|
 |
Attitude toward Russian in Europe | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4763 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes  Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 33 of 128 01 December 2011 at 11:25am | IP Logged | |||||
|
Goddamnit, tanya_b and Марк, why are y'all making such a big deal out of this? Newsflash: not everyone thinks Russia is the best country on Earth and not everyone cares about it enough to learn its language. SO. WHAT. To quote a character from the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond: "Is it really that hard to fathom that somewhere, in this vast cosmos, there might exist a single person - a single ENTITY - that thinks ya suck?" If you want to convince more people to learn Russian, that's fine, but shaming them into doing it isn't gonna work.
8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Alexander86 Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom alanguagediary.blogs Joined 4972 days ago 224 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, Catalan Studies: Swedish | Message 34 of 128 01 December 2011 at 12:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
Nice quote! It reminds me of a quote from the simpsons:
"No matter how good you are at something, there's always about a million people better than you." 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Joose Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 4729 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: Russian, German, Polish | Message 35 of 128 05 December 2011 at 3:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
In Finland Russia is mostly used and studied near the eastern border and north, where
most of the Russian tourists visit or pass through. Apart from that there are small Russian minorities in bigger cities, but they tend to drown into masses and are relatively small compared to Finnish population, provoking the unpopularity of the language as "not useful". The alphabets are also a discouraging element for some people. Some of my friends tend think they are like hieroglyphs or Chinese alphabets that take a lifetime to master. The language as a Slavic one is also regarded as hard to master, many Finns already speak quite good English and some Swedish so it would be far easier for them to study German than Russian as the next language. We also have 2 national languages, Finnish and Swedish, meaning that we have to study also Swedish as "the second mother language", which for the most the Finns isn't at all a mother language but a third foreign language in addition to English. This why, in my opinion, it is harder to accommodate other languages, like Russian, into student's curriculum. There are also historical reasons dating from the second world war and Cold War era why some of the Finns and people from the former Soviet block resent studying Russian. Edited by Joose on 05 December 2011 at 3:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5047 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 36 of 128 05 December 2011 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
I argued against the reasons some people gave. Visa to Russia, lack of materials, no opportunities to learn. Edited by Марк on 05 December 2011 at 5:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6430 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 38 of 128 05 December 2011 at 5:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
There's no lack of materials or opportunities to learn. There are political biases, and it's largely perceived as less useful than I consider it to be. And the visa thing, while it's not insurmountable, is a non-trivial obstacle. I can guarantee you that I would have spent several weeks in Russia by now if it weren't for visas. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7147 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 40 of 128 05 December 2011 at 7:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
Indeed. Mapk's rebuttal seems to downplay glibly the negative effect of a relatively strict travel visa régime for people or potential learners who treat intense immersion (i.e. not with diaspora) and using the target language on its "home turf" as indispensable at some point in the learning process.
Even a half-serious member of this forum would quickly be straightened out about not studying Russian because of some (mis)conception that there's insufficient learning material or lack of easily obtainable opportunities to use it with some native speakers. However there's still the matter of immersion on "home turf" (when required or desired). Anyway, I can show to anyone languages which truly have too little learning material or lack any viable immersion opportunities (i.e. there's not even a significant diaspora) to all but a handful of lucky souls who end up in remote corners of the world. Russian is nowhere near such positions nor has anyone seriously contended as much in this thread. 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. |
