простите за опоздание
“простите за опоздание” (prostite za opozdanie) — sorry for being late in Russian. Phrase, level A2. Prostite za opozdaniye, ya byl daleko — "sorry for being late; I was far away" — za plus the of-form of the fault. In a live sentence: “Простите за опоздание, я был далеко” — Sorry for being late; I was far away. Written with the characters п, р, о, с, т, и, т, е, з, а, о, п… A word from the everyday Russian course, level A2.
In short
| Written in Russian | простите за опоздание |
| Read in Latin letters | prostite za opozdanie |
| Translation | sorry for being late |
| Part of speech | phrase |
| Level | A2 |
Why it looks that way
Prostite za opozdaniye, ya byl daleko — "sorry for being late; I was far away" — za plus the of-form of the fault.
A word with a story stays in memory longer than one learned as a “spelling — translation” pair: memory holds on to meaning, not to a string.
In a live sentence
A single word almost never appears alone in conversation. A sentence shows where it fits and what stands next to it.
- Простите за опоздание, я был далекоProstite za opozdanie, ya byl dalekoSorry for being late; I was far away
How not to forget this word
Reading a word and remembering it are different jobs. A day later, little survives of a single reading — and that is not bad memory, that is how memory works.
- This has been tested on foreign words too. The difference shows up most when you test yourself a few days later rather than straight away.checked many timesKim & Webb, 2022, Language Learning 72(2) · 48 experiments, 3,411 participants, 98 comparisons.
- Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
- An answer you worked out yourself sticks better than one handed to you.checked many timesBertsch et al., 2007, Memory & Cognition 35(2) · 86 studies, 445 comparisons, d = 0.40.
Frequently asked
How do you say “sorry for being late” in Russian?
«простите за опоздание», read “prostite za opozdanie”. In a live sentence: “Простите за опоздание, я был далеко” — Sorry for being late; I was far away. Phrase, level A2; written with the characters п, р, о, с, т, и, т, е, з, а, о, п…
How is “простите за опоздание” written in Latin letters?
prostite za opozdanie. This is a practical spelling — you need it to read aloud and be understood, not to meet an academic standard.
Why does this word look the way it does?
Prostite za opozdaniye, ya byl daleko — "sorry for being late; I was far away" — za plus the of-form of the fault. A word with a story stays in memory longer than a “spelling — translation” pair: memory holds on to meaning, not to a string.