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Russian is not hard | ||
Tags: Difficulty | Russian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5273 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 9 of 47 31 December 2010 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | ||
The only point I would agree with is gender. Russian gender is more predictable than German or French gender, perhaps comparable to Italian or Spanish gender. For the rest you are wrong. Slavic sounds are more alien to Anglophone ears and mouths than German sounds. There are more complicated consonant clusters. There is palatalization. Stress is unpredictable. Vocabulary is mostly Slavic and thus alien to Anglophones. Verbal aspect marked through different pairs of verbs rather than through tense (as in Romance and Germanic) is alien. The case system is more intense in Russian than in German. Word order is more flexible in Russian than in German. There is practically total concurrence amongst native English (only) speakers that Spanish is easier than German, German is easier than Russian, and Russian is easier than Japanese. I'm willing to bet that for the native Mandarin speaker as well, whereas Japanese would be somewhat easier, the Spanish-German-Russian difficulty ordering would be the same. There are objective factors that make it so: Balto-Slavic is the most conservative branch of Indo-European, which has retained its more complicated features better than the more innovative branches of Indo-European, such as Indo-Iranian, Romance, and Germanic. I think only Greek, Albanian, and Armenian are comparable in difficulty, but each in their own way. Edited by Merv on 31 December 2010 at 8:49pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Préposition Diglot Senior Member France aspectualpairs.wordp Joined 5114 days ago 186 posts - 283 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC1 Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 10 of 47 04 January 2011 at 7:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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You're only listing very basic points of Russian grammar one comes across when they start the language. I've
heard several times it's the kind of language that's easy to start with (I totally agree), then gets really tough to finally go back to being quite easy, so that would agree with the "walk through hell" theory. And I'd be tempted to agree with that. I'm also tempted to assume you've only reached a basic intermediate level because if Russian is easier than some languages, it definitely isn't a walk in the park. Aspects are a terrible, nasty point of grammar you cannot avoid, and you need a lot of exposure in context to properly get the hang of them. After that, you hit the verbs of motion. By themselves, they're all nice and funny to play around with, but when you add prefixes to them, you find the dreaded aspects as well as extra confusion as to what's the real difference between в-, при and под-, and what exactly does за- means. Of course it all makes sense after a while, but the differences are sometimes too subtle for the beginner. And my favourite of all (not), numbers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, small numbers are easy to remember, and it's not that complicated to remember a couple of rules about when to use the genitive or the nominative after a number, but when you get to dates or big numbers, it starts to be a bit hellish, with all those case endings at the end of each part of the number, and when you try to think quickly, everything seems to disappear from your mind. I haven't learned German, but I never heard of it having aspects or prefixed verbs of motion as Russian does (let me know if it does, please). All in all, I do agree that Russian isn't impossible and people can sometimes be quite dramatic about it, but it's definitely not an easy language, and not everyone will have fun with it. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 11 of 47 05 January 2011 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Learning materials for Russian are probably superior to those available for any other Slavic language.
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| deniz2 Groupie TurkeyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5152 days ago 53 posts - 62 votes | Message 12 of 47 06 January 2011 at 9:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Though I don’t know any Russian I looked at a book teaching Russian. It seems to me that the number of the rules (especially the case system) is much more than French, German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, and Turkish. I believe it is far more difficult than every language.
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| Préposition Diglot Senior Member France aspectualpairs.wordp Joined 5114 days ago 186 posts - 283 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC1 Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 13 of 47 06 January 2011 at 10:26am | IP Logged | ||
You've seen a book listing more grammar rules for Russian than Arabic? I'd love to see what Arabic book you were looking at, there. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| deniz2 Groupie TurkeyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5152 days ago 53 posts - 62 votes | Message 14 of 47 06 January 2011 at 10:52am | IP Logged | ||
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You've seen a book listing more grammar rules for Russian than Arabic? I'd love to see what Arabic book you were
looking at, there.[/QUOTE] In my country some people learn Arabic for only religious reasons, it is not because they are intellectual (any wonder for foreign languages or grammars). Many of them say its grammar isn’t so hard and I know that the Russian cases have much more details (not only because I saw the noun charts) than even German. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JPike1028 Triglot Senior Member United States piketransitions Joined 5397 days ago 297 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Portuguese, Czech | Message 15 of 47 06 January 2011 at 11:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Being that I am studying both German and Russian I can say that Russian has provided more hurdles
than German has. As far as gender in German one simply has to memorize the word with its article and then gender is not a problem, just like most other European languages. After a while, I tend to have a knack for picking out the gender of words just by the feel of the word, if that makes sense. Russian sounds and vocabulary has provided me with more struggles than Arabic has been. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Préposition Diglot Senior Member France aspectualpairs.wordp Joined 5114 days ago 186 posts - 283 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC1 Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 16 of 47 06 January 2011 at 3:56pm | IP Logged | ||
In my country some people learn Arabic for only religious reasons, it is not because they are intellectual (any wonder for foreign languages or grammars). Many of them say its grammar isn’t so hard and I know that the Russian cases have much more details (not only because I saw the noun charts) than even German.[/QUOTE] I'm not talking about the grammar being difficult, I'd even agree Arabic grammar is easier than Russian grammar, but I still believe there's a lot more of it in Arabic than in Russian, and I'd be surprised to see there are more rules in Russian than in Arabic, because it feels to me that there are fewers and more difficult rules in Russian, and a myriad of easy ones to remember in Arabic. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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