Comment by cyberax
14 hours ago
> 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.
Well, Lithuanian is also a Proto-Indo-European language. But the one that somehow got sucked into a time warp from the past. And it even has a tonal pitch accent in addition to the stress pattern, just to make it more interesting.
Wow, I had no idea. This sounds extremely interesting. I need to read more about Lithuanian language (at least grammar, sadly I don't have time to learn yet another language)
Maybe because Lithuanian has 3 kinds of stresses...
Well, yes.