Radioclare wrote:Throughout the course of the chapter, the book uses three different words for holidays and I don't feel like it defines them very clearly:
отпуск - leave, holiday
каникулы - vacation
отдых - rest, holiday
Are all these words interchangeable? Or is there some nuance in meaning? As far I'm concerned a holiday is a holiday, a vacation is when an American has a holiday and leave is something you might get from the army...
MamaPata is essentially right about каникулы. While it has other uses (e.g. налоговые каникулы for, I believe, "tax holiday"), its primary use is for the regular school holidays. Отдых is the general word for "rest", but can also be used in the sense of "holiday". На отдыхе is a common way of saying "on holiday": for instance you can say "Она на отдыхе в Сочи" to make it clear that the person is taking a holiday in Sochi (as opposed to visiting the city for work or a family emergency). Отпуск is the usual word for "leave of absence". By itself it doesn't distinguish between paid or unpaid leave, but it is distinguished from regular days off (выходные) and national holidays (государственные праздники; праздник by itself can also refer to festivities that aren't formally recognized as grounds for letting employees take a day off). Отпуск is also generally not used for "leave" as in leave from the army; the words used in that case are побывка and увольнение (the latter word has a radically different meaning in civilian employment - "firing").
That makes loads more sense now!
I raced through it, but I found it pretty useful and made a memrise course with the vocab. It's very much text based, which I thought was useful and worthwhile. But not having bought it, it's hard to say if I would recommend it as a purchase. Certainly I know of two courses (class based) that use it so it's definitely well regarded! I wouldn't recommend taking it particularly seriously though.
It's not until September, but I am incredibly excited. You would not believe the amount of hours that I have spent on planning an itinerary, though. I wanted to do a trip around the ring road (a circular route which goes around a substantial part of the country) but I wasn't convinced I could afford it. The cheapest way to go to Iceland is to camp, but I've never camped for longer than 3 - 4 days and I didn't think I was hardy enough to camp in Icelandic weather. A potential compromise is to rent a campervan instead, the most basic of which pretty much consist of a van with a mattress in the back. If you go for the smallest possible van, it does seem quite affordable, because you're getting your transport and all your accommodation in one price. But having spent some time looking at photos and videos of van interiors, my boyfriend and I came to the conclusion that we might kill one another if we had to spend a week or more in such a confined space. Of course, the more you pay the bigger van you can have, but the next van size up was more than I felt like I could justify spending. So, that only left the option of renting a car and staying in hotels, an option which I had initially ruled out because I didn't think there would be any type of accommodation in Iceland that I could afford. But, after about 12 hours of research this weekend (really!), I have found some establishments on the more hostelly end of the hotel spectrum, the price of which when added to the price of a rental car actually comes out at only slightly more than the coffin-sized camper van and considerably less than the larger vans. And, having spent so many hours planning the potential itinerary and finding places to stay, it would have taken more self control than I possess to not go ahead and actually book....