Having studied at various levels about half a dozen languages (mostly Indo-European but also Hebrew), it’s fascinating to see the various features that are common across them. Most IE languages (but not English) create families of verbs by prefixing them with prepositions (we get some of this in borrowed vocabulary such as attain, obtain, sustain, detain, etc.). Greek makes this most obvious since some of its verb inflections happen as prefixes which end up in the middle of these preposition-inflected verbs. The reflexive pronoun se/sa/si manages to stay pretty consistent across languages, although there are some interesting cases where in, Spanish, e.g., se becomes me/te/nos/vos in the first and second person, but in Czech remains se (with declensions).
Vocabulary is especially wild to watch mutate across languages with, e.g., brother recognizable in most languages once you know about mutation between b-p-f and th-t-d-* (the * indicating omission) and it’s almost the same word in most of the IE languages I know except Spanish (which lost it’s frater-derived noun for hermano which comes from the Latin germanus which is the root of the English germane among other words) and Greek ἀδελφός which etymologically means from the same womb.
I noted this in my comment, but there are no native cases of this. It’s one of the (many) ways in which English is an outlier from its IE relatives. There are, though, some postfix cases where we will use a preposition (as a separate word) after a verb to modify its meaning: e.g, give in, give up, give out, etc.
I think it may actually be from _Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor_ instead. I spent an hour or so last night after seeing this tweet trying to track down the rest of this essay, and it took me a while to find the exact book it was from and find a copy of it. The funny part to me was that the whole essay was actually included in the tweets (aside from a footnote), it's very sort and pithy.
On a tangent - I've moved abroad to work in a multinational corporation, and I noticed that similar cultures cluster together. I spend most of my time with other Eastern Europeans.
German inflection is pretty minimalistic. There are just four cases, and it's mostly the article that is being changed with only occasional and predictable changes to the noun itself. Meanwhile in Russian there are six cases and no article, so it's the word itself that has to change. Also there are three different declensions not counting exceptions.
Gender in Russian is much easier than in German though - most of the time you can tell it by the word itself
That's declension of nouns. Then there's the conjugation of the verbs, which is reasonably regular in German and similar to Latin (three persons, two numbers, three basic tenses each with a "perfect", two voices, across four moods).
What's difficult really depends on the languages you already know.
In addition to noun inflection, verb aspect, pronunciation stress, and punctuation trouble many native English speakers. That's in addition to all the simple irregularities, like irregular nouns and verbs.
Stress even troubles native speakers. When I lived there, I saw slideshow "where 's the stress?" quizzes used to fill time on screens in taxi buses, waiting rooms, and the like.
Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement, except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock).
Punctuation is secondary, just put commas, colons and semicolons where you feel they should go, most Russians don't know any better themselves.
Noun and verb inflections you will master with enough practice, yeah.
Maybe overall a more difficult language than English or German, but not in the same league as Chinese or Arabic, in my humble opinion.
> It is not that different from German in this matter.
I've met several Germans who spoke Russian fluently, none of them has really mastered the instrumental case, not even a friend of mine who worked at the German embassy in Moscow. Although you might say it's a minor grammar difference, this particular grammar case seems hard to grasp for people who are not accustomed to it through their native language.
Also, from my personal experience, quite a few Germans who learnt Russian had a real struggle understanding the concept of perfective/imperfective aspect.
These kinds of grammatical difficulties are typical for people who are learning only their second language after their native language.
After learning 3 or more languages that are not closely related, one is usually exposed to most grammatical features that can be encountered in the majority of the languages, so usually grammar no longer poses any challenges, but only memorizing the unfamiliar words and pronouncing sounds that do not exist in the native language.
>It is not that different from German in this matter.
Russian inflection changes the stress. In German it's fixed. Inflectional forms are much more varied in Russian. Colloquial German is much more analytical (past tense is almost always "ich habe" + participle). German has devolved to basically 3 cases at this point (with genitive dying out), compared to Russian's 6. But conceptually, they're very similar indeed.
If you just want to be understood, Russian is not very hard. I think it's true for any language. To master it, however...
> Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language.
That's saying that getting to the lunar orbit is the only difficult part in landing on the Moon. The whole complexity of inflectional languages is in the inflections. It's also why Slavic (or Turkic) languages form such a large continuum of mutually almost-intelligible languages.
Compared to inflections, everything else in Russian is simple. The word formation using prefixes and suffixes is weird, but it's not like English is a stranger to this (e.g. "make out", what does it mean?). The writing system is phonetic with just a handful of rules for reading (writing is a different matter).
Add baltic languages to the mix as well! Lithuanian is like a slavic language with all the inflection drama but with additional word types that are currently mostly gone from slavic languages.
English phrasal verbs make completely zero sense since there is no logic involved
If English was logical "make out" would mean somethibgg like "throw out". But "to make out" means something else obviously. And you dont throw out your trash. You throw them away...
The only difficult part of Russian is writing it. Most native Russian speakers, myself included, can't write properly even after completing 11 years of Russian language in school. Hundreds of rules nobody remembers.
I think as a native speaker it's different to you.
Native English speakers make spelling mistakes quite often. But as a language learner I struggled with everything, except spelling - I always knew how to spell a word, even if I don't know how to pronounce it. It's the opposite of native speaker experience.
Your experience as a native speaker is completely different from learning the language from scratch as an adult, to the point that it's almost irrelevant. Writing Russuan is not that difficult, it's just the only part that you had to actually do any work to learn
There is a saying that you should learn the enemy language to understand them. I suppose the time has come again. Why else would you learn it otherwise? It is not like many of us can even visit the place without consequences. The books were translated years ago anyway.
Slavic languages are similar, IMO you just need to bombard your brain with a lot of it to start discerning the patterns (just like any other language I guess). Reading is not necessary, writing likewise. I never had a single lesson but speak fluently in russian and ok polish, can understand ukrainian, can read also.
Given that you need content for your brain it would be hard to find something nice created in russia recently, might be easier to start with polish if you are in the west.
Careful, by learning russian you also become an oppressed russian minority that needs to be "liberated". It's not just your brain that will get bombarded.
You've just associated actions of a certain fascist government with the whole language spoken by hundreds of millions of people who are against the war it waged and which is orders of magnitude older.
That's not very bright of you, to put it mildly.
Mind you, the language argument was just as well employed by the putin's propagandists, as in something along the lines of "just listen how silly Ukrainian sub-language sounds, lol".
Which is an argument every sane human being finds disgusting and stupid beyond all comprehension, of course.
I think you miss the point. I am talking about the incentive to learn somebody’s native tongue. I doubt people want to know it to meet an emigrant in Germany and have a conversation in russian. Equally I do mot learn spanish to talk to my neighbours but to have a conversation with a local in spain.
There is a large, growing Russian diaspora and many writers/artists create works in exile. The language helps if you want to understand the millions who left their homes out of principle, but they are not the "enemy".
Polish person here. Don't try to learn Polish. It's insanely difficult, the "rules" make no sense whatsoever, and almost anybody that you'll want to talk to will be able to communicate with you in English.
As for Russian, I also don't see any point in learning it. I was forcefully taught Russian in primary school back when Poland was under Russian yoke. The general idea here is that we'd like not to be in that situation ever again. Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
Polish is great because there is a lot of content to learn from. And it is a gateway to other western slavic languages in the region. I basically forced myself to learn it because Manga was all in polish at the time. Their movie industry is great as well.
As someone studying Polish, and making excellent progress, I mostly agree with your take. If you want to explore other languages, something like Spanish will get you much more mileage. Polish is difficult and the community of speakers isn't exactly warm to foreigners or people acquiring the language. On the other hand, if you truly enjoy languages and are passionate about them, I have found Polish to be really interesting and beautiful in its own way. Definitely not recommended, but still enjoyable to read/write/speak.
> Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
Are you a european/white supremacist who doesn't consider the victims of the anglosphere to be human, or are you historically illiterate, even of extremely recent history?
I don't see a third option here since you learned english also, would appreciate an explanation for this special pleading rather than furious downvoting when identifying basic empirical discrepancies in the face of what looks to be materially false claims.
This is poorly informed, it’s quite easy to get a visa to Russia. Easier than many other countries, actually. Just follow the laws and use common sense (same rule applies when you are traveler anywhere) and you will be fine. Don't believe me just check YouTube, plenty of bloggers go there - “Sly’s Life” channel, Russia videos. He also goes to Ukraine after before you start calling me or him a shill for Putin or whatever.
As a native speaker, one thing I see people struggle with surprisingly often is that a) every noun has a gender, and b) every word grammatically related to a noun must always match its gender, case, and plurality. The second thing is the inflections themselves, yes.
But I suppose it also depends a lot on that person's native language — the people I most commonly hear speak Russian as a foreign language are migrant workers, whose native languages are usually Turkic. Those don't have grammatical genders. It feels like learning Russian would be easier for someone who is native in, for example, a Roman language (Spanish/French/Portuguese/Italian) or German.
The gender of a noun in the native language is sometimes the opposite in the other language, so it can be difficult in its own way as well. At least this was my experience when briefly learning german as a portuguese speaker. In this sense learning english was easier, although it happened kinda passively by just being on the internet too much.
I think it depends on how you approach learning genders. As a native English speaker, when learning Romance languages I don't think of words as being feminine or masculine. I think of "il pane" as being a single unit, and "la bottiglia" as being another single unit. I've then never struggled when looking at a new Romance language because I'm not thinking "this word used to be feminine and now it's masculine" - I'm just learning new units, as if the articles are part of the word itself.
This extends to other words that must agree. Instead of thinking "the noun is masculine so the adjective must be masculine as well", think "the article is 'il' therefore the adjective is 'buono' instead of 'buona'".
> As a native speaker, one thing I see people struggle with surprisingly often is that a) every noun has a gender, and b) every word grammatically related to a noun must always match its gender, case, and plurality. The second thing is the inflections themselves, yes.
My experience differs:
In terms of vocabulary: the vocabulary in Russian often has little relationship to words in German, English or French, so you really have to learn very "foreign" words.
In terms of pronounciation, learning is made more difficult since many vowels are pronounced differently depending on whether the syllable is emphasized or not, and where the vowel is in the word. Additionally, some consonant clusters are pronounced differently from what you'd expect (simple example: the "в" in Здравствуйте is silent). Additionally, some consonant cluster don't exist in German or English, so you have to get used to them.
In terms of grammar, a difficulty with Russian as a beginner is rather that there exist lots of cases (6-7, depending on whether you consider locative case as a separate case from prepositional case or not), and you of course have to learn which preposition demands which case, and then you obviously have to use the properly declinated noun/adjective.
So, there is simply an insane amount of tables to cram.
I wouldn't claim that the latter is inherently difficult per se, but rather it's a huge amount of material that you have to get very certain in that slows your learning down.
EDIT: Another difficulty is the irregularity of emphasis in verb conjugation:
приходи́ть: e.g. мы прихо́дим
говори́ть: e.g. мы говори́м
i.e. a very different syllable is emphasized in the verb conjugation.
Even native Russian speakers couldn't explain why this is the case, and told me to simply cram the verb conjugation.
I don't see Russian as completely alien to English. There are a lot of loanwords from English, French, German, Greek and Latin which are identifiable. Some of the native words are similar to western ones — voda is obviously similar to water, brat to brother, tri is similar to three etc. Much easier than Hungarian vocabulary which has remarkably little to latch onto.
With some rarer ones (eg. slovene), you even have a special dual form (singular, dual, plural).
And then there are different declinations when eg counting:
eno pivo (1 beer)
dve pivi (2 beers, dual)
tri piva (3 beers, plural)
štiri piva (4 beers, plural)
pet piv (5 beers, plural, but now in genitive case for some reason, same for higher numbers, eg sto (100) piv)
On the other hand, knowing slovene and being able to read (usually the serbian form of) cyrillic makes you understand 2/3 of the russian texts out there, which is especially useful for dodgy forums with semi-legal knowledge not available anywhere else and which google can't/won't fully translate (unless you copy-paste the text into a translation window).
I like to imagine Slavic languages as a sort of scale, where Russian is at one end, Polish and Serbian are at the opposite end, and Ukrainian and Belarusian are somewhere in the middle.
The other reason being that Russian (and other non-English) speakers are usually picking up their third or fourth language, while for English speakers it's almost universally number two, and half-hearted at that... (I say that as a native English speaker whose Spanish is muy mal).
Eastern europeans speak multiple languages where russian was a second language due to everyone being in the union (occupation). Languages are different and span multiple language groups. IMO there is no strong correlation here not to mention the fact that english is more popular. German language and its presence in the curriculum has other reasons, like the fact that german economy is closer rather than say english or american, there was more incentive to learn german due to economical necessity. But nowadays everyone chooses english as it is a simpler, and considered the real business language.
AFAIK there is no evidence to suggest that the uptake of german is easier for people living in the eastern parts of europe
> German native speakers might better understand how cases work
As a native German speaker: cases mostly work like the type system of a programming language - they help you to immediately detect when there is something off. The "type" that the clause has in a sentence has to match the type that the predicate expects - otherwise the type checker will "reject" the sentence.
Yes, I would say that my thinking about the German language deeply influences my thinking about programming. I asked Russian native speakers who work as programmers whether this also holds for them for the Russian language, but they said the Russian language does not have a similar influence on their thinking about programming as I claim and explained about the German language for me.
I’m learning Croatian as a native Portuguese speaker, and I find out while the grammar itself is easier to think coming from Portuguese, I prefer to deal with sentence construction as if thinking about it from English.
Sort of. When I hear Nabokov speaking, he sounds like he has an unplaceable regional accent, as opposed to a "foreign" one. His writing in English is fluent, but can have a few tics in it — he repeats certain fancy words, and he tends to avoid slang.
By the way, the last tsar's daughters reportedly picked up a slight Irish accent from one of their tutors. He was sacked and replaced by someone more pukka.
Everything he says here also applies to german. For example, to actually say "ich" properly you need to have a wide kind of smile that feels incredibly strange to an english native speaker.
Why? The "ch" in "inc" is exactly the same sound as that represented by "h" in words like "human" and "huge" in English. It's a voiceless palatal fricative. It doesn't require a "wide kind of smile" unless you somehow need to also do that when saying the vowel in "team" too.
Not an expert, but some "to IPA" websites I checked transcribes "the huge human" as "ðə hjuːʤ ˈhjuːmən", but "ich" (voiceless palatal fricative) as "iç" (and "ach" (voiceless velar fricative) as "ax")).
ç != hj
ETA: Wikipedia notes:
> The sound at the beginning of huge in most British accents is a voiceless palatal fricative [ç], but this is analysed phonemically as the consonant cluster /hj/ so that huge is transcribed /hjuːdʒ/. As with /hw/, this does not mean that speakers pronounce [h] followed by [j]; the phonemic transcription /hj/ is simply a convenient way of representing the single sound [ç].
[ç] is an allophone of [h], and it's very hard for English speakers to notice that they're not just saying [h]. I've had the same problem with [e] versus [ɛ].
Not mentioned is that Russian is well populated with loan words from other European languages (especially technology terms) , but about the only Slavic loan word in European languages I know of is "robot" (work) - samizdat being a more recent arrival.
It’s a bit weird to see the English transliteration of Russian words for example, govoritz instead of говорить.
For anyone looking to study Russian, I highly recommend spending a few days familiarizing yourself with Cyrillic first. Toss it into an Anki deck (or download one) and use FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler).
It’s phonetic and consists of only 33 letters, I memorized it on a ~12-hour flight to Moscow many years ago.
Same thing with learning Japanese. Just memorize the symbols. It's phonetic. Of course there are complex meanings and subtleties but that's just how we all play with language. As a foreigner your pronunciation can be good once you get the basics. But you have to match the sounds with the letters. We all did it once. We can do it again.
Related, I spent several formative years in Taiwan. Back then, my Taiwanese phone (way before smartphones) used bopomofo as the primary input method for typing Chinese, so I had to learn it.
Unfortunately, some of the 注音 symbols are remarkably similar to Japanese kana, and I found that my familiarity with hiragana and katakana actually caused me constant grief, as I kept mixing up the pronunciations.
Almost nothing aside from children’s books is written exclusively in hiragana or katakana. You have to also memorize the variable readings of about 2000 kanji and many texts are nearly unintelligible without them. Pretty much everyone can memorize the former, but must struggle with the latter.
Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).
Polish is a rather extreme case, however. Czech orthography is a bit more straightforward. In spite of that, Polish orthography still does a rather good job.
Generally speaking, if you've a language with heavy use of palatalisation in its phonology and grammar, the Latin alphabet is going to struggle without hacks. Irish and Scottish Gaelic similarly struggle with the inherent limitations of the Latin alphabet, but chose a different set of hacks (necessarily, given the Irish has the second oldest written vernacular language in Europe after Greek).
Similarly, the Latin alphabet is poorly suited to the Germanic languages, Danish and English in particular, because of their large vowel inventory.
Your are getting downvoted, but polish writing system really is not great. There are both non-english characters (ą, ę, ś, ć, ź, ż) and digraphs (rz, sz, cz, dz, dż, dź, ch). Also there is done overlap here and some sounds can be written in more than one way (h ~= ch, ż ~= rz, ć == ci, ś == si, etc).
At least you can pretty much always tell how to read a word looking only at its spelling.
Learn Cyrillic the fun way: go in vacation in Bulgaria, they have road signs in both Latin and Cyrillic. This is how I learned Cyrillic 20 years ago, driving a lot for business all over around Balkans. It was an easy curve, a few characters at a time, with a lot of repetitions and the scenery is nice.
Truly everyone assumes “learning another alphabet” is hard but it really isn’t. 1-2 weeks of 30-45min a day drills and you’ll have it down. Cyrillic is very easy to memorize.
With the exception of some "ligatures" like Ю (I + O) and special characters like Ъ, Cyrillic is largely based on Greek and some Aramaic (e.g. Ш). In the past it included pretty much the entire Greek alphabet.
Duolingo Russian isn't very good overall (lack of content / grammar explanations), but it does have a page for learning the alphabet that is pretty helpful.
I always found Russian to be the nasties sounding slavic language. It's just unpleasant to the ears. Probably because it makes you either sound aggressive or like you're asking or begging for another bowl of porridge. I guess watching Soviet world war II movies when I was a child had an impact.
I used to love learning russian. My russian speaking, moscow educated ukrainian friend used to teach me, but she doesn't want to do that anymore. Hopefully sometime in the future I can pick it up again.
In much the same way as you differentiate between "O0" and "00", or between "I1" and "11". (For example, to avoid ambiguity, a standard may prohibit the use of З in a position where 3 is allowed.)
Georgian is really interesting. Very few cognates for non-modern words. Colors in Georgian are fun: you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color" (ყავისფერი / ყავის ფერი); you don't have "light blue", you have "sky-color" (ცისფერი / ცის ფერი).
It's coffee-colour (kahverengi) in Turkish as well, but I don't find it interesting. The English word "orange" is after a fruit as well (which is also the same in Turkish: "portakal rengi", or "turuncu").
The Russian word for "brown" is literally "cinnamon-colored" ("коричневый"). And the Chinese language just uses the literal "coffee-colored" phrase (咖啡色).
For instance, Japanese and Vietnamese do not differentiate between blue and green and require context specific clarification, e.g «traffic light blue-green».
Your command and understanding of the grammar of your native language puts a hard limit to how well you can learn other languages. This has not been stressed enough and schools have all but given up trying to teach children grammar because as natives they more or less get along without it.
On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language. I mean, I used standard English intuitively, but couldn't have told you any of the technical terms. I agree with modern educators that explicit grammar instruction beyond a very, very basic level should not be a high priority. Exposure to and guided close reading of complex texts sharpens grammatical intuition, right alongside all of the other benefits of an advanced reading level. Knowing deep grammar does not so automatically improve textual interpretation.
This is speculation, but I wonder if the period of emphasizing explicit grammatical instruction wasn't an accidental interregnum. That is to say, back in the days when Latin and/or Greek were part of the ordinary curriculum students learned grammar much as I did, as a "natural" excelerant to interpreting a foreign tongue. Once those languages were dropped educators noticed students couldn't do grammar analysis anymore, and so tried teaching it directly, without fully considering when and why it might be useful. I don't know how well the dates line up, but it would be interesting to look into.
This. When I first started learning Russian, we immediately jumped into basic grammar rules. After two weeks of incredible frustration, I realized I did not have sufficient mastery of English grammar to be able to establish a framework for understanding Russian grammar. I often say that my first two months of learning Russian were spent learning English and it is not a joke.
in all countries where i lived, schools where I studied, there was heavy investment in grammar. (no, i didn't study in usa).
I won't really agree that mastering grammar of native language limits on how well you can learn other languages. Maybe it matters in the way how it taught in college, when you are older and approach to learning language is "more structured". But when I learned Georgian at age of 6 and Hebrew at 12 (through very deep immersion. Teachers spoke only Hebrew), English at 14 (I had 5 months of private lessons following by dial-up connection to mostly english internet), it didn't matter. At least not for me.
There was also this interesting phenomena, that immigrant when they went to local school, their scores in hebrew grammar classes were usually higher than those of native speakers.
I've been told that western European languages are easy for Russian speakers because you can learn them by removing parts of the Russian grammar. "Oh, they don't have A, and B and C are the same thing for them, and they don't have D too!" Is that correct?
It's a little bit like moving from Italian/French/Spanish to English, except that English has some tenses with no direct equivalent in those languages and a ton of phrasal verbs to learn, but that's vocabulary and not grammar.
Yes. Although, Romance languages have more verb tenses, generally they're easier. BTW, I only learned that Russan's past tense is the same compound past, by learning Italian. Also, Old Russian dropped participles, but re-borrowed them from Church Slavonic (southern Slavic), so we know these things, and learn them at school. (Ukrainian has participle 2, but not 1, as far as I understand.)
Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object. Some people can't wrap their head around that it can be the other way around, e.g. Italian "sua madre/suo padre" can mean both his and her mother/father. In German, they must concord with both, sein Vater, seine Mutter, ihrer Vater, ihre Mutter. But Russian regional dialects do have the same feature, and if your teacher isn't a mad purist, they can easily give examples: евойная, еёйный.
Otherwise, indeed, there are less features. And in Indo-European, they're all the same: compound past tense, participles, compound past and future.
To give an example of another system: Turkic languages. 4 modal verbs (to run, to walk, to stand, to lay down), that must be applied to everything except the verb "to be", they indicate how much hurry you have doing what you're doing. It's a bit similar to Russian aspect (complete/incomplete), but way more complex. Plus you have noun cases, and everything is a suffix, and the verb is always the last. So, "I don't do X" will be something like "I <verb+ing> <stand>+me+not" (like those German prefixes that fall down in the end of the sentence.) My colleague, a Kazakh born in Russia, learns it as a foreign language, and he says it's hard.
It's ironic, seeing tons of exclusively russian-speaking immigrants not being able to learn the native language after decades living in the country.
But it's not about complexity really. I think it's more caused by the deeply ingrained superiority complex in most russians.
And just in case, most russians != every russian.
Russian is seriously messed up language. Especially after learning Hebrew (which is simple and algorithmic) , I was able to look back in Russian and realize what a horrible mess of a language it is.
I am sorry, due to the war, I cannot see this in good faith. I am Dutch, so that’s that.
I am sorry I can’t see this in good faith, but I would need to see an attempt at how this is meant for curiosity’s sake and not propaganda.
I am on here a lot, I am a person. And this is what I think when I see the title. I am sorry for the bad vibes but I say no to Russia and learning Russian (for now).
I am okay with potential downvotes. I still think this needs to be said. I wish I could be above this but I can’t.
Your comment is troubling. I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion). This is disturbing to me because i believe this is the kind of mental confusion that actually makes this kind of political violence possible.
For the record, I had the exact opposite feeling when i saw that title: I was glad the poster was not feeling obliged to not mention a culture because of a war.
I'm glad you expressed your own view so candidly though, as I did myself, and would not want to discourage that. But you understand you are playing "their" game by helping erecting those fences, right?
> I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion).
The human brain is a hyperactive pattern recognition machine and it is actually usual for it to make associations that don't hold up to intellectual scrutiny. Otherwise it'd be quite difficult to believe things that aren't true. It is expected that people will do this. The real miracle is something like the legal system where a many people have been convinced to follow an evidence- and precedent- based process rather than making decisions based on what they think it true in the moment flowing from their thoughts and feelings.
Not to excuse the behaviour, it is terrifying and generally generally harmful. But it is at least easy to understand - for any random pairing of things there is going to be a large chunk of the population who associates them without any underlying causal reason beyond that they've been spotted together once. Like the Russian language and war. Then political choices flow on from that reality.
As a Ukrainian, seeing how US sometimes romanticizes Russia and takes active interest in its culture is heartbreaking. But I guess having an ocean between you and the continent with Russia does that to you.
Russian is neither a common lingua franca nor is it commonly spoken by foreigners (with the obvious exclusion of former Soviet countries). It belongs culturally to Russia and it's people. English belongs to half a dozen countries.
I'm not sure I agree with the original commenter, but I see the merit in their perspective.
I speak Russian and due to war I've completely abandoned the language and the culture. Russians not showing any resistance is a good litmus test whether culture is worth being involved with and the answer is a clear no imo.
Kinda sad as russian language is quite incredible but any sane individual must sanitize their environment for their own sake and abandoning russian culture is a perfectly reasonable take.
You mean not the level you would feel satisfied, there are plenty showing resistance, they just disappear. Very easy to judge others when you have little risk.
The ones showing resistance are leaving Russia and immigrating to other countries if they can.
You should take pity on them. They are unfortunate people who live in a dictatorship. Russians who tried to protest were arrested and taken in unknown direction by authorities.
As Russian many crazy supporters of Putin and Ukraine war I met outside of Russia are foreigners speaking English. Sure it's worse among Russians but if you were serious about anti war position you would want to speak Russian more because that helps spread your position. It's not like PRC yet, people can disagree with government without being so afraid
My good friend once taught me that people without shame are the most dangerous people.
I am shocked by how much russian-speaking people are shameless.
When russia starts the biggest war since WWII using language/national justification¹, promoting russian culture is shameless beyond limits.
¹ putin promised to solve "Ukrainian question" ("украинский вопрос" – an obvious reference to "Judenfrage" which later was used by German fascists to justify holocaust) when he announced his svo
If you’re referring to Lolita, the novel is written from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, that Nabokov very clearly holds in complete contempt. You would know this if you had actually read the book.
Face it. You have grown up thinking that all teachers should be as kind as your kindergarten teacher and the amount of details about verbs should not exceed the your gaming console instructions.
Having studied at various levels about half a dozen languages (mostly Indo-European but also Hebrew), it’s fascinating to see the various features that are common across them. Most IE languages (but not English) create families of verbs by prefixing them with prepositions (we get some of this in borrowed vocabulary such as attain, obtain, sustain, detain, etc.). Greek makes this most obvious since some of its verb inflections happen as prefixes which end up in the middle of these preposition-inflected verbs. The reflexive pronoun se/sa/si manages to stay pretty consistent across languages, although there are some interesting cases where in, Spanish, e.g., se becomes me/te/nos/vos in the first and second person, but in Czech remains se (with declensions).
Vocabulary is especially wild to watch mutate across languages with, e.g., brother recognizable in most languages once you know about mutation between b-p-f and th-t-d-* (the * indicating omission) and it’s almost the same word in most of the IE languages I know except Spanish (which lost it’s frater-derived noun for hermano which comes from the Latin germanus which is the root of the English germane among other words) and Greek ἀδελφός which etymologically means from the same womb.
> (but not English)
Well, English has inherited a lot of such families ultimately from Latin: admit, commit, remit, transmit.
I noted this in my comment, but there are no native cases of this. It’s one of the (many) ways in which English is an outlier from its IE relatives. There are, though, some postfix cases where we will use a preposition (as a separate word) after a verb to modify its meaning: e.g, give in, give up, give out, etc.
A link to the book - https://archive.org/details/lecturesonlitera0000nabo_z7a4 and on Smellazon https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/0156027763
Also: https://www.ijlll.org/2024/IJLLL-V10N6-557.pdf
I think it may actually be from _Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor_ instead. I spent an hour or so last night after seeing this tweet trying to track down the rest of this essay, and it took me a while to find the exact book it was from and find a copy of it. The funny part to me was that the whole essay was actually included in the tweets (aside from a footnote), it's very sort and pithy.
> You can, and should, speak Russian with a permanent broad smile
Funnily enough, I was told the exact same thing about English when I was learning it as a Russian native.
In contrast, see “Why Russians never smile”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27317859
Unfortunately, the URL referenced in the link does not point to the original article.
Here is what I assume was referenced:
https://chicagomaroon.com/5454/viewpoints/op-ed/why-russians...
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On a tangent - I've moved abroad to work in a multinational corporation, and I noticed that similar cultures cluster together. I spend most of my time with other Eastern Europeans.
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Yeah, that's the point - you shouldn't really smile, it's about relaxing your mouth
I learned it on my own... always imagined it as "speaking without letting the heat out"
Are we trying to make psychopaths? That’s sounds very unsettling for conversation.
Americans are regularly ribbed for smiling way too much during conversations with strangers. Apparently we can be rather unsettling lol
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In the context of a foreigner clumsily trying to speak your language, the smile might be interpreted differently.
Very funny and snobbish too, nothing less expected from Nabokov.
Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language. It is not that different from German in this matter.
German inflection is pretty minimalistic. There are just four cases, and it's mostly the article that is being changed with only occasional and predictable changes to the noun itself. Meanwhile in Russian there are six cases and no article, so it's the word itself that has to change. Also there are three different declensions not counting exceptions.
Gender in Russian is much easier than in German though - most of the time you can tell it by the word itself
That's declension of nouns. Then there's the conjugation of the verbs, which is reasonably regular in German and similar to Latin (three persons, two numbers, three basic tenses each with a "perfect", two voices, across four moods).
What's difficult really depends on the languages you already know.
In addition to noun inflection, verb aspect, pronunciation stress, and punctuation trouble many native English speakers. That's in addition to all the simple irregularities, like irregular nouns and verbs.
Stress even troubles native speakers. When I lived there, I saw slideshow "where 's the stress?" quizzes used to fill time on screens in taxi buses, waiting rooms, and the like.
Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement, except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock).
Punctuation is secondary, just put commas, colons and semicolons where you feel they should go, most Russians don't know any better themselves.
Noun and verb inflections you will master with enough practice, yeah.
Maybe overall a more difficult language than English or German, but not in the same league as Chinese or Arabic, in my humble opinion.
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> It is not that different from German in this matter.
I've met several Germans who spoke Russian fluently, none of them has really mastered the instrumental case, not even a friend of mine who worked at the German embassy in Moscow. Although you might say it's a minor grammar difference, this particular grammar case seems hard to grasp for people who are not accustomed to it through their native language.
Also, from my personal experience, quite a few Germans who learnt Russian had a real struggle understanding the concept of perfective/imperfective aspect.
These kinds of grammatical difficulties are typical for people who are learning only their second language after their native language.
After learning 3 or more languages that are not closely related, one is usually exposed to most grammatical features that can be encountered in the majority of the languages, so usually grammar no longer poses any challenges, but only memorizing the unfamiliar words and pronouncing sounds that do not exist in the native language.
I find the concept of perfective/imperfective verbs quite easy to grasp.
Remembering all the verb couples, that's what takes some effort.
>It is not that different from German in this matter.
Russian inflection changes the stress. In German it's fixed. Inflectional forms are much more varied in Russian. Colloquial German is much more analytical (past tense is almost always "ich habe" + participle). German has devolved to basically 3 cases at this point (with genitive dying out), compared to Russian's 6. But conceptually, they're very similar indeed.
If you just want to be understood, Russian is not very hard. I think it's true for any language. To master it, however...
> Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language.
That's saying that getting to the lunar orbit is the only difficult part in landing on the Moon. The whole complexity of inflectional languages is in the inflections. It's also why Slavic (or Turkic) languages form such a large continuum of mutually almost-intelligible languages.
Compared to inflections, everything else in Russian is simple. The word formation using prefixes and suffixes is weird, but it's not like English is a stranger to this (e.g. "make out", what does it mean?). The writing system is phonetic with just a handful of rules for reading (writing is a different matter).
Add baltic languages to the mix as well! Lithuanian is like a slavic language with all the inflection drama but with additional word types that are currently mostly gone from slavic languages.
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English phrasal verbs make completely zero sense since there is no logic involved
If English was logical "make out" would mean somethibgg like "throw out". But "to make out" means something else obviously. And you dont throw out your trash. You throw them away...
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Well, yes.
The only difficult part of Russian is writing it. Most native Russian speakers, myself included, can't write properly even after completing 11 years of Russian language in school. Hundreds of rules nobody remembers.
I think as a native speaker it's different to you.
Native English speakers make spelling mistakes quite often. But as a language learner I struggled with everything, except spelling - I always knew how to spell a word, even if I don't know how to pronounce it. It's the opposite of native speaker experience.
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Your experience as a native speaker is completely different from learning the language from scratch as an adult, to the point that it's almost irrelevant. Writing Russuan is not that difficult, it's just the only part that you had to actually do any work to learn
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Define properly. As a native speaker who immigrated to the US decades ago, I don’t find writing proper Russian grammar that difficult.
There is a saying that you should learn the enemy language to understand them. I suppose the time has come again. Why else would you learn it otherwise? It is not like many of us can even visit the place without consequences. The books were translated years ago anyway.
Slavic languages are similar, IMO you just need to bombard your brain with a lot of it to start discerning the patterns (just like any other language I guess). Reading is not necessary, writing likewise. I never had a single lesson but speak fluently in russian and ok polish, can understand ukrainian, can read also.
Given that you need content for your brain it would be hard to find something nice created in russia recently, might be easier to start with polish if you are in the west.
Careful, by learning russian you also become an oppressed russian minority that needs to be "liberated". It's not just your brain that will get bombarded.
Same with English. let's ~~bomb other countries~~ spread "democracy".
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You've just associated actions of a certain fascist government with the whole language spoken by hundreds of millions of people who are against the war it waged and which is orders of magnitude older.
That's not very bright of you, to put it mildly.
Mind you, the language argument was just as well employed by the putin's propagandists, as in something along the lines of "just listen how silly Ukrainian sub-language sounds, lol".
Which is an argument every sane human being finds disgusting and stupid beyond all comprehension, of course.
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Russian is spoken by 250 million people. I hope they are not all your enemies.
Only perhaps 90-100 million of them are Russian citizens. For many others it's a second language too.
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I think you miss the point. I am talking about the incentive to learn somebody’s native tongue. I doubt people want to know it to meet an emigrant in Germany and have a conversation in russian. Equally I do mot learn spanish to talk to my neighbours but to have a conversation with a local in spain.
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There is a large, growing Russian diaspora and many writers/artists create works in exile. The language helps if you want to understand the millions who left their homes out of principle, but they are not the "enemy".
> There is a saying that you should learn the enemy language to understand them.
Мы не враги, друг мой..
You seem to be still stuck in an "end of history" mindset, unfortunately.
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v kremle s taboj nisoglasny
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Polish person here. Don't try to learn Polish. It's insanely difficult, the "rules" make no sense whatsoever, and almost anybody that you'll want to talk to will be able to communicate with you in English.
As for Russian, I also don't see any point in learning it. I was forcefully taught Russian in primary school back when Poland was under Russian yoke. The general idea here is that we'd like not to be in that situation ever again. Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
Polish is great because there is a lot of content to learn from. And it is a gateway to other western slavic languages in the region. I basically forced myself to learn it because Manga was all in polish at the time. Their movie industry is great as well.
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As someone studying Polish, and making excellent progress, I mostly agree with your take. If you want to explore other languages, something like Spanish will get you much more mileage. Polish is difficult and the community of speakers isn't exactly warm to foreigners or people acquiring the language. On the other hand, if you truly enjoy languages and are passionate about them, I have found Polish to be really interesting and beautiful in its own way. Definitely not recommended, but still enjoyable to read/write/speak.
> Learning the language of a nation
A nation doesn't own the language.
> Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
So, when do you plan to unlearn English?
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Why is every time you see a Polish person they have an inferiority syndrome and and shit on their own country?
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> Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
Are you a european/white supremacist who doesn't consider the victims of the anglosphere to be human, or are you historically illiterate, even of extremely recent history?
I don't see a third option here since you learned english also, would appreciate an explanation for this special pleading rather than furious downvoting when identifying basic empirical discrepancies in the face of what looks to be materially false claims.
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> The books were translated years ago anyway.
Translated books lack the nuance or tone of the originals, which you would be missing out of, and most of the time you don't even realise.
wow, so nobody should have visited Murica after they nuked Japan and firebombed Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq etc.
Oh but that's fine because they're the Good Guys™
> It is not like many of us can even visit the place without consequences.
There are traveloggers on YouTube visiting Russia in recent months and they seem to be fine.
> Given that you need content for your brain it would be hard to find something nice created in Russia recently
Oh boy.. wow.. really
This is poorly informed, it’s quite easy to get a visa to Russia. Easier than many other countries, actually. Just follow the laws and use common sense (same rule applies when you are traveler anywhere) and you will be fine. Don't believe me just check YouTube, plenty of bloggers go there - “Sly’s Life” channel, Russia videos. He also goes to Ukraine after before you start calling me or him a shill for Putin or whatever.
As a native speaker, one thing I see people struggle with surprisingly often is that a) every noun has a gender, and b) every word grammatically related to a noun must always match its gender, case, and plurality. The second thing is the inflections themselves, yes.
But I suppose it also depends a lot on that person's native language — the people I most commonly hear speak Russian as a foreign language are migrant workers, whose native languages are usually Turkic. Those don't have grammatical genders. It feels like learning Russian would be easier for someone who is native in, for example, a Roman language (Spanish/French/Portuguese/Italian) or German.
The gender of a noun in the native language is sometimes the opposite in the other language, so it can be difficult in its own way as well. At least this was my experience when briefly learning german as a portuguese speaker. In this sense learning english was easier, although it happened kinda passively by just being on the internet too much.
I think it depends on how you approach learning genders. As a native English speaker, when learning Romance languages I don't think of words as being feminine or masculine. I think of "il pane" as being a single unit, and "la bottiglia" as being another single unit. I've then never struggled when looking at a new Romance language because I'm not thinking "this word used to be feminine and now it's masculine" - I'm just learning new units, as if the articles are part of the word itself.
This extends to other words that must agree. Instead of thinking "the noun is masculine so the adjective must be masculine as well", think "the article is 'il' therefore the adjective is 'buono' instead of 'buona'".
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> As a native speaker, one thing I see people struggle with surprisingly often is that a) every noun has a gender, and b) every word grammatically related to a noun must always match its gender, case, and plurality. The second thing is the inflections themselves, yes.
My experience differs:
In terms of vocabulary: the vocabulary in Russian often has little relationship to words in German, English or French, so you really have to learn very "foreign" words.
In terms of pronounciation, learning is made more difficult since many vowels are pronounced differently depending on whether the syllable is emphasized or not, and where the vowel is in the word. Additionally, some consonant clusters are pronounced differently from what you'd expect (simple example: the "в" in Здравствуйте is silent). Additionally, some consonant cluster don't exist in German or English, so you have to get used to them.
In terms of grammar, a difficulty with Russian as a beginner is rather that there exist lots of cases (6-7, depending on whether you consider locative case as a separate case from prepositional case or not), and you of course have to learn which preposition demands which case, and then you obviously have to use the properly declinated noun/adjective.
So, there is simply an insane amount of tables to cram.
I wouldn't claim that the latter is inherently difficult per se, but rather it's a huge amount of material that you have to get very certain in that slows your learning down.
EDIT: Another difficulty is the irregularity of emphasis in verb conjugation:
приходи́ть: e.g. мы прихо́дим
говори́ть: e.g. мы говори́м
i.e. a very different syllable is emphasized in the verb conjugation.
Even native Russian speakers couldn't explain why this is the case, and told me to simply cram the verb conjugation.
I don't see Russian as completely alien to English. There are a lot of loanwords from English, French, German, Greek and Latin which are identifiable. Some of the native words are similar to western ones — voda is obviously similar to water, brat to brother, tri is similar to three etc. Much easier than Hungarian vocabulary which has remarkably little to latch onto.
This is true with most slavic languages.
With some rarer ones (eg. slovene), you even have a special dual form (singular, dual, plural).
And then there are different declinations when eg counting:
eno pivo (1 beer)
dve pivi (2 beers, dual)
tri piva (3 beers, plural)
štiri piva (4 beers, plural)
pet piv (5 beers, plural, but now in genitive case for some reason, same for higher numbers, eg sto (100) piv)
On the other hand, knowing slovene and being able to read (usually the serbian form of) cyrillic makes you understand 2/3 of the russian texts out there, which is especially useful for dodgy forums with semi-legal knowledge not available anywhere else and which google can't/won't fully translate (unless you copy-paste the text into a translation window).
I like to imagine Slavic languages as a sort of scale, where Russian is at one end, Polish and Serbian are at the opposite end, and Ukrainian and Belarusian are somewhere in the middle.
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It’s one of the reasons why most Russian (Eastern European) speakers pick up German easier than English speakers or some other languages.
The other reason being that Russian (and other non-English) speakers are usually picking up their third or fourth language, while for English speakers it's almost universally number two, and half-hearted at that... (I say that as a native English speaker whose Spanish is muy mal).
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Eastern europeans speak multiple languages where russian was a second language due to everyone being in the union (occupation). Languages are different and span multiple language groups. IMO there is no strong correlation here not to mention the fact that english is more popular. German language and its presence in the curriculum has other reasons, like the fact that german economy is closer rather than say english or american, there was more incentive to learn german due to economical necessity. But nowadays everyone chooses english as it is a simpler, and considered the real business language.
AFAIK there is no evidence to suggest that the uptake of german is easier for people living in the eastern parts of europe
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German native speakers might better understand how cases work, but it's as laborious to learn them as for anybody else.
> German native speakers might better understand how cases work
As a native German speaker: cases mostly work like the type system of a programming language - they help you to immediately detect when there is something off. The "type" that the clause has in a sentence has to match the type that the predicate expects - otherwise the type checker will "reject" the sentence.
Yes, I would say that my thinking about the German language deeply influences my thinking about programming. I asked Russian native speakers who work as programmers whether this also holds for them for the Russian language, but they said the Russian language does not have a similar influence on their thinking about programming as I claim and explained about the German language for me.
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I’m learning Croatian as a native Portuguese speaker, and I find out while the grammar itself is easier to think coming from Portuguese, I prefer to deal with sentence construction as if thinking about it from English.
I would really rather read his guide to learning English.
Be born into a noble family with english speaking governesses.
He was exposed to English from the very young age, it's basically his native language
Sort of. When I hear Nabokov speaking, he sounds like he has an unplaceable regional accent, as opposed to a "foreign" one. His writing in English is fluent, but can have a few tics in it — he repeats certain fancy words, and he tends to avoid slang.
By the way, the last tsar's daughters reportedly picked up a slight Irish accent from one of their tutors. He was sacked and replaced by someone more pukka.
Everything he says here also applies to german. For example, to actually say "ich" properly you need to have a wide kind of smile that feels incredibly strange to an english native speaker.
Why? The "ch" in "inc" is exactly the same sound as that represented by "h" in words like "human" and "huge" in English. It's a voiceless palatal fricative. It doesn't require a "wide kind of smile" unless you somehow need to also do that when saying the vowel in "team" too.
Not an expert, but some "to IPA" websites I checked transcribes "the huge human" as "ðə hjuːʤ ˈhjuːmən", but "ich" (voiceless palatal fricative) as "iç" (and "ach" (voiceless velar fricative) as "ax")).
ç != hj
ETA: Wikipedia notes:
> The sound at the beginning of huge in most British accents is a voiceless palatal fricative [ç], but this is analysed phonemically as the consonant cluster /hj/ so that huge is transcribed /hjuːdʒ/. As with /hw/, this does not mean that speakers pronounce [h] followed by [j]; the phonemic transcription /hj/ is simply a convenient way of representing the single sound [ç].
So maybe ç == hj.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#cite_note-18
[ç] is an allophone of [h], and it's very hard for English speakers to notice that they're not just saying [h]. I've had the same problem with [e] versus [ɛ].
The "ich-laut" does not exist in english. It's not like just saying "ish."
Example: https://youtu.be/oSIPAMoCzhA?t=195
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Nabokov writes so beautifully in English.
Not mentioned is that Russian is well populated with loan words from other European languages (especially technology terms) , but about the only Slavic loan word in European languages I know of is "robot" (work) - samizdat being a more recent arrival.
It’s a bit weird to see the English transliteration of Russian words for example, govoritz instead of говорить.
For anyone looking to study Russian, I highly recommend spending a few days familiarizing yourself with Cyrillic first. Toss it into an Anki deck (or download one) and use FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler).
It’s phonetic and consists of only 33 letters, I memorized it on a ~12-hour flight to Moscow many years ago.
Same thing with learning Japanese. Just memorize the symbols. It's phonetic. Of course there are complex meanings and subtleties but that's just how we all play with language. As a foreigner your pronunciation can be good once you get the basics. But you have to match the sounds with the letters. We all did it once. We can do it again.
Related, I spent several formative years in Taiwan. Back then, my Taiwanese phone (way before smartphones) used bopomofo as the primary input method for typing Chinese, so I had to learn it.
Unfortunately, some of the 注音 symbols are remarkably similar to Japanese kana, and I found that my familiarity with hiragana and katakana actually caused me constant grief, as I kept mixing up the pronunciations.
Almost nothing aside from children’s books is written exclusively in hiragana or katakana. You have to also memorize the variable readings of about 2000 kanji and many texts are nearly unintelligible without them. Pretty much everyone can memorize the former, but must struggle with the latter.
Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).
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> Same thing with learning Japanese
Korean, too.
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Except there are many, many more symbols?
Yes, a cursory glance at written Polish should be enough for anyone to understand why Latin alphabet is a poor match for Slavic languages.
Polish is a rather extreme case, however. Czech orthography is a bit more straightforward. In spite of that, Polish orthography still does a rather good job.
Generally speaking, if you've a language with heavy use of palatalisation in its phonology and grammar, the Latin alphabet is going to struggle without hacks. Irish and Scottish Gaelic similarly struggle with the inherent limitations of the Latin alphabet, but chose a different set of hacks (necessarily, given the Irish has the second oldest written vernacular language in Europe after Greek).
Similarly, the Latin alphabet is poorly suited to the Germanic languages, Danish and English in particular, because of their large vowel inventory.
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Oh yes, Polish, the difficulty is shown in this 1:19 slice from a movie: "Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz " -- https://youtu.be/AfKZclMWS1U
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The Latin alphabet is also a poor match for English. We make do.
Your are getting downvoted, but polish writing system really is not great. There are both non-english characters (ą, ę, ś, ć, ź, ż) and digraphs (rz, sz, cz, dz, dż, dź, ch). Also there is done overlap here and some sounds can be written in more than one way (h ~= ch, ż ~= rz, ć == ci, ś == si, etc).
At least you can pretty much always tell how to read a word looking only at its spelling.
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Learn Cyrillic the fun way: go in vacation in Bulgaria, they have road signs in both Latin and Cyrillic. This is how I learned Cyrillic 20 years ago, driving a lot for business all over around Balkans. It was an easy curve, a few characters at a time, with a lot of repetitions and the scenery is nice.
Truly everyone assumes “learning another alphabet” is hard but it really isn’t. 1-2 weeks of 30-45min a day drills and you’ll have it down. Cyrillic is very easy to memorize.
Learned Greek alphabet on Duolingo in a month or two
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I found after learning Greek I could instantly read Cyrillic too
Odd. According to this venn diagram, that would only give you 3 additional characters of Greek from what you would already know coming form English.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venn_diagram_showing...
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With the exception of some "ligatures" like Ю (I + O) and special characters like Ъ, Cyrillic is largely based on Greek and some Aramaic (e.g. Ш). In the past it included pretty much the entire Greek alphabet.
And I found that after going through some math in the uni I could instantly read Greek !
The only letter that never saw any use in proofs was ι (iota).
Duolingo Russian isn't very good overall (lack of content / grammar explanations), but it does have a page for learning the alphabet that is pretty helpful.
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Can you just tell us your biases instead of making us guess?
Why doesn't Russian have culture, why is it not useful?
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You're honestly saying that Russia of all places has no history or culture?
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I always found Russian to be the nasties sounding slavic language. It's just unpleasant to the ears. Probably because it makes you either sound aggressive or like you're asking or begging for another bowl of porridge. I guess watching Soviet world war II movies when I was a child had an impact.
Russian is the German of Slavic languages
I find Russian depending a lot on the speaker. Some Russians can speak it beautifully, some not so much.
I used to love learning russian. My russian speaking, moscow educated ukrainian friend used to teach me, but she doesn't want to do that anymore. Hopefully sometime in the future I can pick it up again.
Why not to learn Ukrainian instead? It quite similar but sounds much better.
Barely anyone speaks it, even those who do typically speak Russian just as good if not better.
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How do russians differentiate between "Z3" and "33"? Font? Avoidance od names like "zone Z3" that could be read as "zone 33"?
In much the same way as you differentiate between "O0" and "00", or between "I1" and "11". (For example, to avoid ambiguity, a standard may prohibit the use of З in a position where 3 is allowed.)
I could do the speaking but the letters are crazy. I was trying to learn it in college to impress this Russian chick. All I got was kak dela privjet.
I think it's crazy so many other countries learn English, I mean lucky us who are ignorant here in the states and don't even speak a second language.
Hm but a set of letters takes how long to learn? A weekend?
You're saying the Russian cyrllic letters takes a weekend to learn? Maybe, that would be impressive, not for me. I think it would take me longer.
I know the Greek alphabet but only because I learned it in a frat from a YT song.
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I envy those who doesn't need a second keyboard layout on their computers haha
ditto. I believe it is impossible to be proficient and eloquent in more than one language at a time.
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>lucky us who are ignorant here in the states and don't even speak a second language.
I feel as lucky as can be, I speak zero languages fluently :)
That's the easiest part.
After russian, other languages - georgian, hebrew, english seem reasonable. Especially hebrew.
Saying this as a native Russian speaker
Georgian is really interesting. Very few cognates for non-modern words. Colors in Georgian are fun: you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color" (ყავისფერი / ყავის ფერი); you don't have "light blue", you have "sky-color" (ცისფერი / ცის ფერი).
> you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color"
It's coffee-colour (kahverengi) in Turkish as well, but I don't find it interesting. The English word "orange" is after a fruit as well (which is also the same in Turkish: "portakal rengi", or "turuncu").
> "coffee-color"
The Russian word for "brown" is literally "cinnamon-colored" ("коричневый"). And the Chinese language just uses the literal "coffee-colored" phrase (咖啡色).
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Sky-colour makes sense, but coffee drinking only goes back to the 15th century or so. Did Georgians not have a word for this colour before then?!
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There are several Hindi words for brown, my favourite is "Badami" - almond-like.
My grandfather used "laal" which is usually used for red. I used to wonder if he was colour blind.
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Colours are fun in many languages.
For instance, Japanese and Vietnamese do not differentiate between blue and green and require context specific clarification, e.g «traffic light blue-green».
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I believe polish is similar. They have “sky color” which is pretty cool!
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Your command and understanding of the grammar of your native language puts a hard limit to how well you can learn other languages. This has not been stressed enough and schools have all but given up trying to teach children grammar because as natives they more or less get along without it.
On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language. I mean, I used standard English intuitively, but couldn't have told you any of the technical terms. I agree with modern educators that explicit grammar instruction beyond a very, very basic level should not be a high priority. Exposure to and guided close reading of complex texts sharpens grammatical intuition, right alongside all of the other benefits of an advanced reading level. Knowing deep grammar does not so automatically improve textual interpretation.
This is speculation, but I wonder if the period of emphasizing explicit grammatical instruction wasn't an accidental interregnum. That is to say, back in the days when Latin and/or Greek were part of the ordinary curriculum students learned grammar much as I did, as a "natural" excelerant to interpreting a foreign tongue. Once those languages were dropped educators noticed students couldn't do grammar analysis anymore, and so tried teaching it directly, without fully considering when and why it might be useful. I don't know how well the dates line up, but it would be interesting to look into.
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This. When I first started learning Russian, we immediately jumped into basic grammar rules. After two weeks of incredible frustration, I realized I did not have sufficient mastery of English grammar to be able to establish a framework for understanding Russian grammar. I often say that my first two months of learning Russian were spent learning English and it is not a joke.
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in all countries where i lived, schools where I studied, there was heavy investment in grammar. (no, i didn't study in usa).
I won't really agree that mastering grammar of native language limits on how well you can learn other languages. Maybe it matters in the way how it taught in college, when you are older and approach to learning language is "more structured". But when I learned Georgian at age of 6 and Hebrew at 12 (through very deep immersion. Teachers spoke only Hebrew), English at 14 (I had 5 months of private lessons following by dial-up connection to mostly english internet), it didn't matter. At least not for me.
There was also this interesting phenomena, that immigrant when they went to local school, their scores in hebrew grammar classes were usually higher than those of native speakers.
I've been told that western European languages are easy for Russian speakers because you can learn them by removing parts of the Russian grammar. "Oh, they don't have A, and B and C are the same thing for them, and they don't have D too!" Is that correct?
It's a little bit like moving from Italian/French/Spanish to English, except that English has some tenses with no direct equivalent in those languages and a ton of phrasal verbs to learn, but that's vocabulary and not grammar.
Yes. Although, Romance languages have more verb tenses, generally they're easier. BTW, I only learned that Russan's past tense is the same compound past, by learning Italian. Also, Old Russian dropped participles, but re-borrowed them from Church Slavonic (southern Slavic), so we know these things, and learn them at school. (Ukrainian has participle 2, but not 1, as far as I understand.)
Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object. Some people can't wrap their head around that it can be the other way around, e.g. Italian "sua madre/suo padre" can mean both his and her mother/father. In German, they must concord with both, sein Vater, seine Mutter, ihrer Vater, ihre Mutter. But Russian regional dialects do have the same feature, and if your teacher isn't a mad purist, they can easily give examples: евойная, еёйный.
Otherwise, indeed, there are less features. And in Indo-European, they're all the same: compound past tense, participles, compound past and future.
To give an example of another system: Turkic languages. 4 modal verbs (to run, to walk, to stand, to lay down), that must be applied to everything except the verb "to be", they indicate how much hurry you have doing what you're doing. It's a bit similar to Russian aspect (complete/incomplete), but way more complex. Plus you have noun cases, and everything is a suffix, and the verb is always the last. So, "I don't do X" will be something like "I <verb+ing> <stand>+me+not" (like those German prefixes that fall down in the end of the sentence.) My colleague, a Kazakh born in Russia, learns it as a foreign language, and he says it's hard.
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Not really. At least not for me. The vast assortment of tenses was somewhat surprising.
About English there is a Russian saying: "in english you write Manchester but you read Liverpool"
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Definiteness has no obvious equivalent in Russian.
Well, just as Nabokov said: Russians have an impression that foreign languages are simpler than Russian.
It's ironic, seeing tons of exclusively russian-speaking immigrants not being able to learn the native language after decades living in the country.
But it's not about complexity really. I think it's more caused by the deeply ingrained superiority complex in most russians. And just in case, most russians != every russian.
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I have my own sample set as I presented.
Russian is seriously messed up language. Especially after learning Hebrew (which is simple and algorithmic) , I was able to look back in Russian and realize what a horrible mess of a language it is.
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Don't we all?
I am sorry, due to the war, I cannot see this in good faith. I am Dutch, so that’s that.
I am sorry I can’t see this in good faith, but I would need to see an attempt at how this is meant for curiosity’s sake and not propaganda.
I am on here a lot, I am a person. And this is what I think when I see the title. I am sorry for the bad vibes but I say no to Russia and learning Russian (for now).
I am okay with potential downvotes. I still think this needs to be said. I wish I could be above this but I can’t.
Your comment is troubling. I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion). This is disturbing to me because i believe this is the kind of mental confusion that actually makes this kind of political violence possible.
For the record, I had the exact opposite feeling when i saw that title: I was glad the poster was not feeling obliged to not mention a culture because of a war.
I'm glad you expressed your own view so candidly though, as I did myself, and would not want to discourage that. But you understand you are playing "their" game by helping erecting those fences, right?
> I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion).
The human brain is a hyperactive pattern recognition machine and it is actually usual for it to make associations that don't hold up to intellectual scrutiny. Otherwise it'd be quite difficult to believe things that aren't true. It is expected that people will do this. The real miracle is something like the legal system where a many people have been convinced to follow an evidence- and precedent- based process rather than making decisions based on what they think it true in the moment flowing from their thoughts and feelings.
Not to excuse the behaviour, it is terrifying and generally generally harmful. But it is at least easy to understand - for any random pairing of things there is going to be a large chunk of the population who associates them without any underlying causal reason beyond that they've been spotted together once. Like the Russian language and war. Then political choices flow on from that reality.
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It's not "mental confusion" its a lived experience for millions of people.
Russia and Russians have a long history of exterminating local languages and culture in territories they control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
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You're struggling to see how glorifying language, culture and ignoring context triggers people?
> But you understand you are playing "their"
Who's "their"? West tried to play nice for years, welcoming Russians despite active aggression and it yielded nothing.
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You are not alone in this my friend.
As a Ukrainian, seeing how US sometimes romanticizes Russia and takes active interest in its culture is heartbreaking. But I guess having an ocean between you and the continent with Russia does that to you.
So we should hate all Russians and it's culture because of Putin?
As a Ukranian you should know that there is a lot of shared [positive] culture between the two, so where do we decide where the interest lays?
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But how does this makes any sense? Do you refuse to speak English when USA (English speaking) invades Iraq? Or you are ok with double standards?
Russian is neither a common lingua franca nor is it commonly spoken by foreigners (with the obvious exclusion of former Soviet countries). It belongs culturally to Russia and it's people. English belongs to half a dozen countries.
I'm not sure I agree with the original commenter, but I see the merit in their perspective.
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I speak Russian and due to war I've completely abandoned the language and the culture. Russians not showing any resistance is a good litmus test whether culture is worth being involved with and the answer is a clear no imo.
Kinda sad as russian language is quite incredible but any sane individual must sanitize their environment for their own sake and abandoning russian culture is a perfectly reasonable take.
>Russians not showing any resistance
You mean not the level you would feel satisfied, there are plenty showing resistance, they just disappear. Very easy to judge others when you have little risk.
The ones showing resistance are leaving Russia and immigrating to other countries if they can.
You should take pity on them. They are unfortunate people who live in a dictatorship. Russians who tried to protest were arrested and taken in unknown direction by authorities.
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As Russian many crazy supporters of Putin and Ukraine war I met outside of Russia are foreigners speaking English. Sure it's worse among Russians but if you were serious about anti war position you would want to speak Russian more because that helps spread your position. It's not like PRC yet, people can disagree with government without being so afraid
Thank you for stating your position.
My good friend once taught me that people without shame are the most dangerous people. I am shocked by how much russian-speaking people are shameless.
When russia starts the biggest war since WWII using language/national justification¹, promoting russian culture is shameless beyond limits.
¹ putin promised to solve "Ukrainian question" ("украинский вопрос" – an obvious reference to "Judenfrage" which later was used by German fascists to justify holocaust) when he announced his svo
I boycott all things Russian (where I can, easily) and so should all of you
When you open your eyes, are you amazed to see the person in front of you come back into existence?
are you insane, or just a troll?
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have you?
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Into the trash it goes.
I've never seen the appeal of this guy's famous novel and find it quite weird how it's supposedly a literary masterpiece. Sick people.
If you’re referring to Lolita, the novel is written from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, that Nabokov very clearly holds in complete contempt. You would know this if you had actually read the book.
Not really a topic that piques my interest.
Glad you enjoyed it, I guess.
Face it. You have grown up thinking that all teachers should be as kind as your kindergarten teacher and the amount of details about verbs should not exceed the your gaming console instructions.