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'".
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.
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
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.
Mass immigration has always happened over the millennia. Sometimes peoples are replaced, sometimes they end up mostly merged after a few generations.
I don't think it's something that can be prevented or encouraged, it's too many people trying to improve their lives to control it. Especially in a time when we're making most of the tropics uninhabitable with climate change.
I believe part of the endgoal is to create a fairly homogenous global culture. If you listen to radio stations across the world, many play the same rotten manufactured pop songs... Hollywood and Google/Wikipedia complete the Coca Colonisation.
The more peaky the bell curve the more money you can make by targeting your product (or extractive tax policy) at the middle of that curve.
McDonalds, Hollywood, etc, etc. would love nothing more than to have nearly everyone consume one class of products and the bureaucrats and academics who know best would love nothing more than to have simple rules that can apply to nearly everyone.
There is no person with enough agency to have that kind of thing as an end goal. It's effect of a lot of other things, mostly US dominance and globalisation.
You don't need a person. It's just a result of the systems we've set up and how they incentives everyone with any agency to act when they do get to use that agency.
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
> 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.
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.
As an Arabic speaker I enjoyed learning Russian because we share verbless sentences, and you could just put the words together in any order and you get your idea across and you could be spot on too. So 'what is the time?'(Kotoryy chas) is 2 words as in Arabic for asking the time and other questions in conversation. And some Russian words have lovely music to my ears, as with ice cream and of-course, мороженое и, конечно.
On a superficial level that seems like a roughly correct ranking in my experience. On the other hand, I picked up one of the category 3 languages pretty easily. I think some of these are more "weird" to a native English speaker than "hard" per se.
The aspects that make languages difficult for a native English speaker vary quite a bit with the language. I would expect individual experiences with the languages to have high variance as a consequence.
It seems like an extremely coarse classification. Category 3 contains languages with very different degrees of difficulty, while Bulgarian and Russian are both Slavic they are nothing alike in terms of difficulty since Bulgarian is the most analytic of Slavic languages (has the less inflection). That makes it extremely easy to learn compared to Russian.
What is also interesting is how written Russian was heavily influenced by old Bulgarian. In fact, written russian includes a lot of older written bulgarian vocabulary.
This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.
This happens in other languages too - danish and Norwegian are almost the same written, such that most products just combine the two on the packaging. But spoken it can be very difficult to comprehend
I speak Russian and some Bulgarian as third/forth languages, and while I agree that Russian is more difficult, I wouldn't say Bulgarian is "extremely easy" in comparison. It's maybe ~20% easier at best.
As others hsve pointed out, it's a very coarse (and rather arbitrary) categorization.
E.g. both Turkish and Russian are in Category 3, but Turkish is trivial compared to Russian.
Turkish grammar is extremely regular, and follows easily defined rules that fit about two pages of easily digestible tables.
In comparison, Russian is a separate class tought in Russian schools for four years to native Russian speakers. And you still get people who can't properly inflect numerals, for example.
> Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement
The difficulty is that the stress pattern is not fixed and needs to be memorized, and it often changes the inflection of the word. E.g. "домá" means "houses", while "дóма" means "at home". Another tripping point is that the stress placement is almost always different in Russian when compared to English.
I'm volunteering as an English teacher for Ukrainian refugees, and one of my rules of thumb is: "If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable". It works surprisingly well.
>If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable
Most of these are Latin and French loanwords where Russian (same as e.g. German) carried the accentuation over from the source language. English is the odd one out as it insists on putting the primary stress on either of the first two syllables, except in some recent loans (and those still get a secondary stress). With nouns the preference is for the first syllable. Russian surnames get similarly butchered, including notably Nabokov, which could have been adopted unchanged.
I have been generally successful at learning Russian as an adult, but tonal languages are something that I just struggle with on a fundamental level. I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.
Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
Fiendish logographic writing system (Chinese) vs fiendish grammar (Russian). I'm not a fan of Pinyin transliteration aesthetically.
Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.
>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...
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.
English spelling is one of the hardest parts of the language to learn because the spelling represents ~16th century pronunciation. However what we gained is a common orthography for all the different dialects and accents of English. I can barely understand some people from Appalachia or Western England when they speak, but if they write it down it’s no problem.
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
Never thought the difference mastering writing can be so significant. Just like to add what I understand regarding this. It's rather about not making any mistake writing by hand ca. 1-2 DIN A4 pages while someone reads a text (slow enough). I can't remember exactly but making only one (or two) mistake(s) and it is not anymore excellent (just good). Making 4-7 mistakes and it is not good (just sufficient). Making few more and it is bad which means failed. It's a long text with a very short path to fail.
Ukrainian is less difficult to write. There are claims that standardization/reform of Russian made it more artificial (far from natural people language) with overtaking too many words from Latin languages. When I read / listen to Belorussian I think they have even more luck with matching pronunciation/writing than Ukrainian. Which suggests this language is even closer to the common roots old language. (I'm not a linguist.)
Poles will hate me saying this, but I've always really struggled with their orthography, even though I am used to the Roman alphabet. I can see what is going on in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian, maybe even Czech to some extent. Polish is bizarre. Szcz is one letter in Cyrillic. I'm still baffled by l with the line through it.
> 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)
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.
[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].
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).
When I was in Japan all the street signs and train stations had a little transliteration in hiragana of the kanji name. Super useful to be able to read it
"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.
> What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard?
Just to add context to a sibling comment, Japan's first "writing system" was literally just Chinese.
I don't mean Chinese characters, I mean that if you wanted to write something down, you had to communicate in written Chinese. Over time this written Chinese accumulated more and more transformations bringing it in alignment with spoken Japanese until we get what we see today. However, this means that, to a first approximation, modern Japanese is some amalgamation of Old Chinese and Middle Japanese.
Actually, use of Chinese co-existed alongside the whole transformation process, so we actually see this funky mix of Early and Middle Japanese with Wu, Han, and Song Chinese. Character readings varied by region and time period, and so the the reading of a compound kanji term in Japanese mostly reflects the time period when that word was imported. This is why a single kanji ends up having multiple readings. Later, people began backporting individual characters onto native Japanese words, giving yet another reading.
The character 行 is a particularly illustrative example: 行脚 (an-gya), 行動 (kou-dou), 行事 (gyo-ji). The first reading "an" comes from 7th century Chinsese or so, "kou" comes a bit later from the Han dynasty, and "gyo" even later from Song. Then we have the backports: 行く末 (yu-ku-sue), 行く (i-ku), 行う (okona-u). The first "yu" reading is from Middle Japanese, "i" from Modern Japanese, and "okona" from I have no clue when. That's six different readings for 行 alone!
Oh, and then there are "poetic" readings that are specific to usage in people's names: 弘行 (hiro-yuki) etc. Granted, these are often quite evocative of the above readings or that of synonym characters.
The historical introduction process also explains why older readings tend to be more obscure, 1) they had less time to accumulate usage, and 2) they tend to be specific to Buddhist and administrative themes.
Note: The above is just what I've pieced together osmotically over the years, so I'm sure there are errors.
Hanzi as used in Chinese usually have exactly one reading. On the other hand, virtually all kanji in Japanese have several different pronunciations depending on context.
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.
At least some of that is the inevitable consequence of pronunciation changing over time ("rz" being the standout, which used to sound like the Czech soft-r, but lost its r-colouring) and others attempt to show an etymological relationship, which makes spelling a bit more difficult in some ways and easier in others.
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.
That diagram is rather bad at what it tries to do. Those are also historically and phonetically the same:
Λ Л
Δ Д
Κ К
The first Cyrillic alphabet was using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script , curiously created by Saint Cyril, but then people found it was too difficult, so someone in the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire mashed up Glagolitic, Greek and Latin to create the new Cyrillic (probably naming it as a sorry to Cyril for butchering his nice unique alphabet).
The diagram says that (Cyrillic ∩ Greek) - (Cyrillic ∩ Latin) is 3 letters, П Ф Г but as the sibling comment says, Λ/Л, Δ/Д and Κ/К are similar enough. That only leaves you with Θ/theta (th as in thin), Σ/sigma (s as in soft), Ξ/xi (x as in fox), Ψ/psi (ps as in lapse), and Ω/omega (o as in ore.) A lot of those are close enough that you can sort of guess, if you know the English names for the letters!
Many Cyrillic letters are Latin-looking, but actually have direct Greek analogues due to the history of the writing system. If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound. If you do, it's a natural guess.
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.
I started learning them for fun and didn't find it to be very difficult. I agree that a weekend might be a bit fast, I'd probably say a week to a month is enough time.
To practice I like going on r/EnglishCyrillic and trying to read some of the posts
Is that a joke?
I’m eloquent in 3 languages and I don’t even consider myself to be particularly good at languages.
Or maybe you have a really high standard for eloquence.
by eloquence I mean, well, being well-spoken. I only speak two languages, and I feel that my ability to express myself in my native Russian degrades severely after periods of time away from home - for example, I often forget words, or fail to come up with a well-put way to describe a complex thing. but even when I'm home, I'm still consuming >= 95% of information and entertainment in English, and only my interactions with friends and family are conducted in Russian, so the opportunities for me to improve my Russian are very limited. the last time I've read a book in Russian was over a decade ago.
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").
No idea about Georgian but that's not unusual - for example English didn't have color for orange for a long time. That's why you say "red hair" even though the color is orange.
While English did not have a dedicated word for "orange" there are many examples in older English texts where there was written "red-yellow" or "yellow-red" in the places where modern English would use "orange".
So the color was recognized, even if it did not have a special name.
English didn't have the word "orange" until relatively recently (1500s) either. That's despite the word brown (which is the same colour in a different context) going back millenia.
Names change as language changes. It's hard to imagine Georgian didn't have a word for brown, but that would've been a completely different word that got displaced over time, like yellow-red was displaced by orange.
Given that this pattern appears in several Georgian colors (the color purple is also just "lilac-color": იასამნისფერი / იასამნის ფერი), I'm sure they just used a different brown thing before coffee was common.
There have been many authors who have claimed about various old languages that they lacked words for some colors, and "brown" is one of the most frequent colors about which such claims have been made.
I believe that most such claims, if not all, were wrong. The problem is that when reading an ancient text in which colors are mentioned it is very difficult to guess which is the color that is meant by some word and it frequently is difficult to even be sure that the word refers to a color and not to some other kind of property of an object.
There are very rare cases when the text says something like "this object is X like blood", so you can infer that X = "red", or "this object is Y like the sky", so you can infer that Y = "blue".
Brown is a color for which it is even rarer to find suitable comparisons in a text, from which the color can be inferred, than for colors like red, green or blue, which are typically compared to blood, grass and sky.
So when various authors have claimed that there was no word for "brown" in some old language, the truth was that they just were unable to find any word whose meaning could be determined with certainty to be "brown", in the preserved texts, even if there were plenty of words that most likely meant "brown".
Moreover, in nature there are many shades of brown, lighter or darker, more reddish or more yellowish, which is why in many languages there are multiple words for brown, which are derived from various things that have that particular shade of brown, e.g. words that mean coffee-brown, chestnut-brown, dry-earth brown, brown like the fur of certain animals, etc. Such words that identify a particular shade with reference to a familiar object have been renewed from time to time, in function of which objects have become more familiar or less familiar. After coffee became a very popular beverage, in many languages it has replaced whatever reference object was previously used for a dark brown.
As an example, many have claimed that Ancient Greek had no word for "brown". However, when reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, i.e. the oldest Greek texts except for the Mycenaean tablets, there already are a lot of places where there is no doubt that "brown" was meant by the word "aithono-". This is an adjective derived from the verb "to burn", and most dictionaries say that it means "burning". However, in the actual texts there are plenty of places where it does not mean "burning", but it means "burnt", more precisely "having the color of burnt wood", i.e. brown. This is not surprising. Another word used in the same way is "anthrakos", which can be used either for an object red like a burning ember (e.g. for red garnets or rubies) or for an object black like an extinguished ember (e.g. for charcoal or coal).
The Russian word for "brown" is literally "cinnamon-colored" ("коричневый"). And the Chinese language just uses the literal "coffee-colored" phrase (咖啡色).
"Брюки цвета кофе" ("pants of coffee color") is natural, "коричневые брюки" ("brown pants") is natural, but "кофейные брюки" is not. In fact the latter would likely be interpreted as "coffee pants" or "pants made out of coffee."
I admit that. I also realize that tguvot is actually arguing in my favor, as he said that coffee color is distinct from brown, and therefore the inference is that they aren't synonymous. I would summarize that they are conceptually different, as "brown" is a real color, whereas "coffee color" is a marketing color.
"кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
> "кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
If the context is clothes, people would likely be able to guess, sure. But consider another example "кофейная чашка" ("a coffee mug"). In this context, it would most certainly be interpreted as "a mug for coffee" and not as "a coffee-coloured mug." In other words, you must include the word "цвет" ("color") for it to be correct and unambiguous.
> it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
I don't think this is unique to Russian. I'm sure you can do the same in English and Japanese at least.
It’s fine as an occasional stylistic choice, but using it repeatedly as a regular synonym for brown is a pragmatic and collocational error. The meaning is clear, but the wording is marked, and overuse makes the speech sound odd in everyday contexts.
Uh huh. Don't forget "aliceblue" and "rebeccapurple." But seriously, those are just arbitrary marketing aliases, aren't they. I remember e-shopping for sneakers, and every brand's "off-white" was a different color.
For instance, Japanese and Vietnamese do not differentiate between blue and green and require context specific clarification, e.g «traffic light blue-green».
Celtic languages, and I believe Mayan, had a similar thing going on with blue and green. A lot of languages never distinguished orange from yellow really either.
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.
> On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language.
This is one of the reasons why Latin is tought. You learn transferring a gramatically hard language into your own, having to learn the ins and out of your own language's grammar. No grammatically complex situation in your own language can fluster you afterwards.
I learned (an academic expression of) German grammar at university, in computational linguistics. There was a class „Syntax I“, and it had us break down phrases and sentences in a graphs, a (constituent) C structure and a (functional) F structure.
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.
Interesting. We had a lot of grammar parsing of Russian since the 2nd grade of school. Especially we analyzed parts of speech and constituents. For the latter, we'd underline words in sentences in different ways.
It's so widespread that today if you want to play word guessing with gestures, and you have several words, you just imitate that underline style, and everybody understands it. (Just remembered, we also did a lot of word analysis, marking up prefix, root, suffixes and ending, and everyone knows this markup too.)
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.
>Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object.
This is only true in third person singular. For example, in first person singular: 'моя чашка' (my cup, 'cup' is feminine) vs. 'мой ключ' (my key, 'key' is masculine). Third person plural: 'ихнее дело' (their business, neuter) vs. 'ихняя забота' (their concern, feminine) although most educated Russian speakers would object to these pronouns as a bit too colloquial (although not as colloquial as 'евойная'). Same in second person singular: 'твой друг' (your friend, masculine) vs. 'твоя подруга' (your friend, feminine). In all of the examples above, the gender of the speaker/owner cannot even be determined (grammatically speaking).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I couldn't find a source for how many Hebrew words have each origin, so I sampled 25 random words from the Hebrew Wiktionary and counted their sources. Where there wasn't a clear source (or a clear "way" to a source) or the word itself was spelled in English for some reason I just randomized another word.
The number one source was unsurprisingly Hebrew with 11 words. This includes biblical sources as well as medieval and more modern sources, typically Jewish scholars writing in Hebrew in exile.
The second most common source was Greek with 5 words and relatedly Latin had 1 word. A lot of them you'd probably recognize in many languages e.g. whatever way you say Democracy probably has the same origin (sounds like Demokratia in Hebrew).
The third most common source was ancient Hebrew-adjacent languages, 2 for Aramaic, 1 for Ugaritic, 1 for Akkadian. You could include the 2 for Arabic here as well.
The fourth would be modern loanwords with 1 for English and 1 for Italian ("Pizzeria").
It is also worth noting that some words with a foreign origin still have a Hebrew counterpart. For example דיאלוג==Dialog==Dialogue is not from Hebrew, but you can say דו-שיח instead.
Additionally, Wiktionary does slightly bias towards the words you'd want to look up and is not as comprehensive as a real dictionary, so not a perfect sampling.
My personal guess is that this isn't too far off of reality. A more comprehensive sampling will probably diversify the various European languages rather than just being Greek (i.e. probably a bit more German via Yiddish, a bit of French etc.) and maybe make Aramaic a bit more prominent, but overall it doesn't feel insanely off base.
No, that isn't true. Hebrew has taken a lot of Arabic words but not the majority. It has also taken a lot from Yiddish (as you'd expect) and certain modern words which are common across Europe.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But by your own reasoning, you're also saying it's reasonable to learn Russian as a way to better understand Russia because your country happens to be opposed to them.
If you accept that this relatively obscure reason is a valid motivation (which I agree it can be) then you must also accept that there are all sorts of other motivations that are equally valid including "so I can speak to emigrants" or even just "because I find it fun".
It's not an obscure reason, many people engage with the enemy professionally. That's one of the most frequent motives to learn a language probably. Either you want to immigrate to a country or you want to conduct business with it or it's your enemy and you need to undersrand it. First two options are out for the Western world at the moment
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".
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.
Their propaganda was saying a lot of different things, including both mentioned above.
Ukrainian is magical language that is both the same as russian (so not real language of its own) and difficult to learn, so russian not being an official language is literally genocide.
A certain part of speakers - yes. A large part, no doubt, otherwise there'd be no one to fight this war.
But what about the other part?
The part that is guilty fell for the same trick that you're falling for - they perceived the whole nation as one single entity that, as they were told by the propaganda, was all Nazis, from newborns to the elderly.
We both know that was bullshit, but you keep painting all Russians in the same way the zombified part of Russians has been painting Ukrainians.
"The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government."
So are you implying that I should start treating every foreigner as an enemy just because we as a humanity didn't, and maybe will never come up with a political system that will bring peace on Earth once and for all?
Allright then, I'll still regard most of you at least as non-enemies, if you so object being friends with me;
but you are free to continue considering me your enemy if your current political fartwinds turn your wind vane that way.
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.
> 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.
You're really deep into painting everyone with the same brush, aren't you?
Define russian federation first. Am I it? Is it land? Is it government? Is it those zombie mercenaries who execute criminal orders? Is it those who got jailed after protests against war? Is it those who got conscripted? Those who fled the country to avoid that? Those who struggle to meet ends? Those cruising aboard 150 meter yachts?
This kind of historical blindness and hysterical hypocrisy has never ended well.
Is HN becoming a place where we should expect people to lie to us and promote trivially disprovably rationales in order to foment cultural and racial hatreds based on current political conveniences?
"Never believe they are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. By giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."
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'".
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.
It’s one of the reasons why most Russian (Eastern European) speakers pick up German easier than English speakers or some other languages.
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
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.
I learned it on my own... always imagined it as "speaking without letting the heat out"
In contrast, see “Why Russians never smile”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27317859
Yeah, that's the point - you shouldn't really smile, it's about relaxing your mouth
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.
This is why forced mass immigration will never work and will only lead to disaster.
Mass immigration has always happened over the millennia. Sometimes peoples are replaced, sometimes they end up mostly merged after a few generations.
I don't think it's something that can be prevented or encouraged, it's too many people trying to improve their lives to control it. Especially in a time when we're making most of the tropics uninhabitable with climate change.
I believe part of the endgoal is to create a fairly homogenous global culture. If you listen to radio stations across the world, many play the same rotten manufactured pop songs... Hollywood and Google/Wikipedia complete the Coca Colonisation.
The more peaky the bell curve the more money you can make by targeting your product (or extractive tax policy) at the middle of that curve.
McDonalds, Hollywood, etc, etc. would love nothing more than to have nearly everyone consume one class of products and the bureaucrats and academics who know best would love nothing more than to have simple rules that can apply to nearly everyone.
There is no person with enough agency to have that kind of thing as an end goal. It's effect of a lot of other things, mostly US dominance and globalisation.
You don't need a person. It's just a result of the systems we've set up and how they incentives everyone with any agency to act when they do get to use that agency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-segregation
Are we trying to make psychopaths? That’s sounds very unsettling for conversation.
In the context of a foreigner clumsily trying to speak your language, the smile might be interpreted differently.
Americans are regularly ribbed for smiling way too much during conversations with strangers. Apparently we can be rather unsettling lol
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
> 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.
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.
As an Arabic speaker I enjoyed learning Russian because we share verbless sentences, and you could just put the words together in any order and you get your idea across and you could be spot on too. So 'what is the time?'(Kotoryy chas) is 2 words as in Arabic for asking the time and other questions in conversation. And some Russian words have lovely music to my ears, as with ice cream and of-course, мороженое и, конечно.
You may find this interesting: https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages
On a superficial level that seems like a roughly correct ranking in my experience. On the other hand, I picked up one of the category 3 languages pretty easily. I think some of these are more "weird" to a native English speaker than "hard" per se.
The aspects that make languages difficult for a native English speaker vary quite a bit with the language. I would expect individual experiences with the languages to have high variance as a consequence.
It seems like an extremely coarse classification. Category 3 contains languages with very different degrees of difficulty, while Bulgarian and Russian are both Slavic they are nothing alike in terms of difficulty since Bulgarian is the most analytic of Slavic languages (has the less inflection). That makes it extremely easy to learn compared to Russian.
What is also interesting is how written Russian was heavily influenced by old Bulgarian. In fact, written russian includes a lot of older written bulgarian vocabulary.
This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.
This happens in other languages too - danish and Norwegian are almost the same written, such that most products just combine the two on the packaging. But spoken it can be very difficult to comprehend
I speak Russian and some Bulgarian as third/forth languages, and while I agree that Russian is more difficult, I wouldn't say Bulgarian is "extremely easy" in comparison. It's maybe ~20% easier at best.
As others hsve pointed out, it's a very coarse (and rather arbitrary) categorization.
E.g. both Turkish and Russian are in Category 3, but Turkish is trivial compared to Russian.
Turkish grammar is extremely regular, and follows easily defined rules that fit about two pages of easily digestible tables.
In comparison, Russian is a separate class tought in Russian schools for four years to native Russian speakers. And you still get people who can't properly inflect numerals, for example.
Isn't English also a separate class taught in English schools to native English speakers?
Not for four years, for all eleven years...
Difficulty scale looks about right.
> Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement
The difficulty is that the stress pattern is not fixed and needs to be memorized, and it often changes the inflection of the word. E.g. "домá" means "houses", while "дóма" means "at home". Another tripping point is that the stress placement is almost always different in Russian when compared to English.
I'm volunteering as an English teacher for Ukrainian refugees, and one of my rules of thumb is: "If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable". It works surprisingly well.
Stress pattern in russian is not just different from English, it's also different from Ukrainian half the time.
>If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable
Most of these are Latin and French loanwords where Russian (same as e.g. German) carried the accentuation over from the source language. English is the odd one out as it insists on putting the primary stress on either of the first two syllables, except in some recent loans (and those still get a secondary stress). With nouns the preference is for the first syllable. Russian surnames get similarly butchered, including notably Nabokov, which could have been adopted unchanged.
> except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock).
Only because we're in a language thread: i.e. is "that is" (id est) e.g. is "example given" (exempli gratia)
I find Mandarin Chinese a lot easier than Russian.
I have been generally successful at learning Russian as an adult, but tonal languages are something that I just struggle with on a fundamental level. I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.
Right but those Mandarin tones are pretty easy for an native english speaker to learn to say, they roll off the mouth easily.
Likewise, learning to speak the tone is just another grammar dimension, memorization.
Listening for tone is the hard part, but once you know enough grammar AND know the context of the sentence, it falls into place.
YMMV, also Cantonese is more difficult here (IMO).
I find Cantonese a lot easier on the ear. Unfortunately, nearly all the Cantonese I know is rude.
Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
So Vietnamese is the “Danish” of East Asia it seems
Or the Golang of East Asia.
Personally I find Vietnamese and Chinese to be about the same difficulty overall, just not on the same areas.
Vietnamese is massively harder to pronounce with way less room for mistakes whereas reading is easier.
Fiendish logographic writing system (Chinese) vs fiendish grammar (Russian). I'm not a fan of Pinyin transliteration aesthetically.
Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.
>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...
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.
English spelling is one of the hardest parts of the language to learn because the spelling represents ~16th century pronunciation. However what we gained is a common orthography for all the different dialects and accents of English. I can barely understand some people from Appalachia or Western England when they speak, but if they write it down it’s no problem.
The verbs in Russian can be complex, especially the verbs of motion and prepositions.
The state of English spelling has deteriorated a lot since the simpler minded started going online.
By the way, I far prefer Russian orthography to Polish which has me baffled a lot of the time.
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
> Writing Russuan is not that difficult
Never thought the difference mastering writing can be so significant. Just like to add what I understand regarding this. It's rather about not making any mistake writing by hand ca. 1-2 DIN A4 pages while someone reads a text (slow enough). I can't remember exactly but making only one (or two) mistake(s) and it is not anymore excellent (just good). Making 4-7 mistakes and it is not good (just sufficient). Making few more and it is bad which means failed. It's a long text with a very short path to fail.
Ukrainian is less difficult to write. There are claims that standardization/reform of Russian made it more artificial (far from natural people language) with overtaking too many words from Latin languages. When I read / listen to Belorussian I think they have even more luck with matching pronunciation/writing than Ukrainian. Which suggests this language is even closer to the common roots old language. (I'm not a linguist.)
Poles will hate me saying this, but I've always really struggled with their orthography, even though I am used to the Roman alphabet. I can see what is going on in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian, maybe even Czech to some extent. Polish is bizarre. Szcz is one letter in Cyrillic. I'm still baffled by l with the line through it.
Define properly. As a native speaker who immigrated to the US decades ago, I don’t find writing proper Russian grammar that difficult.
> 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.
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.
[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
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
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.
> Same thing with learning Japanese
Korean, too.
Hangeul is at least an alphabet, in spite of appearances, and has hints as to the pronunciation built into the glyph shapes.
Except there are many, many more symbols?
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).
When I was in Japan all the street signs and train stations had a little transliteration in hiragana of the kanji name. Super useful to be able to read it
"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.
What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard? Japanese is partially kanji, while Mandarin is 100% HanZi (kanji).
But yes, grammar-wise Mandarin is definitely easier than both Japanese and Korean.
> What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard?
Just to add context to a sibling comment, Japan's first "writing system" was literally just Chinese.
I don't mean Chinese characters, I mean that if you wanted to write something down, you had to communicate in written Chinese. Over time this written Chinese accumulated more and more transformations bringing it in alignment with spoken Japanese until we get what we see today. However, this means that, to a first approximation, modern Japanese is some amalgamation of Old Chinese and Middle Japanese.
Actually, use of Chinese co-existed alongside the whole transformation process, so we actually see this funky mix of Early and Middle Japanese with Wu, Han, and Song Chinese. Character readings varied by region and time period, and so the the reading of a compound kanji term in Japanese mostly reflects the time period when that word was imported. This is why a single kanji ends up having multiple readings. Later, people began backporting individual characters onto native Japanese words, giving yet another reading.
The character 行 is a particularly illustrative example: 行脚 (an-gya), 行動 (kou-dou), 行事 (gyo-ji). The first reading "an" comes from 7th century Chinsese or so, "kou" comes a bit later from the Han dynasty, and "gyo" even later from Song. Then we have the backports: 行く末 (yu-ku-sue), 行く (i-ku), 行う (okona-u). The first "yu" reading is from Middle Japanese, "i" from Modern Japanese, and "okona" from I have no clue when. That's six different readings for 行 alone!
Oh, and then there are "poetic" readings that are specific to usage in people's names: 弘行 (hiro-yuki) etc. Granted, these are often quite evocative of the above readings or that of synonym characters.
The historical introduction process also explains why older readings tend to be more obscure, 1) they had less time to accumulate usage, and 2) they tend to be specific to Buddhist and administrative themes.
Note: The above is just what I've pieced together osmotically over the years, so I'm sure there are errors.
Hanzi as used in Chinese usually have exactly one reading. On the other hand, virtually all kanji in Japanese have several different pronunciations depending on context.
Yes, a cursory glance at written Polish should be enough for anyone to understand why Latin alphabet is a poor match for Slavic languages.
Oh yes, Polish, the difficulty is shown in this 1:19 slice from a movie: "Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz " -- https://youtu.be/AfKZclMWS1U
Also compare the Polish 'chrząszcz' with its Cyrillic equivalent 'хрущ' (but take into account a difference in pronunciation).
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.
At least some of that is the inevitable consequence of pronunciation changing over time ("rz" being the standout, which used to sound like the Czech soft-r, but lost its r-colouring) and others attempt to show an etymological relationship, which makes spelling a bit more difficult in some ways and easier in others.
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 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...
That diagram is rather bad at what it tries to do. Those are also historically and phonetically the same: Λ Л Δ Д Κ К The first Cyrillic alphabet was using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script , curiously created by Saint Cyril, but then people found it was too difficult, so someone in the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire mashed up Glagolitic, Greek and Latin to create the new Cyrillic (probably naming it as a sorry to Cyril for butchering his nice unique alphabet).
The diagram says that (Cyrillic ∩ Greek) - (Cyrillic ∩ Latin) is 3 letters, П Ф Г but as the sibling comment says, Λ/Л, Δ/Д and Κ/К are similar enough. That only leaves you with Θ/theta (th as in thin), Σ/sigma (s as in soft), Ξ/xi (x as in fox), Ψ/psi (ps as in lapse), and Ω/omega (o as in ore.) A lot of those are close enough that you can sort of guess, if you know the English names for the letters!
Many Cyrillic letters are Latin-looking, but actually have direct Greek analogues due to the history of the writing system. If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound. If you do, it's a natural guess.
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).
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
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.
I started learning them for fun and didn't find it to be very difficult. I agree that a weekend might be a bit fast, I'd probably say a week to a month is enough time.
To practice I like going on r/EnglishCyrillic and trying to read some of the posts
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.
Is that a joke? I’m eloquent in 3 languages and I don’t even consider myself to be particularly good at languages. Or maybe you have a really high standard for eloquence.
by eloquence I mean, well, being well-spoken. I only speak two languages, and I feel that my ability to express myself in my native Russian degrades severely after periods of time away from home - for example, I often forget words, or fail to come up with a well-put way to describe a complex thing. but even when I'm home, I'm still consuming >= 95% of information and entertainment in English, and only my interactions with friends and family are conducted in Russian, so the opportunities for me to improve my Russian are very limited. the last time I've read a book in Russian was over a decade ago.
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").
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?!
Take for example Russian коричневый (brown).
It stems from корица (cinnamon), which was first introduced to Russia in 16th century, and literally means "the color of cinnamon".
But before that they used бурый, from turkic bor/bur, meaning bay, as in horse color.
I guess there must be an older synonym for "color of coffee" in Georgian too.
No idea about Georgian but that's not unusual - for example English didn't have color for orange for a long time. That's why you say "red hair" even though the color is orange.
While English did not have a dedicated word for "orange" there are many examples in older English texts where there was written "red-yellow" or "yellow-red" in the places where modern English would use "orange".
So the color was recognized, even if it did not have a special name.
English didn't have the word "orange" until relatively recently (1500s) either. That's despite the word brown (which is the same colour in a different context) going back millenia.
Names change as language changes. It's hard to imagine Georgian didn't have a word for brown, but that would've been a completely different word that got displaced over time, like yellow-red was displaced by orange.
Given that this pattern appears in several Georgian colors (the color purple is also just "lilac-color": იასამნისფერი / იასამნის ფერი), I'm sure they just used a different brown thing before coffee was common.
There have been many authors who have claimed about various old languages that they lacked words for some colors, and "brown" is one of the most frequent colors about which such claims have been made.
I believe that most such claims, if not all, were wrong. The problem is that when reading an ancient text in which colors are mentioned it is very difficult to guess which is the color that is meant by some word and it frequently is difficult to even be sure that the word refers to a color and not to some other kind of property of an object.
There are very rare cases when the text says something like "this object is X like blood", so you can infer that X = "red", or "this object is Y like the sky", so you can infer that Y = "blue".
Brown is a color for which it is even rarer to find suitable comparisons in a text, from which the color can be inferred, than for colors like red, green or blue, which are typically compared to blood, grass and sky.
So when various authors have claimed that there was no word for "brown" in some old language, the truth was that they just were unable to find any word whose meaning could be determined with certainty to be "brown", in the preserved texts, even if there were plenty of words that most likely meant "brown".
Moreover, in nature there are many shades of brown, lighter or darker, more reddish or more yellowish, which is why in many languages there are multiple words for brown, which are derived from various things that have that particular shade of brown, e.g. words that mean coffee-brown, chestnut-brown, dry-earth brown, brown like the fur of certain animals, etc. Such words that identify a particular shade with reference to a familiar object have been renewed from time to time, in function of which objects have become more familiar or less familiar. After coffee became a very popular beverage, in many languages it has replaced whatever reference object was previously used for a dark brown.
As an example, many have claimed that Ancient Greek had no word for "brown". However, when reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, i.e. the oldest Greek texts except for the Mycenaean tablets, there already are a lot of places where there is no doubt that "brown" was meant by the word "aithono-". This is an adjective derived from the verb "to burn", and most dictionaries say that it means "burning". However, in the actual texts there are plenty of places where it does not mean "burning", but it means "burnt", more precisely "having the color of burnt wood", i.e. brown. This is not surprising. Another word used in the same way is "anthrakos", which can be used either for an object red like a burning ember (e.g. for red garnets or rubies) or for an object black like an extinguished ember (e.g. for charcoal or coal).
I believe polish is similar. They have “sky color” which is pretty cool!
> "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).
Actually brown in russian it's "bark-colored". bark = кора. Корица (cinnamon) is diminutive
You can also use "кофейный" (coffee-coloured) as synonym for "brown".
That wouldn't be natural though. You would never describe, say, pants, as "coffee-coloured" in Russian.
Брюки цвета кофе is natural in Russian. Pretentious, but still natural.
"Брюки цвета кофе" ("pants of coffee color") is natural, "коричневые брюки" ("brown pants") is natural, but "кофейные брюки" is not. In fact the latter would likely be interpreted as "coffee pants" or "pants made out of coffee."
"кофейного цвета брюки" is acceptable too.
I admit that. I also realize that tguvot is actually arguing in my favor, as he said that coffee color is distinct from brown, and therefore the inference is that they aren't synonymous. I would summarize that they are conceptually different, as "brown" is a real color, whereas "coffee color" is a marketing color.
"кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
> "кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
If the context is clothes, people would likely be able to guess, sure. But consider another example "кофейная чашка" ("a coffee mug"). In this context, it would most certainly be interpreted as "a mug for coffee" and not as "a coffee-coloured mug." In other words, you must include the word "цвет" ("color") for it to be correct and unambiguous.
> it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
I don't think this is unique to Russian. I'm sure you can do the same in English and Japanese at least.
"кофейная чашка" meaning will be resolved according to context where it's used
Don't know japanese, but english been main language that i consume in past 25 years or so. i never saw it abused to same degree as russian gets abused
It’s fine as an occasional stylistic choice, but using it repeatedly as a regular synonym for brown is a pragmatic and collocational error. The meaning is clear, but the wording is marked, and overuse makes the speech sound odd in everyday contexts.
coffee color won't be synonym for brown. it will be distinct color, just like strawberry, raspberry, straw, ruby, etc colors.
It would make your Russian more posh, eccentric or sophisticated, depending on the context, but not necessary unnatural.
actually you will. "coffee color" it's distinct from brown. And then there is also "coffee with milk" color.
Won't be surprised if there is "pumpkin latte" color nowdays.
Uh huh. Don't forget "aliceblue" and "rebeccapurple." But seriously, those are just arbitrary marketing aliases, aren't they. I remember e-shopping for sneakers, and every brand's "off-white" was a different color.
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».
Japanese has a word for green now 緑 (midori). Traffic lights use the word for blue for historical reasons
Celtic languages, and I believe Mayan, had a similar thing going on with blue and green. A lot of languages never distinguished orange from yellow really either.
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.
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.
> On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language.
This is one of the reasons why Latin is tought. You learn transferring a gramatically hard language into your own, having to learn the ins and out of your own language's grammar. No grammatically complex situation in your own language can fluster you afterwards.
I learned (an academic expression of) German grammar at university, in computational linguistics. There was a class „Syntax I“, and it had us break down phrases and sentences in a graphs, a (constituent) C structure and a (functional) F structure.
Best class I ever had!
I too enjoy mentally putting parentheses around parts of speech.
You'd probably like the way Thomas Mann uses language then (not parentheses but subordinate clauses, or nebensatz).
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.
Interesting. We had a lot of grammar parsing of Russian since the 2nd grade of school. Especially we analyzed parts of speech and constituents. For the latter, we'd underline words in sentences in different ways.
It's so widespread that today if you want to play word guessing with gestures, and you have several words, you just imitate that underline style, and everybody understands it. (Just remembered, we also did a lot of word analysis, marking up prefix, root, suffixes and ending, and everyone knows this markup too.)
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.
>Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object.
This is only true in third person singular. For example, in first person singular: 'моя чашка' (my cup, 'cup' is feminine) vs. 'мой ключ' (my key, 'key' is masculine). Third person plural: 'ихнее дело' (their business, neuter) vs. 'ихняя забота' (their concern, feminine) although most educated Russian speakers would object to these pronouns as a bit too colloquial (although not as colloquial as 'евойная'). Same in second person singular: 'твой друг' (your friend, masculine) vs. 'твоя подруга' (your friend, feminine). In all of the examples above, the gender of the speaker/owner cannot even be determined (grammatically speaking).
Definiteness has no obvious equivalent in Russian.
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"
No need to throw daggers at Wayne Rooney just like that!
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.
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.
Don't we all?
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.
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.
>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.
I couldn't find a source for how many Hebrew words have each origin, so I sampled 25 random words from the Hebrew Wiktionary and counted their sources. Where there wasn't a clear source (or a clear "way" to a source) or the word itself was spelled in English for some reason I just randomized another word.
The number one source was unsurprisingly Hebrew with 11 words. This includes biblical sources as well as medieval and more modern sources, typically Jewish scholars writing in Hebrew in exile.
The second most common source was Greek with 5 words and relatedly Latin had 1 word. A lot of them you'd probably recognize in many languages e.g. whatever way you say Democracy probably has the same origin (sounds like Demokratia in Hebrew).
The third most common source was ancient Hebrew-adjacent languages, 2 for Aramaic, 1 for Ugaritic, 1 for Akkadian. You could include the 2 for Arabic here as well.
The fourth would be modern loanwords with 1 for English and 1 for Italian ("Pizzeria").
It is also worth noting that some words with a foreign origin still have a Hebrew counterpart. For example דיאלוג==Dialog==Dialogue is not from Hebrew, but you can say דו-שיח instead.
Additionally, Wiktionary does slightly bias towards the words you'd want to look up and is not as comprehensive as a real dictionary, so not a perfect sampling.
My personal guess is that this isn't too far off of reality. A more comprehensive sampling will probably diversify the various European languages rather than just being Greek (i.e. probably a bit more German via Yiddish, a bit of French etc.) and maybe make Aramaic a bit more prominent, but overall it doesn't feel insanely off base.
No, that isn't true. Hebrew has taken a lot of Arabic words but not the majority. It has also taken a lot from Yiddish (as you'd expect) and certain modern words which are common across Europe.
No idea. But vocabulary and grammar are mostly orthogonal.
>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.
> 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.
I have just watched a video about Hebrew spelling which suggests it is a lot more complicated than people realise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_h541RkCTI
Because Hebrew has been revived artificially.
it doesn't really diminishes my point
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 find Russian depending a lot on the speaker. Some Russians can speak it beautifully, some not so much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But by your own reasoning, you're also saying it's reasonable to learn Russian as a way to better understand Russia because your country happens to be opposed to them.
If you accept that this relatively obscure reason is a valid motivation (which I agree it can be) then you must also accept that there are all sorts of other motivations that are equally valid including "so I can speak to emigrants" or even just "because I find it fun".
It's not an obscure reason, many people engage with the enemy professionally. That's one of the most frequent motives to learn a language probably. Either you want to immigrate to a country or you want to conduct business with it or it's your enemy and you need to undersrand it. First two options are out for the Western world at the moment
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".
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".
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.
> hundreds of millions of people who are against the war
Lie #1. If they were against the war there would be no war.
> That's not very bright of you, to put it mildly.
Lie #2. He tells facts.
> "just listen how silly Ukrainian sub-language sounds, lol".
Lie #3. This is not what Russian propaganda said. They said Ukraine will not allow to speak Russian and will punish for speaking it.
> Which is an argument every sane human being finds disgusting and stupid beyond all comprehension, of course.
The language itself is not guilty, of course. It's the speakers.
Their propaganda was saying a lot of different things, including both mentioned above.
Ukrainian is magical language that is both the same as russian (so not real language of its own) and difficult to learn, so russian not being an official language is literally genocide.
You should learn what the word "literally" means, apart from the truth about Ukrainian language.
A certain part of speakers - yes. A large part, no doubt, otherwise there'd be no one to fight this war.
But what about the other part?
The part that is guilty fell for the same trick that you're falling for - they perceived the whole nation as one single entity that, as they were told by the propaganda, was all Nazis, from newborns to the elderly.
We both know that was bullshit, but you keep painting all Russians in the same way the zombified part of Russians has been painting Ukrainians.
> 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.
Had to look that up:
"The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government."
So are you implying that I should start treating every foreigner as an enemy just because we as a humanity didn't, and maybe will never come up with a political system that will bring peace on Earth once and for all?
Allright then, I'll still regard most of you at least as non-enemies, if you so object being friends with me;
but you are free to continue considering me your enemy if your current political fartwinds turn your wind vane that way.
Every foreigner? Hell no. There's more to the world than Europe, you know. We're not in active conflict with Laos or Chile.
The nations who quite officially see me as not really human, with widespread popular support? As much as I want it to be different, yes.
v kremle s taboj nisoglasny
А в белом доме или в парламенте евросоюза с тобой согласны по всем вопросам?
Ваня, іді дамой, тут водкі нєт
All that energy, wasted away from the front lines.
Dude, speaking in stereotypes doesn't do you any favor.
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.
> Learning the language of a nation
A nation doesn't own the language.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
trolling is really an art ^^^^
the references were about russian federation waging an imperialistic type of a war to conquer land when they have the most land already
You're really deep into painting everyone with the same brush, aren't you?
Define russian federation first. Am I it? Is it land? Is it government? Is it those zombie mercenaries who execute criminal orders? Is it those who got jailed after protests against war? Is it those who got conscripted? Those who fled the country to avoid that? Those who struggle to meet ends? Those cruising aboard 150 meter yachts?
Who is this elusive mrs. russian federation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Invasions_by_Great_Br...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
This kind of historical blindness and hysterical hypocrisy has never ended well.
Is HN becoming a place where we should expect people to lie to us and promote trivially disprovably rationales in order to foment cultural and racial hatreds based on current political conveniences?
"Never believe they are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. By giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."