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Russian is not hard | ||
Tags: Difficulty | Russian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Monte Cristo Newbie United States Joined 4990 days ago 26 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 47 31 December 2010 at 12:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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For whatever reason, a lot of people seem to think Russian is an impossible language. I for one think Russian is about as hard as German is for an Anglophone.
1.) Russian pronunciation is a little tougher than German but once you get it down (it'll only take a couple weeks) you'll think it's relatively straightforward. I think one thing that scares people off is Здравствуйте (zdrAst-vowe-tye), which means "good day". For such a basic greeting it is pretty tough to say for beginners. 2.) Genders in Russian are 99% non-memorization when it comes to nouns. You don't have to sit there and figure out if a book is masculine, feminine, or neuter, like you would in German. The noun's ending determines the gender. 3.) Stress seems to give people some difficulty, but I never really had problems with it. When you learn by the spoken language you know how a word sounds. I am using Russian without toil as my main method and the stress is put in bold. This book contains a pretty big vocabulary and you'll recognize the stress of all the words it contains if you read them from a different source since you already know the spoken word. Just think of it this way... English spelling for foreigners has to be one major obstacle since we do not spell how we write. Personally, when I come across a word I do not know, I haven't a clue how to pronounce it either, and I'm a native speaker! 4.) The only real troubling obstacle that I find is the declension system (six cases) in Russian produces a real loose word order that takes some time to get use to. You have a lot of freedom to toss words around since the declension brings about the meaning. In English, our word order is very strict and determines the meaning of our sentences. Edited by Monte Cristo on 31 December 2010 at 12:38am 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5332 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes  Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 2 of 47 31 December 2010 at 3:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd love it if this were true, but syntax and idioms in German match up to English's so much better than Russian from what I've heard. Also, German too has noun endings which you can often guess the gender from (it might be less consistent that Russian though, I'm not sure).
Are you using the 1950s Russian Without Toil or the 1970s one? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Monte Cristo Newbie United States Joined 4990 days ago 26 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 47 31 December 2010 at 5:13am | IP Logged | |||||
There is no easy way to learn genders in German from what I've found; they are, for the most part, random just like genders in French (there are some exceptions such as days/months always being masculine, etc). I found this obstacle very tricky because the entire case system in German depends on the randomized gender. Memorizing the noun is a task itself, but memorizing the article too? In Russian you always know the gender so there is no worries.
I'm using the 50's English version. I found a copy printed in the late 70's for cheap so I bought it. The book is very good, and goes through a great deal of Russian literature. I also have German without toil and it seems like Russian without toil covers a great deal more in lessons. There are exercises with each lesson, and then after lesson 30 they toss on "additional exercise" for drilling the case system. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6359 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 4 of 47 31 December 2010 at 5:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've never studied German, but I doubt this is true because
1) lots of German vocab is essentially common to English 2) Russian uses a different script. Just because it's easy doesn't make it a non issue 3) there appears to be less high quality learning material for Russian 4) FSI ranks Russian more difficult than German 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6965 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 47 31 December 2010 at 5:22am | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah, the shared Germanic vocabulary would be fairly a big factor that would aid acquisition by English-speakers but is something that the original post doesn't even mention. The core of Russian vocabulary is, well, Slavonic. Don't tell me that an English-speaker learner would find "Ходить / Идти", "Ездить / Ехать" to be just as easy to assimilate or remember as "gehen" and "fahren". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| arturs Triglot Senior Member Latvia Joined 5080 days ago 278 posts - 408 votes Speaks: Latvian*, Russian, English | Message 6 of 47 31 December 2010 at 8:51am | IP Logged | |||||
Are you sure about the fact that nouns in German can't be determined by the ending? Of course not with all words, but it's still possible, for example, neuter words end with -chen, -lein, -tel, -um, -ment. Masculine words are loan words with endings like -at, -ant, -ist, -ismus, -eur, -or and German words with endings like -er, -ler, -ner, -ling, -el. Feminine words end with -e, -in, -ung, -schaft, -keit, -heit. Edited by arturs on 31 December 2010 at 8:51am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5143 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 47 31 December 2010 at 11:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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I do not know whether I am in a slightly different position than someone with English as their native language, since Norwegian is of a clearer Germanic origin, but on a scale from 1 to 10 I would put German on 2 (fairly easy) and Russian on 7 (fairly difficult). And the only reason why I am not putting it higher, is that there are so many languages out there which I assume are even more difficult, like Mandarin, Korean or Japanese.
Russian is the only language I have given up as too difficult. Twice. It is also the only language I know which has made me feel really stupid. The only reason why I have started a third time, and persist, is because in the mean time I have fallen in love with the language. and cannot live without my daily dosis of Russian. It is like a lover you keep fighting with, but know you cannot live without. Someone on this forum said that "Russian is not a walk in the park, it is a walk through hell." I agree with that, but at the same time there is no language where I feel such a degree of satisfaction when there is something I understand, even if it is just a word here and there, or a sentence on a film. I do not often say Я люблю тебя to anything or anyone, but I could say that to the Russian language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Thatzright Diglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5481 days ago 202 posts - 311 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English Studies: French, Swedish, German, Russian | Message 8 of 47 31 December 2010 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have had similiar experiences with Russian as Solfrid, except that I learned my first word of Russian only in 2009. Nevertheless, I've sort of given up on it a few times already and yet I just seemingly absolutely have to continue studying it no matter what. It pulls me in and there's just no way to prevent this. It's probably the only language I've ever studied that I would describe as addictive in some cases - I really don't know why exactly this is, but there is just something immensely intriguing about it all.
I personally don't know about the "walk through hell" part, though - granted, I'm not far at all yet, but I mean, learn vocabulary, learn the case system properly, learn all the basic stuff and you're pretty much set to say whatever you want to. No differences between tenses like "I walked, I was walking, I had walked, I had been walking" etc. (well, of course the different aspects of verbs do sort of have the same purpose), everything can usually be expressed in a pretty simple way, and so forth. Not to say that there isn't any truth to what you're saying - the vocabulary acquiring part isn't exactly the easiest of tasks for a non-Slavic person and the case system can take time to get used to :-) I don't fully have it down yet myself either... Edited by Thatzright on 31 December 2010 at 1:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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