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Whatever happened to Russian? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Bookstores |  | |
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6728 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 17 01 May 2007 at 3:54pm | IP Logged |
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I was browsing the local book superstore (Borders) and I noticed something peculiar.
When I first starting learning Arabic (and this was pre-Amazon.com), you were lucky if you could find one book about Arabic (or Chinese for that matter), but there was at least a whole shelf or two dedicated to Russian. Now it seems that there are three-four shelves of Arabic materials (and a lot of Chinese stuff too) and very little for Russian. A lot of new stuff is being published for Arabic, Chinese and Japanese (and that's great!), but interest in Russian seems to have dissipated. Why? Edited by translator2 on 01 May 2007 at 3:54pm 1 person has 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 2 of 17 01 May 2007 at 3:59pm | IP Logged |
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Al Qaeda vs. USSR. Which one do you think fascinates the average Joe more?
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| IbanezFire Senior Member United States Joined 6503 days ago 119 posts - 124 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Russian | Message 3 of 17 01 May 2007 at 4:17pm | IP Logged |
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That's because Borders sucks. Go to Barnes and Noble.
But yeah, the cold war ended. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Magnum Bilingual Triglot Retired Moderator Pro Member United States Joined 6926 days ago 359 posts - 353 votes Speaks: English*, Serbian*, French Studies: German Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 17 01 May 2007 at 4:19pm | IP Logged |
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I did not notice this. I will look the next time I am at the bookstore.
From my memory, the largest section tends to be Spanish. The next largest section is French and German. The other languages all have much smaller selections. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6511 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 5 of 17 01 May 2007 at 10:11pm | IP Logged |
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The Cold War ended, the New Russian Economy went bust, and businessmen were getting killed in the streets of Moscow. For about ten years, there was nothing that the average businessman (the true target market for language courses) wanted from Russia that was worth dying for. That's starting to change again, but Russian still isn't as hot as Chinese or Arabic.
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| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6728 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 17 01 May 2007 at 11:15pm | IP Logged |
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I don't really understand why this topic was moved to Language Bookstores as it is more about the waning study of Russian in the U.S. and does not reference a language-specific bookstore or site. Oh well, whatever!
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| Qbe Tetraglot Senior Member United States joewright.org/var Joined 6944 days ago 289 posts - 335 votes Speaks: English*, Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew Studies: Japanese, German, Mandarin, Aramaic | Message 7 of 17 02 May 2007 at 3:46pm | IP Logged |
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Let's try to bring it back to the bookstore category then.
Here in the upper midwestern US I'm finding that the Russian section equals the Arabic section. We have plenty of Russian, Polish, etc immigrants here, and not much demand for Arabic. Overall though, as the others have pointed out, Russian just doesn't have the global interest it did in the past. I started self-learning Russian in the early-80s and was widely revered for it. Nowadays I never even hear of anyone studying Russian (except on this forum) and would expect anyone learning it to be asked, "Why are you learning that?" In fact, I'd probably ask that question myself. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6511 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 8 of 17 03 May 2007 at 7:13am | IP Logged |
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Actually there are still a lot of good reasons to study Russian, it's just not considered a "sexy" language anymore because the money isn't there.
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