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Why study Russian?

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vonPeterhof
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4582 days ago
715 posts - 1527 votes 
Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German
Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish

 
 Message 49 of 64
15 December 2011 at 4:00pm | IP Logged 
Oleg wrote:
vonPeterhof wrote:
Oleg wrote:
Aha, by the way: Russian is a perfect tool for quarreling! And one of the most mysterious languages I know: you can talk in Russian for hours without making any sense.
Gee, that's some top-notch Russian you're speaking there, Sir Humphrey! Et vous aussi, Les Inconnus! お前も結構ペラペラだな、魅音ちゃん!..


The problem is that it's humour for them and reality for us.
I beg to differ. I don't have much love for my country, but I don't think it holds the monopoly on demagoguery/pseudo-intellectualism/rhetoric/bullshit/whateve r you meant by that remark. Sir Humphrey is a satirical character, representing the very real phenomenon of bureaucratic double-speak and obfuscating rhetoric. The verbal stunts he pulls are possible in probably any language other than Toki Pona, and they do get employed worldwide.

Oleg wrote:
And you've mistaken threads, this one's on Russian.
You presented something as a feature specific to Russian, I showed counter-examples in other languages. And if you were just being facetious, well, I was just being nitpicky :)

But, yeah this is quite off-topic, so to get back on: the only practical reason to learn Russian I can think of that hasn't been mentioned is to take advantage of our negligent attitude to copyright. Don't get the wrong idea, I'm not advocating something as obviously heinous as (gasp!) copyright infringement, but let's just say that I've heard that there might be some freely available content (including language-learning resources) on the Runet. Sure, the Chinese also don't give a damn about copyright, but the Chinese interwebs have issues of a different nature. The Great Firewall is one, and I was also kind of amused when Chinese websites that streamed American and Japanese TV shows blocked all of their entertainment content for a day because the PRC had declared a day of mourning over the victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Either the Chinese pirates are all very responsible citizens, or the Party has a way of making them comply with its decisions. But if you have no desire to break the law and refuse to enter a wretched hive of scum and villainy, then I think you have no business learning Russian :D

Edited by vonPeterhof on 15 December 2011 at 4:01pm
1 person has voted this message useful



leosmith
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6360 days ago
2365 posts - 3804 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Tagalog

 
 Message 50 of 64
15 December 2011 at 4:12pm | IP Logged 
Same reason I learn all my languages - for the chicks! Oh, and the food is quite excellent too.
3 persons have voted this message useful



BioCatLan
Newbie
United States
Joined 4526 days ago
3 posts - 4 votes
Speaks: English*

 
 Message 51 of 64
27 December 2011 at 3:44pm | IP Logged 
I love Russian music; it sounds so awesome, I have so much of it now. It's the whole reason I started learning Russian! Hand writing Cyrillic is really fun too. Moscow and Siberia look like really cool places to visit someday, and knowing some Russian would be quite helpful whenever I do go there. Also, all the Russians I've talked to were always chill people.

Cavesa wrote:

3. The cyrillics alphabet is another reason. It is a foreign alphabet, therefore something I'd like to try, but not as different as Japanese kana's and kanji for exemple. And it can be useful at the internet and for exemple when reading the old music sheets at my granny's (it's sometimes hard to guess the name from the music only, I am not that knowledgeable).

There's a piano where my mom works and they have so many boxes full of sheet music and many of them are in Russian too! After learning to read Cyrillic and went back to her work one day, I noticed I could read the titles of all the music. I was like WOAH COOL! I was so happy :)
1 person has voted this message useful



Ellsworth
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4767 days ago
345 posts - 528 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish

 
 Message 52 of 64
27 December 2011 at 3:46pm | IP Logged 
I am studying Russian because I think it sounds completely awesome and I like Russian
history. Also, I love Dostoevsky and Gogol.
1 person has voted this message useful



s0fist
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4856 days ago
260 posts - 445 votes 
Speaks: Russian*, English
Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French

 
 Message 53 of 64
28 December 2011 at 7:17am | IP Logged 
Sir Humphrey! Et vous aussi,
Les Inconnus! お前も結構ペラペラだな、
魅音ちゃん


The language in question is the almighty L0 (or possibly Lminus1 or L-Uno)
the common language
that everyone speaks and that no one understands,
the language that both underlies and superimposes itself,
that edifies and corrupts all languages that it comes in contact with,
some conjecture it is the language spoken by the language translation microbes in Douglas
Adams' Guide or possibly the language of Vogon poetry,
its origins are unknown, some say it is the language from the future (transmitted to us by
the paradoxical grandfather or possibly scratched^Wscribbled by Schroedinger's hapless
kitten),
while others hint that it comes from the aliens that established the Earth colony on their
way back to Alpha Centauri,
or possibly the sideways dudes that built the pyramids and some gardens a while back,
some believe god made it on the lesser known 8th day, citing the tower of Babel as the
first recorded instance,
others argue it's the after effect of Neo destroying the matrix,
known by many names the almighty L0 is known as
bureaucratese or officialese in
English,
1%82">канцелярит по-русски,
Brainf**k in "programmese",
macaronics by the FSMers,
it is often referred to as doublespeak, gobbledygook, speaking in tongues and beating
around the Bushes,
it is mathematically proven to be unprovable,
the only language that is both dead and alive it's linguistically calcified into the
Zomboid family,
anything said in L0 is automatically copylefted (ɔ) as free for distribution and
prohibited for conscious apprehension for any purpose, by any agent, via any medium, to
the jedi republic from which it stems, one zerozeroone, undivisible under god, with
liberty, blackjack and hookers, amen,
it's feature full and context free,
syntactically divergent, semantically null, and legally void,
it delivers an iByte of information in a googlosecond,
anatomically descriptive, miraculously medical, and user friendless,
gender mindfulless, racially sensuous, culturally philistine, and politically corrective,
you can't shut it up, you can't dumb it down,
it's hanging in, there ain't no doubt,
and it's hanging tough, bureaucratese over and officialese out.

2 persons have voted this message useful



Strudel
Newbie
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4518 days ago
1 posts - 1 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Russian

 
 Message 54 of 64
04 January 2012 at 8:03pm | IP Logged 
I know someone very special from there and I wish to learn Russian further. I am having difficulties finding a good web sites and or software.

Edited by Strudel on 04 January 2012 at 8:05pm
1 person has voted this message useful



Jinx
Triglot
Senior Member
Germany
reverbnation.co
Joined 5503 days ago
1085 posts - 1879 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, French
Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish

 
 Message 55 of 64
05 January 2012 at 11:32am | IP Logged 
s0fist wrote:
Sir Humphrey! Et vous aussi,
Les Inconnus! お前も結構ペラペラだな、
魅音ちゃん


The language in question is the almighty L0 (or possibly Lminus1 or L-Uno)
the common language
that everyone speaks and that no one understands,
the language that both underlies and superimposes itself,
that edifies and corrupts all languages that it comes in contact with,
some conjecture it is the language spoken by the language translation microbes in Douglas
Adams' Guide or possibly the language of Vogon poetry,
its origins are unknown, some say it is the language from the future (transmitted to us by
the paradoxical grandfather or possibly scratched^Wscribbled by Schroedinger's hapless
kitten),
while others hint that it comes from the aliens that established the Earth colony on their
way back to Alpha Centauri,
or possibly the sideways dudes that built the pyramids and some gardens a while back,
some believe god made it on the lesser known 8th day, citing the tower of Babel as the
first recorded instance,
others argue it's the after effect of Neo destroying the matrix,
known by many names the almighty L0 is known as
bureaucratese or officialese in
English,
1%82">канцелярит по-русски,
Brainf**k in "programmese",
macaronics by the FSMers,
it is often referred to as doublespeak, gobbledygook, speaking in tongues and beating
around the Bushes,
it is mathematically proven to be unprovable,
the only language that is both dead and alive it's linguistically calcified into the
Zomboid family,
anything said in L0 is automatically copylefted (ɔ) as free for distribution and
prohibited for conscious apprehension for any purpose, by any agent, via any medium, to
the jedi republic from which it stems, one zerozeroone, undivisible under god, with
liberty, blackjack and hookers, amen,
it's feature full and context free,
syntactically divergent, semantically null, and legally void,
it delivers an iByte of information in a googlosecond,
anatomically descriptive, miraculously medical, and user friendless,
gender mindfulless, racially sensuous, culturally philistine, and politically corrective,
you can't shut it up, you can't dumb it down,
it's hanging in, there ain't no doubt,
and it's hanging tough, bureaucratese over and officialese out.


fnord!!!
1 person has voted this message useful





Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6513 days ago
9078 posts - 16473 votes 
Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 56 of 64
05 January 2012 at 1:31pm | IP Logged 
Michael K. wrote:
I don't know if all Russians would be that pleased that someone would try to learn their language, but I've heard Russians are usually happy when someone chooses to learn their language and forgive mistakes rather easily.


Last time I visited Russia I knew even less Russian than I do now, but at least the few times I asked for something in Russian (a pizza, chips in a blue bag) people seemed rather forgiving. But my mother went on a Volga cruise in the 90s knowing only one Russian word "спасибо" (thanks), and using this one well chosen word meant that she got much more coffee than her travel companions.

I have arrived late in this discussion, partly I don't want to get eulogic and sentimental about any single language. Besides I have no intention of reading big fat novels in Russian, no matter how famous their authors are. I like classical Russian music very much, but only the instrumental works so this has no bearing on my language studies. However there are still several good reasons for attempting to climb Mount Russia:

1) it is the most spoken Slavic language ...
2) ...and the one with most resources
3) it spoken by a lot of people in an outside Russia - if just the red tape around visas wasn't as repulsive I would have been there twice as often
4) it can help me to learn the other Slavic languages - and this is a big and important family
5) it has several quaint features, like the morphology of the past tense, the "by me is" replacement for "I have" and the distinction between perfective and imperfective verbs - these are generally also found in other Slavic languages which will make it easier to learn those
6) I like to write in the Cyrillic alphabet - but not cursive
7) there are lots of places in Russia and elsewhere in Russian savvy places which I would love to visit
8) you can meet Russian tourists in the most unlikely places now
9) Russia is an important country which even is fairly close to Denmark




Edited by Iversen on 06 January 2012 at 2:03am


5 persons have voted this message useful



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