Comment by Yizahi
11 hours ago
She's saying that Ruzzian history and culture doesn't deserve neither recognition nor effort to learn them, at this period of time. It's fine if a person is already partially or fully embedded in those, you can't "unlearn" stuff. But I'm personally baffled at the people on reddit book subs who are clearly westerners and writing that they are actively trying to learn Ruzzian to read some Tolstoevsky. Yeah, I'm impressed, twice, both at the spectacularly low reward/effort ratio and the sheer tone deafness of it all. In 2025. Or 2024. Or 2023. Etc.
So because of a war they shouldn't learn Russian, and why do you type it as "Ruzzian"?
The effort people put into criticizing how others spend their time is baffling, especially on HN.
Yup.
Not because of war. Because all russia has to offer this world is destruction and learning russian is the biggest waste of time one can come up with.
Only if you don't know any russians you may think "I may communicate with them". When time comes and you meet more than 1 random example of them - you will not want to speak with them ever again.
These are facts from big numbers of people who actually konw them.
If you think "but i know a guy at work at my US company he is from russia" - mate, he is nothing like russians, and he also hides like 90% of his true self.
I'm teaching my son Russian and English now as well as the rich culture. I can also teach him to think critically and NOT support war.
I'm sorry your experience has been so one sided, we all have different persepctives.
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Your comment was flagged but I just vouched for it because this kind of shameless xenophobia deserves to be seen.
russian is also natively spoken in Belarus, Ukraine & many ethnics minorities inside russian federation.
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it is delightfully damning that you people say such things out loud :)
russians (this time spelt with a lowercase 'r') have forfeited their right to exist as a nation.
Consistently throughout history, they have invaded, colonized, and genocided their neighbors.
They are doing it now, while the whole world watches. If anything, their brazenness is increasing - because they know there will never be any punishment.
When people wonder how Germans allowed their country to tip over into Nazism, modern russia is a perfect reenactment of that: we can see it happening, in real time.
And it's a blazing indictment that the rest of our "civilized" world is doing the absolute minimum to prevent history from repeating itself. Utterly SHAMEFUL.
> russians (this time spelt with a lowercase 'r') have forfeited their right to exist as a nation. Consistently throughout history, they have invaded, colonized, and genocided their neighbors.
Just to make sure we're on the right track here, has the UK (or maybe just England?) also earned that forfeit, or does it get a pass because it did all those things further away from home? (Except for that Ireland thing, which has produced some really 'funny' jokes about potatoes...)
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