|
 |
Is Russian Really that Difficult? | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5009 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 9 of 47 31 August 2013 at 11:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
This. And the numbers only apply to one path: signing up for a course at the FSI. I think there should be more than five cathegories as the IV is really crowded and even subdivided by asterisks at some languages. And following some other methods, the table could look different even if you kept the class time as the base for sorting the languages. Russian is surely closer to English in many ways than some other IV languages. There are loanwords from other european languages. And much more resources of all kinds than for Farsi or Vietnamese. And it doesn't have six tones as Vietnamese. That is a blessing by itself in my opinion. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 10 of 47 31 August 2013 at 11:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
On the other hand I think that debating the difficulties doesn't do any good when you
could focus on what is really easy. I always like thinking in terms of what makes things easier to learn. Not harder. Harder in languages is 99/100 times a grammar concept (except when it's pronunciation. Which I guess is a big thing in Russian). I mean. If I hear a language has 34 cases, 20 verb tenses, and 30 tones, that would make me think "let's get the shit outta here" If I then hear that all of them consist of single endings, have no irregularities, and there are 7 phonemes... what's the problem? :) Almost everything is compensated for somewhere else. The net effect is that something will always suck, but hey, if it didn't, then it wouldn't be life. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Qaanaaq Newbie United States Joined 4124 days ago 14 posts - 25 votes Speaks: English* | Message 11 of 47 01 September 2013 at 3:02am | IP Logged | |||||
Very true. That's why I was so surprised to see Russian so high. Personally, I think this also applies with a poor American speaker of Lao vs. a fluent American speaker of Russian (I won't include Vietnamese and Thai, since they have asterisks). But regarding other Category IV languages, I do know that my limited Farsi was met with huge enthusiasm by Tajiks, and that Israelis are always immensely thrilled with foreigners' Hebrew, no matter how bad. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4688 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 12 of 47 01 September 2013 at 2:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
Perhaps the answer is that Amharic, Bengali, Hebrew and Lao aren't as hard to learn as you thought. 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4671 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 13 of 47 01 September 2013 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
There are people who get really upset when we talk about difficulty. For example, I remember reading a really
long, not so interesting post by a 90 day polyglot on this topic that got rave reviews. The upset people usually say one or more of the following. 1) There is no such thing as a “level playing field for a native English speaker”, and so it is worthless to talk about difficulty based on this. 2) Difficulty and time aren’t related, therefore there is no way to measure difficulty, so don’t even try. 3) If you think a language is more difficult than another, this will discourage you, so you should not discuss difficulty. My opinion is that if you believe these things, you shouldn’t read questions about difficulty, because they will just frustrate you. To me it’s both an interesting and useful discussion. I don’t let difficulty affect my decision to learn a language, but it’s nice to have a rough idea of how long it will take to learn one relative to another, for example. Back on topic. I didn’t look at the list, but it’s a good question – is Russian really that hard? Why do Timothy Donner and Steve Kaufman consider it to be the hardest language to learn? I think Tanya hit the nail on the head. It’s not so hard to learn to speak Russian, but it’s very hard to learn to speak it well. By that I mean to converse at normal speeds with correct grammar. For me it’s difficulty lies in it’s grammar. To the uninitiated, the case system can be brutal. Verbs of motion are also very tricky. I’ve studied it for 3 years, and as I feel more and more comfortable with those things, I’m realizing remembering the genders of nouns and remembering both aspects of verbs is going to be the biggest hurdle left. If you guess the wrong gender, then often every ending is wrong. If you use the wrong aspect, you can easily end up saying something completely different than intended. If you forget the verb with the desired aspect, you’re stuck. Don’t get me wrong – you will be understood most of the time, because Russians seem to be used to foreigners butchering their language. But I just hate making so many grammar mistakes - I must sound like an idiot to a Russian. So here I am in Ukraine, taking 4 weeks of Russian classes, 1.5 hrs/day, and trying to get somewhat immersed. I have one week left, and admit that I failed somewhat at the immersion. But I did get a lot of conversation in, and had a great time over all. As I said, I’ve been studying it for 3 years. After some shockingly low estimates of my level in the first week, I’ve stabilized, and my teachers has spent enough time with me to accurately estimate my level. She says I’m low B1 in conversation, and low B2 in comprehension. She’s amazed at the discrepancy; evidently they don’t see big differences in people who study there full time. I’m actually quite please at this level, considering I’m maintaining 4 other languages, and my time is severely restricted by work. But my point is that I have never struggled this much with conversation after 3 years. I trip over my own tongue a lot because I’m trying to remember the correct grammar. Naturally, I’m much smoother on skype than in front of my teacher, but it’s still noteworthy. For this reason, I find Russian to be vey difficult. I’m just glad it doesn’t use Chinese characters. 12 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Maralol Nonaglot Newbie France Joined 5018 days ago 35 posts - 75 votes Speaks: Spanish, French*, English, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Portuguese, Catalan Studies: Polish, Danish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 14 of 47 02 September 2013 at 12:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
I disagree. Learning to speak Mandarin is quite straightforward it's just really time- consuming. Most of the people who say that Mandarin is really hard have never studied it, it really epitomizes the saying "A lie repeated 1000 times becomes a truth". The whole vocabulary is foreign, how do you learn it? You repeat it over and over again. Hanzis are nothing like alphabets, how do you learn them? You can write 10-15 times 5 characters a day by the end of a year you'd have learned a lot. Is there something difficult about it? I believe it just takes times. Granted, particles can be tricky and other things as well, but generally you don't need to worry about the grammar. Cases in Russian are really a pain in the ass if you are a lazy person. Some people need a lot of time before they dare to speak because they're afraid that their bad declension skills will become a bad habit they could hardly get rid of eventually. That's why in my experience Chinese was way easier than Russian. Edited by Maralol on 02 September 2013 at 1:05pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 15 of 47 02 September 2013 at 1:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
Just bases on what I saw friends going through in college, Russian seems to be at the
right place on the FSI scale (not as hard as Arabic, Japanese, or Chinese, but harder than a lot of world languages). What I wonder, though, is: is it as hard to learn passively? I don't foresee any need to speak Russian in my life, but one day I would love to read Tolstoi, Dostoesvsky, and the rest. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7205 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 16 of 47 02 September 2013 at 4:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
And part of the difficulty in the FSI rating is perhaps in the standard to which speakers are held. For Russian, grammatical errors may be less accepted than say getting the subjunctive wrong in Spanish.
I think this is a great question. One may recognize the cases, etc, but not having to produce them would lower the bar considerably, it seems. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
