which disables the loop antenna so that only the sense antenna is used. On Western ADFs it's usually labelled either "antenna" or "test".

рамка - Literally "frame". Another test mode. On Western systems a similar mode is usually called "loop". It's basically the opposite of "antenna" mode - sense antenna is off, loop antenna is on, and there is sometimes a switch to manually rotate the loop antenna.

ТЛФ/ТЛГ - there will usually be a switch labelled this way. It stands for respectively telephony/telegraphy. In telegraphy mode a beat frequency oscillator is used. I won't go into detail on what it does because (a) I have a rather vague understanding of it, and (b) it's useless in DCS anyway, cause none of the NDBs require you to be in this mode. Keep it in ТЛФ. On Western ADFs a similar mode is labelled BFO.

Ok, some examples now...

The one on the Ka-50 is pretty simple:

This one's from the Mi-8 and it's a little more complex. There's a loop mode and next to the mode selector there's a spring loaded switch to move the antenna left (Л) and right (П). The Russian words for left and right are левый and правый.

Here are some controls from the MiG-15bis:

The L-39C has two modes of operation - manual (ручной) and automatic (автоматический):

Well, we can't (yet) operate the ADF on the Su-25, but if we could, we'd probably have a pretty good idea how before we even opened the manual ;) :

I wish languages came in a pill you could just swallow. :book:

Thank you once again, that was a huge help - especially using the ADF as an example. I really appreciate the effort you went to.

I'm learning the MiG-21 at the moment, and I've added the vocab you provided to my flash card set for that aircraft: https://quizlet.com/156261260/mig-21-russian-cockpit-terminology-flash-cards/

If anyone is considering taking the time to do the same, it's a bit of effort, but it's well worth it. It is a very rewarding experience and has given me a greater appreciation of the thinking behind the aircraft and its systems.

Thanks again for all the help!

I'm glad I could help :). It's good that you're also learning pronunciation. In a lot of cases it actually makes it easier since a lot of Russian aviation terms are nearly identical once you say them out loud (e.x. compass, generator, marker, trimmer). It's worth it to actually learn to read the letters and make a sound ;).

Ok, now for something a little bit harder. The thing that is perhaps the hardest for an English speaker to "get" on an intuitive level when learning languages such as Russian or (my native) Polish is how much more inflectional they are. What it boils down to is - words change a lot more when used in different contexts. For example the English word "tank" (as in fuel tank) is inflected for number... and I think that's it. You have a singular "tank" and plural "tanks". The same is true for most English nouns.

On the other hand, in Russian nouns are also inflected for grammatical case, so depending on their grammatical function in the sentence (object, subject etc.). The Russian word for "tank" is "бак". And you would use that form (nominative case) of the word if you wanted to say, for example, main tank - основной бак. However, in the phrase "pressure in the tank", you would use the prepositional case - давление в баке. For the record, all six (!) cases of the word бак are:

nominative - бак,

genitive - бакa,

dative - баку,

accusative - бак,

instrumental - баком,

prepositional - баке.

And that's only for a singular tank.

Other parts of speech also get more inflections. I suppose learning and understanding all that is beyond what you're trying to achieve (if not, you should probably find some proper language classes in your area), so just remember this:

Expect the "same" words to look and sound slightly different (especially the last few letters) depending on the context they're used in. For someone whose mother tongue doesn't do that, it's really hard to wrap your head around exactly when and how.

Next time I'll try to do something more useful, like maybe annunciator panel terms? Unless you have some other ideas?

Good online dictionary

http://www.multitran.com/

That is a really good resource, thank you. I found the list of words by subject/domain very useful: http://www.multitran.com/m.exe?l1=2&l2=1&CL=1&SHL=1