Comment by volemo

2 months ago

Well, just as Nabokov said: Russians have an impression that foreign languages are simpler than Russian.

25 comments

volemo

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koiueo  2 months ago

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.

  • mlrtime  2 months ago

    I was surprised as well living in Hong Kong that many kids grow up never learning Cantonese being born there (Non Chinese heritage). Their parents spoke their native language, and they learned English in a private school.

    You could live there until very late in life never needing to know more than a few sentences.

  • eudamoniac  2 months ago

    I don't think I've ever seen this in my life from a Russian. I do see a lot of Spanish and Chinese speaking immigrants with no interest in learning English though.

    • tguvot  2 months ago

      it's a thing. there are russians that think that they have superior culture and learning some other barbaric language is beneath them.

      so they either don't learn native language of the country where they live or learn it to bare minimum

    • koiueo  2 months ago

      I realized, I don't know many cases of Spanish or Chinese people not learning the language.

      My hypothesis: I understand russian and register cases like this easily. Otoh, I don't understand Chinese, so the ones with whom I have ever had any communication, are the ones who learned any of the languages I understand. Similar story with Spanish, my level is ~A2, so there's bias here too, although slightly less prominent.

      Do you understand russian?

tguvot  2 months ago

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.

  • vkazanov  2 months ago

    Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. Language designers really did great work on taking a core of a dead language and proposing a cleaner, more modern version of it.

    Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences.

    A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.

    • rationer  1 month ago

      Hebrew wasn’t “literally synthesised” and wasn’t dead. Jews have continuously been writing and publishing works in Hebrew for the past 2,000 years.

      It has evolved naturally to some extent over that time, but much less than other languages - a modern Hebrew speaker can more easily understand medieval Hebrew than an English speaker Medieval English.

      What has been synthesised a century ago is additional vocabulary for modern concepts, and this is ongoing for Hebrew as it is for every other language.

      1 reply →

    • rgblambda  2 months ago

      >Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago.

      I had heard somewhere that much of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew consists of loanwords from Arabic. Is this correct and if so, would it mean that the "cleanliness" of the language is more a reflection of Modern Standard Arabic?

      Apologies in advance if this is seen as some falsehood or if it's a sensitive topic.

      3 replies →

    • Muromec  2 months ago

      >Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment.

      Then 1918th spelling reform was a thing. It's of course always easier to reform other languages to make it closer to yours than change yourself. Those silly natives can't ever figure out the spelling and dictionary themselves without a bit of a genocide.

  • delitrem  2 months ago

    > Russian is seriously messed up language.

    Some (most?) national languages, which developed chaotically, are very illogical, with weird constructions and some inexplicable features (Russian and English are examples of this). Artificial/planned languages such as Esperanto are a different matter -- they are very easy to learn and very pleasant to the ear.