From Russia with Love

When I was in college, I took Russian to fulfill my foreign language requirement.  In fact, my college transcripts say that I attended "МГУ" (pronounced "Em- Gay- Oo"), which would stand for Moscow State University.

background source

I did not go to Moscow State University.

I wanted to go to МГУ, but alas, I missed a lot of class and my teacher wouldn't give me the recommendation to be an exchange student, and I graduated as a surprise that semester anyway, which was kind of fine with me because I learned that I had to get an assload of vaccinations and stuff to go, and that was a point in my life where my fear of needles overpowered good sense. Little did I know that many years later, I would be allowing doctors to stick needles in my face.

Anyway, my choice of Russian, instead of a standard foreign language, like Spanish or French, was on account of the book "A Clockwork Orange," and also because the challenge of having to learn  a new alphabet appealed to me. I had tried to teach myself Russian my senior year of high school, but I was reading from a book and it had no pronunciation guide, so I didn't learn much.

Despite having taken about 2 solid years of Russian (over many semesters), while I can still read cyrillic, I can only remember how to say a few phrases/words and none of them are very helpful, unless I ever find myself writing bad Russian airport porn.

Here is the Russian and the phonetics for you, just in case you want to look it up yourself!
здравствуйте - zdravstvuyte - Hello
Извините за беспокойства - Izvinite za bespokoystva - Sorry for the trouble (said when one calls a wrong number)
Какой большой чемодан!  - Kakoy bolʹshoy chemodan!- What a big suitcase!
Да, это очень большой!  - Da, eto ochenʹ bolʹshoy!- Yes, it is very big!
Я хочу твой большой чемодан! - Ya khochu t'voy bol'shoy chemodan!- I want your big suitcase!
четыре! chetyre!

Just as an aside, this porn script has been a running joke since I was in college, when my classmates and I, who had a crush on our teacher, would go to lunch and laugh about having to talk about his BIG suitcase repeatedly.