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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Itikar Groupie Italy Joined 4463 days ago 94 posts - 158 votes  Speaks: Italian* | Message 49 of 96 13 March 2014 at 9:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Hello Cristina. It is a while that I do not write on this forum but having experienced recently both the study of Russian and Mandarin, so I felt to share some experience. Answering your question: yes, I did, with Arabic, Japanese and now Mandarin and it has been very rewarding. Not in the term of being able to speak the language or use it proficiently (after all I do not need it) but from the cultural point of view indeed it was. They all opened to me a whole new world day by day. As for comparing it with Russian they are totally different. :P In Russian after you study methodically the morphology it is quite comforting to guess the grammatical function of a word in a sentence, and pronunciation is relatively clear. In Mandarin on the other hand context is very important and pronunciation is very subtle. Consider that when I'm finishing my current Mandarin course I feel like I am going to do Latin in order to feel comforted again by morphology. Then Mandarin writing system alone is so extremely fascinating that speaking about difficulty is pointless, especially if you do not plan to use Mandarin so actively. In my short experience Mandarin seems me both very demanding and very rewarding. I really suggest anyone to at least try it. You will not regret. Bye! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3826 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 50 of 96 13 March 2014 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Will the 'Russian is complex' phase on HTLAL pass soon? Will a single person become fluent at all? But like I said, I just feel surprised that the most widely spoken Slavic languages is regarded as the hardest of all of them by most posters here. Icelandic has only 300k speakers, the Caucasian languages are spoken by isolated pockets, same with many languages around the world. But Russian would be less surprising to me if it were some minority language with time to pile up based on the way it has been worded in this forum. Edited by Stolan on 13 March 2014 at 9:48pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 51 of 96 13 March 2014 at 10:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I study Mandarin, Georgian (the Caucasian language) and Russian. I started Mandarin in
June 2011, Georgian in January 2012, Russian in October 2012. I sometimes have this feeling my reading comprehension of Russian will surpass that of Georgian anytime soon. I have good resources for Russian, while I got stuck long in Georgian due to bad resources. Yet the A1-A2 and A2-B1 stages were much harder in Russian than in the other two. With such an abundance of endings for adjectives and nouns, I have the impression I won't dare say anything on my own anytime soon! Palatalization accounts for the fact there's at least 50% more consonants than previewed by the alphabet. That also makes it harder to internalize single words - I find it much easier to memorize even the weirdest roots with a phonemic spelling, and this is the case for Georgian and not for Russian, with its shifting stress. If I had resources for Georgian of the same quality I have for Russian, I might be close to basic fluency by now. I claim the right to say Russian is harder for me than Georgian and Mandarin, don't think this should sound as a taboo at this forum. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4622 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 52 of 96 13 March 2014 at 11:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well if you dabbled with SSiW, the first course of which is entirely free, then you could get up to near native level in terms of structures, in the spoken language, and then it'd just be a question of adding in extra vocabulary, which inevitably takes time, but you'd do at your own speed. As they say on their home page:
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6391 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 53 of 96 13 March 2014 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3826 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 54 of 96 13 March 2014 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well it looks like the Russian have done diddly did it. Hardest European language. Not Indo European but within Europe and Western Asia. Harder for this person than Georgian! Georgian is one of the most difficult ingrown languages, tons of clusters and irregular verbs! The complex Georgian verb screeves and such. But Russian beats everything, I am not sarcastic when I say this, but I am interested in figuring out how the Russian languages evolved to be so complex as in what enviroment it had, did a mentality lead to it? Was it pure chance? Did Belarus and/or Ukraine provide time for ingrowing with barely any influence to the further east? Even Native American languages and Georgian were in proximity to neighboring Tribes/Kingdoms etc! And the lack of internal dialectal variation at some points due to repopulations prevented competing dialects, hence, creolization of two closely related languages that always happens in degrees. Edited by Stolan on 13 March 2014 at 11:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4501 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 55 of 96 13 March 2014 at 11:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm still not entirely satisfied with my Russian, but it feels a whole lot better now than it used to, haha...
That assumes they actually know Lak or Abkhaz exists. Icelandic, maybe not even that, but at least it's a national lingo. And the only reason I know Lak exists is because I have a friend who speaks it. "I don't know what it is, but it has strange squiggly letters and I can't figure it out, must be hard!" is how most people think, naively or not. I don't understand how you measured that Lak or Abkhaz or Icelandic or Russian are hard. I don't find Icelandic hard at all for example (I have yet to complete my studies proper though). I don't understand this hardest language lark at all. Edited by tarvos on 14 March 2014 at 12:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3826 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 56 of 96 14 March 2014 at 12:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Because folks are saying Russian is the hardest they have learned, sometimes even even harder than other
languages which are more historically conservative. Harder than Polish for example, harder than Ukrainian or Belarussian, or Georgian like the person above. I just find it unusual Russian would evolve in that direction for something that is not holed up in a small part of the world with plenty of time to grow in. Russian today actually cut off some feature from the older literary language, imagine what that may have been like if people think Russian now is harder than Georgian or Czech. I can't figure it out, I would expect something else to be the hardest language in Eurasia. Edited by Stolan on 14 March 2014 at 12:21am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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