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The usefulness of Russian... | ||
Tags: Usefulness | Russian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5826 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes  5 sounds | Message 1 of 21 06 April 2011 at 2:13pm | IP Logged |
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...in Europe and the western world as a whole. There is some hype about Russian lately. Granted, Russian is a 'big' language but due to political and geographical reasons it is more or less isolated from the rest of Europe. So I'm interested what is your practical motivation for studying Russian? Do you want to live in Russia? Is it a business-related motivation? Purely cultural ?
On the whole I like the language but I find it hard to justify my interest in any practical way. French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, etc. seem to be more practical choices. Edited by Sennin on 06 April 2011 at 2:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5054 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 2 of 21 06 April 2011 at 3:32pm | IP Logged |
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My opinion is that it doesn't matter how many people speak the language or how widely dispersed it is if you are genuinely interested in the culture and people that the language represents. Russian literature is one reason to learn the language. The Russian people would be another. If you are not interested in either the culture or the people then Russian would not be useful to you. To those who are interested, the vast span of Eurasia opens up. Edited by iguanamon on 06 April 2011 at 3:37pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| aabram Pentaglot Senior Member Estonia Joined 5325 days ago 138 posts - 263 votes Speaks: Estonian*, English, Spanish, Russian, Finnish Studies: Mandarin, French | Message 3 of 21 06 April 2011 at 4:24pm | IP Logged |
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As has been discussed in another thread, in addition to Russia itself Russian will let
you get by in most if not all former Soviet Union republics, some of which are members of EU nowadays. If your Europe ends with, say, Poland and Romania in on eastern axis, then yea, there's not much point learning it for travelling reasons. Russian literature is clearly a genre in itself, I imagine that there are people who learn the language just to access it in its original form. One of the reasons I went extra steps with my Russian to improve it beyond required level in school was to access technical and scientific works. There's huge amount of it out there for certain fields. Also, for some unknown reason Russia is like mini-Japan with its awesome and yet at the same time terrible ideas and theories produced by brightest crackpots you've ever seen. Obviously their minds work differently than normal conditioned Western minds, which is wonderful at times and horrible at others. And last but not least, there's a lot of language learning material out there available in Russian, lot of which is different from your standard TY-series textbooks. But no, it is not terribly practical if your interests lie strictly in business connections or travelling around elsewhere. Edited by aabram on 06 April 2011 at 4:25pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| arturs Triglot Senior Member Latvia Joined 5063 days ago 278 posts - 408 votes Speaks: Latvian*, Russian, English | Message 4 of 21 06 April 2011 at 5:05pm | IP Logged |
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Yeah, literature is the main reason why people learn Russian - it's well known fact that classical literature must be read in the original language used by the author, because of the idioms and words used in the work. Even for me, who speaks Russian practically on a native level, understanding Dostoevsky is a bit hard because of the outdated structures and vocabulary. Not to mention reading Dostoevsky in English - it loses all the essence.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5461 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 5 of 21 06 April 2011 at 5:22pm | IP Logged |
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I study Russian because there is a significant increase in the number of Russians
migrating west. Here in Prague, I meet many more Russians than I did just a few years ago. A typical explanation for them migrating is that the economic situation in Russian may be looking good, but the future and stability is uncertain. We are not just talking about the super-rich here: plenty of upper-middle-class Russians seem to be seeking a more stable country for their families. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5126 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 21 06 April 2011 at 7:34pm | IP Logged |
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My official reason for learning Russian is that it is practical to learn because of my work. The Russians and a lot of the Eastern Europeans that are there are not too good at speaking English.
My main reason for learning Russian is however a little 10 year old girl called Valeria, who lives a 2 hours drive from Kiev. When we lived in Belgium, she, her older sister and my two daughters were together all the time, and we spoke French together. Now both my girls and Valeria have forgotten their French, and the oldest sister and I are the only ones who can fully communicate. My only possibility to talk to Valeria is to learn Russian. So whenever I feel down because it takes me forever to learn Russian, I picture Valeria, and go back to my studying. And I guess it might come in handy when rich Russian tourists start flooding Norway. :-) Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 06 April 2011 at 7:36pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| akprocks Senior Member United States Joined 5078 days ago 178 posts - 258 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 8 of 21 06 April 2011 at 11:23pm | IP Logged |
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For me, I don't believe that the number of speakers equates into usefulness. For instance, I'm learning an Inuit language, which has few speakers. This would make my language useless, right? Wrong. I could travel across north Alaska and Canada and meet a new person every day to speak to. It would take me a lifetime to speak to everybody
who knew my target language. If you choose not to learn Russian for 'usefulness' because Spanish has more speakers then that's your loss. The Russian diaspora is huge and it would be bound to be useful in Bulgaria, even if there's only 30,000 Russian speakers in Bulgaria you would never be able to speak to them all. So, all in all, if you like Russian, learn it! Edited by akprocks on 07 April 2011 at 3:22am 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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