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Russian too hard for a second language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| MLSUSA94 Groupie United States linguisticventures19 Joined 5708 days ago 50 posts - 53 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 1 of 14 14 April 2009 at 1:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Over the years, I've loved the idea of knowing another language. I'm a mere fourteen years old, but I have been very committed to doing voluntary study. In the past (August '07), I dived into a love of Spanish and surprisingly, I knew the language quite well. Then for an unexplainable reason, I started to juggle with German, then it was all over until the summer of '08 where I attempted to learn Esperanto. Again, I gained a decent amount of vocabulary, but I never completed it. This year, I've tortured myself with indecision by trying to pick a long-term language "marriage". German and Spanish have mostly come to mind, but when I pick up a book, I feel a deep sense of regret. Finally, I've made my choice on what language to learn: Russian. I had thought of this choice before, but I was always turned off by the comments that it is "hard". However, when I was discouraged by these comments, I had plans to become a polyglot (5+ Languages), but now I don't really care anymore.
Is Russian too hard for a person like me? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Maximus Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6749 days ago 417 posts - 427 votes Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Thai | Message 2 of 14 14 April 2009 at 1:56am | IP Logged | ||
No! Just make sure you have a lifestyle where you can dedicate about 3 hours of solid study everyday and maintain it! No excuses! Or even better, just become obsessed with the language and study it as much as possible! That way success is inevitable! Fourteen years old huh? If I was a school kid your age, I would be truenting as much school as possible so that I could study my languages much more! ;) The thing I regret about my schoolboy days is not only the fact that I wasted too much time playing video games, but also the fact that I didn't play truent enough skipping all those meaningless classes of Science, Mathematics, even the likes of Drama and music. If I could go back in time, I would skive all those classes and would just get awesome at languages instead! No offense to anyone who is into those subjects. It is just that I haven't used Algebra or Trigonometry at all since graduating from highschool. Edited by Maximus on 14 April 2009 at 1:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6087 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes 5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 3 of 14 14 April 2009 at 4:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Go for it. It's really only overwhelmingly difficult at the very the beginning, because there is a lot of grammar to learn. However, the grammar builds on itself like a pyramid, so after several months of studying it'll become rather intuitive and easy. Aside from that, you'll basically just have a lot of vocabulary to learn, little of which is similar to English or Romance language vocabulary.
Anyways, it's a fun, beautiful language and the difficulty is fleeting, so again: Go for it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SII Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5792 days ago 184 posts - 194 votes Speaks: Russian* Studies: English | Message 4 of 14 14 April 2009 at 9:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Hmm... IMHO, real Russian is one of most difficult languages on Earth. But the 'book', literary language isn't very difficult, although more difficult than most of European languages. The main complication in literary language is the great number of word's forms. For example, in English the noun 'table' has two form: 'table' (sing.) and 'tables' (pl.). In Russian the noun 'стол' (a table) has following forms:
Nom. sing. стол Gen. sing. стола Dat. sing. столу Acc. sing. стол Inst. sing. столом Prep. sing. столе Nom. pl. столы Gen. pl. столов Dat. pl. столам Acc. pl. столы Inst. pl. столами Prep. pl. столах In the informal Russian the main complication is the free word order. In speech we, Russians, build sentences very... er... freely, and often we don't understand how we understand what we speak :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6087 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes 5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 5 of 14 14 April 2009 at 12:13pm | IP Logged | ||
As a learner, I actually find the bookish language to be the hardest part. That and all of the crazy stuff related to number declensions. :p I find that the case declensions for normal nouns and adjectives actually is the easiest part, since there's a lot of overlap in the endings. I mean, when I first started I was thinking "Oh my god.", but once you learn how to use one case, the next one is easier, and so on and so on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6372 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 14 14 April 2009 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Dude, you're 14!!! That's great. You have so much time to learn and experiment. Don't
do it for 3 hours a day if you can't. The minimum amount is 45 mins a day. But you will be much better faster the more you study each day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ennime Tetraglot Senior Member South Africa universityofbrokengl Joined 5904 days ago 397 posts - 507 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, Esperanto, Afrikaans Studies: Xhosa, French, Korean, Portuguese, Zulu | Message 7 of 14 14 April 2009 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Go for it!!! Russian is beautiful to study. Although I do find it a bit of a
challenge... Yet still easier than Korean ^_^
what's the emphasized"real" about? lit. Russian is quite real I would say 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5766 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian | Message 8 of 14 14 April 2009 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I found the majority of Russian grammar to be fairly easy, although I do frequently struggle with word order, which is surely something that will come with time and practise. Russian is not too difficult a language for you, no way. Every language has its difficult aspects. The difference with inflected languages like German, Latin and Russian is that they have a very sharp learning curve. The difficult aspects of the language are encountered very early on; you're fourteen, I'm impressed that you can even read cyrillic! I have been teaching myself Russian since I was about your age; I am now 19 and studying it at university. Sounds to me like you're suffering from Wanderlust. This happens to everybody who has any kind of passion for languages; they find they like one, overcome a lot of it, and become interested in another language and their progress in the previous language begins to regress. I suggest picking one, or two at a push, and sticking with them.
Obviously, depending on which way your brain works, you could try it one of two ways. Firstly, you could pick two grammatically similar languages, such as Latin and Russian (both are inflected, although their vocabularies are, obviously, very different) and use your strength in one to aid the other. Or you could try another, which in your situation with Wanderlust, if my diagnosis is correct, would probably help you in a more effective way. Pick two completely different languages, like Russian (a Slavonic language) and Spanish (a Romance language). Study one, keeping vocabulary and grammar notes et cetera, and when you get bored, switch to the other. If I were in your situation, that would cure my Wanderlust. Jack 1 person has voted this message useful |
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