Comment by lucms_
2 months ago
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'".
That works, but Russian doesn't have articles. You can, however, mostly get away by assuming that feminine nouns end with -а, -ь, and -я, neutral ones with -о, and all others are masculine.
That helps less than I'd like with the spoken language given that a trailing о or а are pronounced like а because it won't be stressed.
For non-Russian speakers, the two letters get the sound that you expect if stressed, and otherwise sound like а. This rule also applies to borrow words that were transliterated into Cyrillic. So the English computer becomes компью́тер, and the stress goes on ...пью́т... (the English ...put... bit of the word). As a result that first о became an а sound.
My wife's reassurances that Cyrillic is phonetic likewise didn't work out for me. You can't pronounce the written word correctly without knowing where the stress is. You can't write down the spoken word correctly without knowing which unstressed а sounds are written as о.
Of course this is far better than English spelling...
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does russian gender anything like prepositions or demonstrative? anything would help I think.
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I am starting to do this for Anglo-Saxon, instead of "Hūs", learn "þæt Hūs", instead of "Wer" learn "sē Wer", etc.
It didn't work for me in Mandarin though, where I can recall the sounds of words but not the tone.
In Mandarin you're also well advised to learn the measure word for any noun along with it.
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