It’s a bit weird to see the English transliteration of Russian words for example, govoritz instead of говорить.
For anyone looking to study Russian, I highly recommend spending a few days familiarizing yourself with Cyrillic first. Toss it into an Anki deck (or download one) and use FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler).
It’s phonetic and consists of only 33 letters, I memorized it on a ~12-hour flight to Moscow many years ago.
Same thing with learning Japanese. Just memorize the symbols. It's phonetic. Of course there are complex meanings and subtleties but that's just how we all play with language. As a foreigner your pronunciation can be good once you get the basics. But you have to match the sounds with the letters. We all did it once. We can do it again.
Admittedly I only know (a little) Japanese and no Korean, but I get the superficial impression that kana are generally much more phonetically faithful than Hangul (namely, because of the post-WWII spelling reform that updated all the kana spellings). Like, the fact that Wiktionary gives "phonetic Hangul" for each Korean entry, to more accurately represent the actual pronunciation, makes me really suspicious of the common internet claim that Hangul is the easiest script to learn.
However, Japanese also has allophony (the moraic nasal and devoicing both come to mind) and kana aren't entirely phonetic (e.g. ha/wa, he/e, ou/ō, ei/ē). I don't know enough about Korean to know if the "irregularities" are also this minor or not—can any Korean speakers/readers enlighten me?
Almost nothing aside from children’s books is written exclusively in hiragana or katakana. You have to also memorize the variable readings of about 2000 kanji and many texts are nearly unintelligible without them. Pretty much everyone can memorize the former, but must struggle with the latter.
Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).
Hanzi as used in Chinese usually have exactly one reading. On the other hand, virtually all kanji in Japanese have several different pronunciations depending on context.
> What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard?
Just to add context to a sibling comment, Japan's first "writing system" was literally just Chinese.
I don't mean Chinese characters, I mean that if you wanted to write something down, you had to communicate in written Chinese. Over time this written Chinese accumulated more and more transformations bringing it in alignment with spoken Japanese until we get what we see today. However, this means that, to a first approximation, modern Japanese is some amalgamation of Old Chinese and Middle Japanese.
Actually, use of Chinese co-existed alongside the whole transformation process, so we actually see this funky mix of Early and Middle Japanese with Wu, Han, and Song Chinese. Character readings varied by region and time period, and so the the reading of a compound kanji term in Japanese mostly reflects the time period when that word was imported. This is why a single kanji ends up having multiple readings. Later, people began backporting individual characters onto native Japanese words, giving yet another reading.
The character 行 is a particularly illustrative example: 行脚 (an-gya), 行動 (kou-dou), 行事 (gyo-ji). The first reading "an" comes from 7th century Chinsese or so, "kou" comes a bit later from the Han dynasty, and "gyo" even later from Song. Then we have the backports: 行く末 (yu-ku-sue), 行く (i-ku), 行う (okona-u). The first "yu" reading is from Middle Japanese, "i" from Modern Japanese, and "okona" from I have no clue when. That's six different readings for 行 alone!
Oh, and then there are "poetic" readings that are specific to usage in people's names: 弘行 (hiro-yuki) etc. Granted, these are often quite evocative of the above readings or that of synonym characters.
The historical introduction process also explains why older readings tend to be more obscure, 1) they had less time to accumulate usage, and 2) they tend to be specific to Buddhist and administrative themes.
Note: The above is just what I've pieced together osmotically over the years, so I'm sure there are errors.
"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.
When I was in Japan all the street signs and train stations had a little transliteration in hiragana of the kanji name. Super useful to be able to read it
Related, I spent several formative years in Taiwan. Back then, my Taiwanese phone (way before smartphones) used bopomofo as the primary input method for typing Chinese, so I had to learn it.
Unfortunately, some of the 注音 symbols are remarkably similar to Japanese kana, and I found that my familiarity with hiragana and katakana actually caused me constant grief, as I kept mixing up the pronunciations.
Many Cyrillic letters are Latin-looking, but actually have direct Greek analogues due to the history of the writing system. If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound. If you do, it's a natural guess.
That diagram is rather bad at what it tries to do. Those are also historically and phonetically the same:
Λ Л
Δ Д
Κ К
The first Cyrillic alphabet was using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script , curiously created by Saint Cyril, but then people found it was too difficult, so someone in the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire mashed up Glagolitic, Greek and Latin to create the new Cyrillic (probably naming it as a sorry to Cyril for butchering his nice unique alphabet).
The diagram says that (Cyrillic ∩ Greek) - (Cyrillic ∩ Latin) is 3 letters, П Ф Г but as the sibling comment says, Λ/Л, Δ/Д and Κ/К are similar enough. That only leaves you with Θ/theta (th as in thin), Σ/sigma (s as in soft), Ξ/xi (x as in fox), Ψ/psi (ps as in lapse), and Ω/omega (o as in ore.) A lot of those are close enough that you can sort of guess, if you know the English names for the letters!
With the exception of some "ligatures" like Ю (I + O) and special characters like Ъ, Cyrillic is largely based on Greek and some Aramaic (e.g. Ш). In the past it included pretty much the entire Greek alphabet.
Truly everyone assumes “learning another alphabet” is hard but it really isn’t. 1-2 weeks of 30-45min a day drills and you’ll have it down. Cyrillic is very easy to memorize.
Your are getting downvoted, but polish writing system really is not great. There are both non-english characters (ą, ę, ś, ć, ź, ż) and digraphs (rz, sz, cz, dz, dż, dź, ch). Also there is done overlap here and some sounds can be written in more than one way (h ~= ch, ż ~= rz, ć == ci, ś == si, etc).
At least you can pretty much always tell how to read a word looking only at its spelling.
At least some of that is the inevitable consequence of pronunciation changing over time ("rz" being the standout, which used to sound like the Czech soft-r, but lost its r-colouring) and others attempt to show an etymological relationship, which makes spelling a bit more difficult in some ways and easier in others.
Polish is a rather extreme case, however. Czech orthography is a bit more straightforward. In spite of that, Polish orthography still does a rather good job.
Generally speaking, if you've a language with heavy use of palatalisation in its phonology and grammar, the Latin alphabet is going to struggle without hacks. Irish and Scottish Gaelic similarly struggle with the inherent limitations of the Latin alphabet, but chose a different set of hacks (necessarily, given the Irish has the second oldest written vernacular language in Europe after Greek).
Similarly, the Latin alphabet is poorly suited to the Germanic languages, Danish and English in particular, because of their large vowel inventory.
Learn Cyrillic the fun way: go in vacation in Bulgaria, they have road signs in both Latin and Cyrillic. This is how I learned Cyrillic 20 years ago, driving a lot for business all over around Balkans. It was an easy curve, a few characters at a time, with a lot of repetitions and the scenery is nice.
Duolingo Russian isn't very good overall (lack of content / grammar explanations), but it does have a page for learning the alphabet that is pretty helpful.
What's difficult really depends on the languages you already know.
In addition to noun inflection, verb aspect, pronunciation stress, and punctuation trouble many native English speakers. That's in addition to all the simple irregularities, like irregular nouns and verbs.
Stress even troubles native speakers. When I lived there, I saw slideshow "where 's the stress?" quizzes used to fill time on screens in taxi buses, waiting rooms, and the like.
Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement, except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock).
Punctuation is secondary, just put commas, colons and semicolons where you feel they should go, most Russians don't know any better themselves.
Noun and verb inflections you will master with enough practice, yeah.
Maybe overall a more difficult language than English or German, but not in the same league as Chinese or Arabic, in my humble opinion.
It seems like an extremely coarse classification. Category 3 contains languages with very different degrees of difficulty, while Bulgarian and Russian are both Slavic they are nothing alike in terms of difficulty since Bulgarian is the most analytic of Slavic languages (has the less inflection). That makes it extremely easy to learn compared to Russian.
What is also interesting is how written Russian was heavily influenced by old Bulgarian. In fact, written russian includes a lot of older written bulgarian vocabulary.
This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.
This happens in other languages too - danish and Norwegian are almost the same written, such that most products just combine the two on the packaging. But spoken it can be very difficult to comprehend
I speak Russian and some Bulgarian as third/forth languages, and while I agree that Russian is more difficult, I wouldn't say Bulgarian is "extremely easy" in comparison. It's maybe ~20% easier at best.
On a superficial level that seems like a roughly correct ranking in my experience. On the other hand, I picked up one of the category 3 languages pretty easily. I think some of these are more "weird" to a native English speaker than "hard" per se.
The aspects that make languages difficult for a native English speaker vary quite a bit with the language. I would expect individual experiences with the languages to have high variance as a consequence.
As others hsve pointed out, it's a very coarse (and rather arbitrary) categorization.
E.g. both Turkish and Russian are in Category 3, but Turkish is trivial compared to Russian.
Turkish grammar is extremely regular, and follows easily defined rules that fit about two pages of easily digestible tables.
In comparison, Russian is a separate class tought in Russian schools for four years to native Russian speakers. And you still get people who can't properly inflect numerals, for example.
All through middle and high school, so for 7 years from around 10 to 16.
It did become one eventually in primary school, so probably the last 2 or 3 years there.
Turkish has a completely different vocabulary (loanwords aside) and a completely different grammar.
"I want to swim" in Russian is "ja hoću plavatj", "I" + "want" + "to swim". The only difficulties are the conjugation of "want" and the aspect of "to swim". In Turkish it's "yüzmek istiyorum", where "-mek" is "to" and "-um" is "I". Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.
Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
I have been generally successful at learning Russian as an adult, but tonal languages are something that I just struggle with on a fundamental level. I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.
Fiendish logographic writing system (Chinese) vs fiendish grammar (Russian). I'm not a fan of Pinyin transliteration aesthetically.
Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.
> Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement
The difficulty is that the stress pattern is not fixed and needs to be memorized, and it often changes the inflection of the word. E.g. "домá" means "houses", while "дóма" means "at home". Another tripping point is that the stress placement is almost always different in Russian when compared to English.
I'm volunteering as an English teacher for Ukrainian refugees, and one of my rules of thumb is: "If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable". It works surprisingly well.
>If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable
Most of these are Latin and French loanwords where Russian (same as e.g. German) carried the accentuation over from the source language. English is the odd one out as it insists on putting the primary stress on either of the first two syllables, except in some recent loans (and those still get a secondary stress). With nouns the preference is for the first syllable. Russian surnames get similarly butchered, including notably Nabokov, which could have been adopted unchanged.
As an Arabic speaker I enjoyed learning Russian because we share verbless sentences, and you could just put the words together in any order and you get your idea across and you could be spot on too. So 'what is the time?'(Kotoryy chas) is 2 words as in Arabic for asking the time and other questions in conversation. And some Russian words have lovely music to my ears, as with ice cream and of-course, мороженое и, конечно.
> Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language.
That's saying that getting to the lunar orbit is the only difficult part in landing on the Moon. The whole complexity of inflectional languages is in the inflections. It's also why Slavic (or Turkic) languages form such a large continuum of mutually almost-intelligible languages.
Compared to inflections, everything else in Russian is simple. The word formation using prefixes and suffixes is weird, but it's not like English is a stranger to this (e.g. "make out", what does it mean?). The writing system is phonetic with just a handful of rules for reading (writing is a different matter).
Add baltic languages to the mix as well! Lithuanian is like a slavic language with all the inflection drama but with additional word types that are currently mostly gone from slavic languages.
Well, Lithuanian is also a Proto-Indo-European language. But the one that somehow got sucked into a time warp from the past. And it even has a tonal pitch accent in addition to the stress pattern, just to make it more interesting.
Wow, I had no idea. This sounds extremely interesting. I need to read more about Lithuanian language (at least grammar, sadly I don't have time to learn yet another language)
The only difficult part of Russian is writing it. Most native Russian speakers, myself included, can't write properly even after completing 11 years of Russian language in school. Hundreds of rules nobody remembers.
Your experience as a native speaker is completely different from learning the language from scratch as an adult, to the point that it's almost irrelevant. Writing Russuan is not that difficult, it's just the only part that you had to actually do any work to learn
Never thought the difference mastering writing can be so significant. Just like to add what I understand regarding this. It's rather about not making any mistake writing by hand ca. 1-2 DIN A4 pages while someone reads a text (slow enough). I can't remember exactly but making only one (or two) mistake(s) and it is not anymore excellent (just good). Making 4-7 mistakes and it is not good (just sufficient). Making few more and it is bad which means failed. It's a long text with a very short path to fail.
Ukrainian is less difficult to write. There are claims that standardization/reform of Russian made it more artificial (far from natural people language) with overtaking too many words from Latin languages. When I read / listen to Belorussian I think they have even more luck with matching pronunciation/writing than Ukrainian. Which suggests this language is even closer to the common roots old language. (I'm not a linguist.)
Poles will hate me saying this, but I've always really struggled with their orthography, even though I am used to the Roman alphabet. I can see what is going on in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian, maybe even Czech to some extent. Polish is bizarre. Szcz is one letter in Cyrillic. I'm still baffled by l with the line through it.
I think as a native speaker it's different to you.
Native English speakers make spelling mistakes quite often. But as a language learner I struggled with everything, except spelling - I always knew how to spell a word, even if I don't know how to pronounce it. It's the opposite of native speaker experience.
English spelling is one of the hardest parts of the language to learn because the spelling represents ~16th century pronunciation. However what we gained is a common orthography for all the different dialects and accents of English. I can barely understand some people from Appalachia or Western England when they speak, but if they write it down it’s no problem.
> English spelling is one of the hardest parts of the language to learn because the spelling represents ~16th century pronunciation.
English spelling doesn't represent any pronunciation. English spelling represented pronunciation before the Normans, and afterwards was turned into something that would allow Norman speakers to do nearly-intelligible imitations of unpronounceable English words. Even worse, 1) French spelling also had drifted far from pronunciation (although not as far as now), and 2) English picked up a ton of that French and further mispronounced it.
Such as how place names that now end in "-shire" pre-conquest ended in "-scr," which is how they're still pronounced.
> However what we gained is a common orthography for all the different dialects and accents of English.
True, but those dialects came after the spelling changes. Vowels in English multiplied out of control and became more of a system of how vowels could relate to each other rather than specific sounds, like in (very regular) Old English when a long or doubled vowel was simply the same vowel sounded longer. Germanic vowels are crazy and got crazier.
To understand somebody's English, you listen to them for a while and figure out what they're doing with their vowels - we know from experience that some vowel sounds move together with each other, so when we hear X we can guess Y, and we then look for exceptions and mergers. Once we've figured out the vowels, the words become clear. A fun example is when you compare the Canadian accent to the US accent, and you see some words rhyme in both British and Canadian English that don't rhyme in US English.
IIRC, English is often described as having between 16 and 22 vowels, depending on who is speaking it. Writing that would be hellish, and as you say, you'd have to change spellings when you crossed rivers. English orthography is more like Chinese orthography than one would think.
>It is not that different from German in this matter.
Russian inflection changes the stress. In German it's fixed. Inflectional forms are much more varied in Russian. Colloquial German is much more analytical (past tense is almost always "ich habe" + participle). German has devolved to basically 3 cases at this point (with genitive dying out), compared to Russian's 6. But conceptually, they're very similar indeed.
If you just want to be understood, Russian is not very hard. I think it's true for any language. To master it, however...
> It is not that different from German in this matter.
I've met several Germans who spoke Russian fluently, none of them has really mastered the instrumental case, not even a friend of mine who worked at the German embassy in Moscow. Although you might say it's a minor grammar difference, this particular grammar case seems hard to grasp for people who are not accustomed to it through their native language.
Also, from my personal experience, quite a few Germans who learnt Russian had a real struggle understanding the concept of perfective/imperfective aspect.
These kinds of grammatical difficulties are typical for people who are learning only their second language after their native language.
After learning 3 or more languages that are not closely related, one is usually exposed to most grammatical features that can be encountered in the majority of the languages, so usually grammar no longer poses any challenges, but only memorizing the unfamiliar words and pronouncing sounds that do not exist in the native language.
German inflection is pretty minimalistic. There are just four cases, and it's mostly the article that is being changed with only occasional and predictable changes to the noun itself. Meanwhile in Russian there are six cases and no article, so it's the word itself that has to change. Also there are three different declensions not counting exceptions.
Gender in Russian is much easier than in German though - most of the time you can tell it by the word itself
Georgian is really interesting. Very few cognates for non-modern words. Colors in Georgian are fun: you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color" (ყავისფერი / ყავის ფერი); you don't have "light blue", you have "sky-color" (ცისფერი / ცის ფერი).
The Russian word for "brown" is literally "cinnamon-colored" ("коричневый"). And the Chinese language just uses the literal "coffee-colored" phrase (咖啡色).
"Брюки цвета кофе" ("pants of coffee color") is natural, "коричневые брюки" ("brown pants") is natural, but "кофейные брюки" is not. In fact the latter would likely be interpreted as "coffee pants" or "pants made out of coffee."
I admit that. I also realize that tguvot is actually arguing in my favor, as he said that coffee color is distinct from brown, and therefore the inference is that they aren't synonymous. I would summarize that they are conceptually different, as "brown" is a real color, whereas "coffee color" is a marketing color.
"кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
> "кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
If the context is clothes, people would likely be able to guess, sure. But consider another example "кофейная чашка" ("a coffee mug"). In this context, it would most certainly be interpreted as "a mug for coffee" and not as "a coffee-coloured mug." In other words, you must include the word "цвет" ("color") for it to be correct and unambiguous.
> it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
I don't think this is unique to Russian. I'm sure you can do the same in English and Japanese at least.
It’s fine as an occasional stylistic choice, but using it repeatedly as a regular synonym for brown is a pragmatic and collocational error. The meaning is clear, but the wording is marked, and overuse makes the speech sound odd in everyday contexts.
Uh huh. Don't forget "aliceblue" and "rebeccapurple." But seriously, those are just arbitrary marketing aliases, aren't they. I remember e-shopping for sneakers, and every brand's "off-white" was a different color.
For instance, Japanese and Vietnamese do not differentiate between blue and green and require context specific clarification, e.g «traffic light blue-green».
Celtic languages, and I believe Mayan, had a similar thing going on with blue and green. A lot of languages never distinguished orange from yellow really either.
It's coffee-colour (kahverengi) in Turkish as well, but I don't find it interesting. The English word "orange" is after a fruit as well (which is also the same in Turkish: "portakal rengi", or "turuncu").
There have been many authors who have claimed about various old languages that they lacked words for some colors, and "brown" is one of the most frequent colors about which such claims have been made.
I believe that most such claims, if not all, were wrong. The problem is that when reading an ancient text in which colors are mentioned it is very difficult to guess which is the color that is meant by some word and it frequently is difficult to even be sure that the word refers to a color and not to some other kind of property of an object.
There are very rare cases when the text says something like "this object is X like blood", so you can infer that X = "red", or "this object is Y like the sky", so you can infer that Y = "blue".
Brown is a color for which it is even rarer to find suitable comparisons in a text, from which the color can be inferred, than for colors like red, green or blue, which are typically compared to blood, grass and sky.
So when various authors have claimed that there was no word for "brown" in some old language, the truth was that they just were unable to find any word whose meaning could be determined with certainty to be "brown", in the preserved texts, even if there were plenty of words that most likely meant "brown".
Moreover, in nature there are many shades of brown, lighter or darker, more reddish or more yellowish, which is why in many languages there are multiple words for brown, which are derived from various things that have that particular shade of brown, e.g. words that mean coffee-brown, chestnut-brown, dry-earth brown, brown like the fur of certain animals, etc. Such words that identify a particular shade with reference to a familiar object have been renewed from time to time, in function of which objects have become more familiar or less familiar. After coffee became a very popular beverage, in many languages it has replaced whatever reference object was previously used for a dark brown.
As an example, many have claimed that Ancient Greek had no word for "brown". However, when reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, i.e. the oldest Greek texts except for the Mycenaean tablets, there already are a lot of places where there is no doubt that "brown" was meant by the word "aithono-". This is an adjective derived from the verb "to burn", and most dictionaries say that it means "burning". However, in the actual texts there are plenty of places where it does not mean "burning", but it means "burnt", more precisely "having the color of burnt wood", i.e. brown. This is not surprising. Another word used in the same way is "anthrakos", which can be used either for an object red like a burning ember (e.g. for red garnets or rubies) or for an object black like an extinguished ember (e.g. for charcoal or coal).
No idea about Georgian but that's not unusual - for example English didn't have color for orange for a long time. That's why you say "red hair" even though the color is orange.
While English did not have a dedicated word for "orange" there are many examples in older English texts where there was written "red-yellow" or "yellow-red" in the places where modern English would use "orange".
So the color was recognized, even if it did not have a special name.
English didn't have the word "orange" until relatively recently (1500s) either. That's despite the word brown (which is the same colour in a different context) going back millenia.
Names change as language changes. It's hard to imagine Georgian didn't have a word for brown, but that would've been a completely different word that got displaced over time, like yellow-red was displaced by orange.
Given that this pattern appears in several Georgian colors (the color purple is also just "lilac-color": იასამნისფერი / იასამნის ფერი), I'm sure they just used a different brown thing before coffee was common.
Your command and understanding of the grammar of your native language puts a hard limit to how well you can learn other languages. This has not been stressed enough and schools have all but given up trying to teach children grammar because as natives they more or less get along without it.
This. When I first started learning Russian, we immediately jumped into basic grammar rules. After two weeks of incredible frustration, I realized I did not have sufficient mastery of English grammar to be able to establish a framework for understanding Russian grammar. I often say that my first two months of learning Russian were spent learning English and it is not a joke.
Interesting. We had a lot of grammar parsing of Russian since the 2nd grade of school. Especially we analyzed parts of speech and constituents. For the latter, we'd underline words in sentences in different ways.
It's so widespread that today if you want to play word guessing with gestures, and you have several words, you just imitate that underline style, and everybody understands it. (Just remembered, we also did a lot of word analysis, marking up prefix, root, suffixes and ending, and everyone knows this markup too.)
On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language. I mean, I used standard English intuitively, but couldn't have told you any of the technical terms. I agree with modern educators that explicit grammar instruction beyond a very, very basic level should not be a high priority. Exposure to and guided close reading of complex texts sharpens grammatical intuition, right alongside all of the other benefits of an advanced reading level. Knowing deep grammar does not so automatically improve textual interpretation.
This is speculation, but I wonder if the period of emphasizing explicit grammatical instruction wasn't an accidental interregnum. That is to say, back in the days when Latin and/or Greek were part of the ordinary curriculum students learned grammar much as I did, as a "natural" excelerant to interpreting a foreign tongue. Once those languages were dropped educators noticed students couldn't do grammar analysis anymore, and so tried teaching it directly, without fully considering when and why it might be useful. I don't know how well the dates line up, but it would be interesting to look into.
I learned (an academic expression of) German grammar at university, in computational linguistics. There was a class „Syntax I“, and it had us break down phrases and sentences in a graphs, a (constituent) C structure and a (functional) F structure.
> On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language.
This is one of the reasons why Latin is tought. You learn transferring a gramatically hard language into your own, having to learn the ins and out of your own language's grammar. No grammatically complex situation in your own language can fluster you afterwards.
in all countries where i lived, schools where I studied, there was heavy investment in grammar. (no, i didn't study in usa).
I won't really agree that mastering grammar of native language limits on how well you can learn other languages. Maybe it matters in the way how it taught in college, when you are older and approach to learning language is "more structured". But when I learned Georgian at age of 6 and Hebrew at 12 (through very deep immersion. Teachers spoke only Hebrew), English at 14 (I had 5 months of private lessons following by dial-up connection to mostly english internet), it didn't matter. At least not for me.
There was also this interesting phenomena, that immigrant when they went to local school, their scores in hebrew grammar classes were usually higher than those of native speakers.
Russian is seriously messed up language. Especially after learning Hebrew (which is simple and algorithmic) , I was able to look back in Russian and realize what a horrible mess of a language it is.
Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. Language designers really did great work on taking a core of a dead language and proposing a cleaner, more modern version of it.
Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences.
A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.
I had heard somewhere that much of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew consists of loanwords from Arabic. Is this correct and if so, would it mean that the "cleanliness" of the language is more a reflection of Modern Standard Arabic?
Apologies in advance if this is seen as some falsehood or if it's a sensitive topic.
No, that isn't true. Hebrew has taken a lot of Arabic words but not the majority. It has also taken a lot from Yiddish (as you'd expect) and certain modern words which are common across Europe.
I couldn't find a source for how many Hebrew words have each origin, so I sampled 25 random words from the Hebrew Wiktionary and counted their sources. Where there wasn't a clear source (or a clear "way" to a source) or the word itself was spelled in English for some reason I just randomized another word.
The number one source was unsurprisingly Hebrew with 11 words. This includes biblical sources as well as medieval and more modern sources, typically Jewish scholars writing in Hebrew in exile.
The second most common source was Greek with 5 words and relatedly Latin had 1 word. A lot of them you'd probably recognize in many languages e.g. whatever way you say Democracy probably has the same origin (sounds like Demokratia in Hebrew).
The third most common source was ancient Hebrew-adjacent languages, 2 for Aramaic, 1 for Ugaritic, 1 for Akkadian. You could include the 2 for Arabic here as well.
The fourth would be modern loanwords with 1 for English and 1 for Italian ("Pizzeria").
It is also worth noting that some words with a foreign origin still have a Hebrew counterpart. For example דיאלוג==Dialog==Dialogue is not from Hebrew, but you can say דו-שיח instead.
Additionally, Wiktionary does slightly bias towards the words you'd want to look up and is not as comprehensive as a real dictionary, so not a perfect sampling.
My personal guess is that this isn't too far off of reality. A more comprehensive sampling will probably diversify the various European languages rather than just being Greek (i.e. probably a bit more German via Yiddish, a bit of French etc.) and maybe make Aramaic a bit more prominent, but overall it doesn't feel insanely off base.
>Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment.
Then 1918th spelling reform was a thing. It's of course always easier to reform other languages to make it closer to yours than change yourself. Those silly natives can't ever figure out the spelling and dictionary themselves without a bit of a genocide.
overblown. there is no need in vowels beyond first couple of classes of elementary school and first couple of months when you learn hebrew as Nth language.
the rest of complaints can be equally applied to any given language i guess.
hebrew is learned in ulpans with teachers that speak only hebrew. vowels (nikud) will be used only for first month or two when people figure out basics of the language.
given the way that hebrew structured, it's trivial to figure out words even if you don't know them.
the really hard problem is borrowed words that are written without nikud. for example something like: _nvrst .
For what it's worth, I do think English is horrific when it comes to spelling too, but what is effectively happening with both English and Hebrew words is that people are often memorising the whole word as a symbol rather than as a set of units.
Some (most?) national languages, which developed chaotically, are very illogical, with weird constructions and some inexplicable features (Russian and English are examples of this). Artificial/planned languages such as Esperanto are a different matter -- they are very easy to learn and very pleasant to the ear.
It's ironic, seeing tons of exclusively russian-speaking immigrants not being able to learn the native language after decades living in the country.
But it's not about complexity really. I think it's more caused by the deeply ingrained superiority complex in most russians.
And just in case, most russians != every russian.
I was surprised as well living in Hong Kong that many kids grow up never learning Cantonese being born there (Non Chinese heritage). Their parents spoke their native language, and they learned English in a private school.
You could live there until very late in life never needing to know more than a few sentences.
I don't think I've ever seen this in my life from a Russian. I do see a lot of Spanish and Chinese speaking immigrants with no interest in learning English though.
I realized, I don't know many cases of Spanish or Chinese people not learning the language.
My hypothesis: I understand russian and register cases like this easily. Otoh, I don't understand Chinese, so the ones with whom I have ever had any communication, are the ones who learned any of the languages I understand. Similar story with Spanish, my level is ~A2, so there's bias here too, although slightly less prominent.
I've been told that western European languages are easy for Russian speakers because you can learn them by removing parts of the Russian grammar. "Oh, they don't have A, and B and C are the same thing for them, and they don't have D too!" Is that correct?
It's a little bit like moving from Italian/French/Spanish to English, except that English has some tenses with no direct equivalent in those languages and a ton of phrasal verbs to learn, but that's vocabulary and not grammar.
Yes. Although, Romance languages have more verb tenses, generally they're easier. BTW, I only learned that Russan's past tense is the same compound past, by learning Italian. Also, Old Russian dropped participles, but re-borrowed them from Church Slavonic (southern Slavic), so we know these things, and learn them at school. (Ukrainian has participle 2, but not 1, as far as I understand.)
Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object. Some people can't wrap their head around that it can be the other way around, e.g. Italian "sua madre/suo padre" can mean both his and her mother/father. In German, they must concord with both, sein Vater, seine Mutter, ihrer Vater, ihre Mutter. But Russian regional dialects do have the same feature, and if your teacher isn't a mad purist, they can easily give examples: евойная, еёйный.
Otherwise, indeed, there are less features. And in Indo-European, they're all the same: compound past tense, participles, compound past and future.
To give an example of another system: Turkic languages. 4 modal verbs (to run, to walk, to stand, to lay down), that must be applied to everything except the verb "to be", they indicate how much hurry you have doing what you're doing. It's a bit similar to Russian aspect (complete/incomplete), but way more complex. Plus you have noun cases, and everything is a suffix, and the verb is always the last. So, "I don't do X" will be something like "I <verb+ing> <stand>+me+not" (like those German prefixes that fall down in the end of the sentence.) My colleague, a Kazakh born in Russia, learns it as a foreign language, and he says it's hard.
>Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object.
This is only true in third person singular. For example, in first person singular: 'моя чашка' (my cup, 'cup' is feminine) vs. 'мой ключ' (my key, 'key' is masculine). Third person plural: 'ихнее дело' (their business, neuter) vs. 'ихняя забота' (their concern, feminine) although most educated Russian speakers would object to these pronouns as a bit too colloquial (although not as colloquial as 'евойная'). Same in second person singular: 'твой друг' (your friend, masculine) vs. 'твоя подруга' (your friend, feminine). In all of the examples above, the gender of the speaker/owner cannot even be determined (grammatically speaking).
On a tangent - I've moved abroad to work in a multinational corporation, and I noticed that similar cultures cluster together. I spend most of my time with other Eastern Europeans.
I believe part of the endgoal is to create a fairly homogenous global culture. If you listen to radio stations across the world, many play the same rotten manufactured pop songs... Hollywood and Google/Wikipedia complete the Coca Colonisation.
There is no person with enough agency to have that kind of thing as an end goal. It's effect of a lot of other things, mostly US dominance and globalisation.
You don't need a person. It's just a result of the systems we've set up and how they incentives everyone with any agency to act when they do get to use that agency.
There are plenty. Hollywood has massive dominance in the international film industry as does the American music industry. The USA has spent a lot of time and money promoting its culture. It is partly a consequence of the Cold War.
But the endgoal is to produce a homogenised world culture. You can see this being pushed by groups such as FIFA and Global Citizen (the name isn't even subtle) in the last few weeks with the lead up to the World Cup, and the repeated use of platitudes like "we are one" and "unite for our future".
It seems that cultural domination is dwindling. At least in Russia. Hollywood studios left the country themselves in 2022. But also Hollywood movies are of such low quality nowadays that I stopped going to cinema long before that. Also, they're stuffed with current American narrative (like LGBT propaganda) to the top that doesn't look even a little bit attractive to us. Forty years ago we could look at "American dream" in the movies and feel that we're missing something. Nowadays when LGBT narrative is pushed down my throat forcefully from every scene in the movie and every page of their books (even Sci-Fi), I just stop reading or watching. And there's no more "American dream" that we can strive for or that Hollywood movies can advertise to us. Also their dwindling sales show that this narrative is not attractive even for their own population.
American music seems to lost a lot of popularity here as well. When I hear American music on the radio, it is usually 30-50 years old or more, not the current music which feels totally commercial and artificial.
"we are one" is not equal to "we are exactly the same"
Honestly can't believe I'm out here defending FIFA for god's sake, but it's obvious that they mean everyone should be good to eachother even though we are all different. It has nothing to do with cultural colonisation.
There's a lot wrong with FIFA, but trying to get people to hate eachother a little less isn't one of them
The more peaky the bell curve the more money you can make by targeting your product (or extractive tax policy) at the middle of that curve.
McDonalds, Hollywood, etc, etc. would love nothing more than to have nearly everyone consume one class of products and the bureaucrats and academics who know best would love nothing more than to have simple rules that can apply to nearly everyone.
More or less... I used to have the Radio Garden app where I could listen to stations across the world until bureaucracy intervened.
It was an eyeopener (earopener?) to hear most stations in South America, Asia and Australia playing the same crappy pop songs. Not even very good ones either. Some stations played local music as well which was of far more interest to me than hearing more or less the same pap.
Interesting -- that doesn't match my experience with South America at all! Everywhere you go, the venues mainly play local music, except maybe in Chile.
Mass immigration has always happened over the millennia. Sometimes peoples are replaced, sometimes they end up mostly merged after a few generations.
I don't think it's something that can be prevented or encouraged, it's too many people trying to improve their lives to control it. Especially in a time when we're making most of the tropics uninhabitable with climate change.
Forcing people to move to another country en masse sounds like the failures wouldn't be caused by a culture clash so much as more fundamental issues around being forced to move to another country.
I started learning them for fun and didn't find it to be very difficult. I agree that a weekend might be a bit fast, I'd probably say a week to a month is enough time.
To practice I like going on r/EnglishCyrillic and trying to read some of the posts
Is that a joke?
I’m eloquent in 3 languages and I don’t even consider myself to be particularly good at languages.
Or maybe you have a really high standard for eloquence.
by eloquence I mean, well, being well-spoken. I only speak two languages, and I feel that my ability to express myself in my native Russian degrades severely after periods of time away from home - for example, I often forget words, or fail to come up with a well-put way to describe a complex thing. and even when I'm home, I'm still consuming >= 95% of information and entertainment in English, and only my interactions with friends and family are conducted in Russian, so the opportunities for me to improve my Russian are very limited. the last time I've read a book in Russian was over a decade ago.
I feel the same way as you do, regarding language degrading. I moved when I was 10, and while I can speak conversationally, unless I do it regularly I forget words.
And even without that, my vocabulary has huge gaps. Why would a ten year old need to know the word for "rent"? I didn't learn it until several years ago, in my 40s.
But I disagree about eloquence. We're just out of practice. If we spent six months of the year in Moscow and six in New York, we'd both be perfectly fluent in both.
I do English/Spanish but when a fluent Spanish speaker starts speaking quickly I can't keep up. So maybe I don't know Spanish even though I studied it in school for 3 years. I watch anime/think I could learn Japanese but gotta actually immerse myself in that culture and learn it. At the very least I can discern the difference between Japanese/Korean/Chinese both written and spoken. Although I still have to sometimes check between written Japanese/Chinese.
I think it may actually be from _Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor_ instead. I spent an hour or so last night after seeing this tweet trying to track down the rest of this essay, and it took me a while to find the exact book it was from and find a copy of it. The funny part to me was that the whole essay was actually included in the tweets (aside from a footnote), it's very sort and pithy.
Face it. You have grown up thinking that all teachers should be as kind as your kindergarten teacher and the amount of details about verbs should not exceed the your gaming console instructions.
I always found Russian to be the nasties sounding slavic language. It's just unpleasant to the ears. Probably because it makes you either sound aggressive or like you're asking or begging for another bowl of porridge. I guess watching Soviet world war II movies when I was a child had an impact.
Everything he says here also applies to german. For example, to actually say "ich" properly you need to have a wide kind of smile that feels incredibly strange to an english native speaker.
Why? The "ch" in "inc" is exactly the same sound as that represented by "h" in words like "human" and "huge" in English. It's a voiceless palatal fricative. It doesn't require a "wide kind of smile" unless you somehow need to also do that when saying the vowel in "team" too.
[ç] is an allophone of [h], and it's very hard for English speakers to notice that they're not just saying [h]. I've had the same problem with [e] versus [ɛ].
Sort of. When I hear Nabokov speaking, he sounds like he has an unplaceable regional accent, as opposed to a "foreign" one. His writing in English is fluent, but can have a few tics in it — he repeats certain fancy words, and he tends to avoid slang.
By the way, the last tsar's daughters reportedly picked up a slight Irish accent from one of their tutors. He was sacked and replaced by someone more pukka.
As a native speaker, one thing I see people struggle with surprisingly often is that a) every noun has a gender, and b) every word grammatically related to a noun must always match its gender, case, and plurality. The second thing is the inflections themselves, yes.
But I suppose it also depends a lot on that person's native language — the people I most commonly hear speak Russian as a foreign language are migrant workers, whose native languages are usually Turkic. Those don't have grammatical genders. It feels like learning Russian would be easier for someone who is native in, for example, a Roman language (Spanish/French/Portuguese/Italian) or German.
The gender of a noun in the native language is sometimes the opposite in the other language, so it can be difficult in its own way as well. At least this was my experience when briefly learning german as a portuguese speaker. In this sense learning english was easier, although it happened kinda passively by just being on the internet too much.
I think it depends on how you approach learning genders. As a native English speaker, when learning Romance languages I don't think of words as being feminine or masculine. I think of "il pane" as being a single unit, and "la bottiglia" as being another single unit. I've then never struggled when looking at a new Romance language because I'm not thinking "this word used to be feminine and now it's masculine" - I'm just learning new units, as if the articles are part of the word itself.
This extends to other words that must agree. Instead of thinking "the noun is masculine so the adjective must be masculine as well", think "the article is 'il' therefore the adjective is 'buono' instead of 'buona'".
That works, but Russian doesn't have articles. You can, however, mostly get away by assuming that feminine nouns end with -а, -ь, and -я, neutral ones with -о, and all others are masculine.
That helps less than I'd like with the spoken language given that a trailing о or а are pronounced like а because it won't be stressed.
For non-Russian speakers, the two letters get the sound that you expect if stressed, and otherwise sound like а. This rule also applies to borrow words that were transliterated into Cyrillic. So the English computer becomes компью́тер, and the stress goes on ...пью́т... (the English ...put... bit of the word). As a result that first о became an а sound.
My wife's reassurances that Cyrillic is phonetic likewise didn't work out for me. You can't pronounce the written word correctly without knowing where the stress is. You can't write down the spoken word correctly without knowing which unstressed а sounds are written as о.
Of course this is far better than English spelling...
That а/о thing is taught extensively in schools. There are formal rules for everything, but of course I don't remember any. What I do remember is these are called "безударные гласные" (unstressed vowels), and "проверочные слова" (test words?) are used to figure out whether it's о or а. The idea is iirc that you find a word with the same root in a different form where that syllable is stressed. Except sometimes there isn't one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
As a native English speaker who learned Russian years ago, the o/a thing never felt confusing to me, perhaps because it felt very similar to what English does. Syllables that aren't stressed tend to be pronounced faster with less of a hard sound, and that's just what the o -> a rule feels like to me.
I always felt like Russian was a pretty easy language to learn because it was so regular. Yes there are a lot of cases and declensions, but once you learn the rules, you can get like 95% of the way there, and then even the last 5% of exceptions are quite "regular exceptions", e.g. the "ogo" written -> "ova" pronounced rule.
Eastern europeans speak multiple languages where russian was a second language due to everyone being in the union (occupation). Languages are different and span multiple language groups. IMO there is no strong correlation here not to mention the fact that english is more popular. German language and its presence in the curriculum has other reasons, like the fact that german economy is closer rather than say english or american, there was more incentive to learn german due to economical necessity. But nowadays everyone chooses english as it is a simpler, and considered the real business language.
AFAIK there is no evidence to suggest that the uptake of german is easier for people living in the eastern parts of europe
I think it is generational. A hundred years ago, most Eastern Europeans would have learnt German, fifty years ago they would have learnt Russian and nowadays they all want to pick up American English.
The other reason being that Russian (and other non-English) speakers are usually picking up their third or fourth language, while for English speakers it's almost universally number two, and half-hearted at that... (I say that as a native English speaker whose Spanish is muy mal).
Russians don't actually speak foreign much, a Russian person who speaks four languages is considered very smart / having too much free time for their own good / both. Definitely not West Europe levels of language prowess.
With some rarer ones (eg. slovene), you even have a special dual form (singular, dual, plural).
And then there are different declinations when eg counting:
eno pivo (1 beer)
dve pivi (2 beers, dual)
tri piva (3 beers, plural)
štiri piva (4 beers, plural)
pet piv (5 beers, plural, but now in genitive case for some reason, same for higher numbers, eg sto (100) piv)
On the other hand, knowing slovene and being able to read (usually the serbian form of) cyrillic makes you understand 2/3 of the russian texts out there, which is especially useful for dodgy forums with semi-legal knowledge not available anywhere else and which google can't/won't fully translate (unless you copy-paste the text into a translation window).
I like to imagine Slavic languages as a sort of scale, where Russian is at one end, Polish and Serbian are at the opposite end, and Ukrainian and Belarusian are somewhere in the middle.
I’m learning Croatian as a native Portuguese speaker, and I find out while the grammar itself is easier to think coming from Portuguese, I prefer to deal with sentence construction as if thinking about it from English.
> As a native speaker, one thing I see people struggle with surprisingly often is that a) every noun has a gender, and b) every word grammatically related to a noun must always match its gender, case, and plurality. The second thing is the inflections themselves, yes.
My experience differs:
In terms of vocabulary: the vocabulary in Russian often has little relationship to words in German, English or French, so you really have to learn very "foreign" words.
In terms of pronounciation, learning is made more difficult since many vowels are pronounced differently depending on whether the syllable is emphasized or not, and where the vowel is in the word. Additionally, some consonant clusters are pronounced differently from what you'd expect (simple example: the "в" in Здравствуйте is silent). Additionally, some consonant cluster don't exist in German or English, so you have to get used to them.
In terms of grammar, a difficulty with Russian as a beginner is rather that there exist lots of cases (6-7, depending on whether you consider locative case as a separate case from prepositional case or not), and you of course have to learn which preposition demands which case, and then you obviously have to use the properly declinated noun/adjective.
So, there is simply an insane amount of tables to cram.
I wouldn't claim that the latter is inherently difficult per se, but rather it's a huge amount of material that you have to get very certain in that slows your learning down.
EDIT: Another difficulty is the irregularity of emphasis in verb conjugation:
приходи́ть: e.g. мы прихо́дим
говори́ть: e.g. мы говори́м
i.e. a very different syllable is emphasized in the verb conjugation.
Even native Russian speakers couldn't explain why this is the case, and told me to simply cram the verb conjugation.
There is a saying that you should learn the enemy language to understand them. I suppose the time has come again. Why else would you learn it otherwise? It is not like many of us can even visit the place without consequences. The books were translated years ago anyway.
Slavic languages are similar, IMO you just need to bombard your brain with a lot of it to start discerning the patterns (just like any other language I guess). Reading is not necessary, writing likewise. I never had a single lesson but speak fluently in russian and ok polish, can understand ukrainian, can read also.
Given that you need content for your brain it would be hard to find something nice created in russia recently, might be easier to start with polish if you are in the west.
Polish person here. Don't try to learn Polish. It's insanely difficult, the "rules" make no sense whatsoever, and almost anybody that you'll want to talk to will be able to communicate with you in English.
As for Russian, I also don't see any point in learning it. I was forcefully taught Russian in primary school back when Poland was under Russian yoke. The general idea here is that we'd like not to be in that situation ever again. Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
> Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
Are you a european/white supremacist who doesn't consider the victims of the anglosphere to be human, or are you historically illiterate, even of extremely recent history?
I don't see a third option here since you learned english also, would appreciate an explanation for this special pleading rather than furious downvoting when identifying basic empirical discrepancies in the face of what looks to be materially false claims.
This kind of historical blindness and hysterical hypocrisy has never ended well.
Is HN becoming a place where we should expect people to lie to us and promote trivially disprovably rationales in order to foment cultural and racial hatreds based on current political conveniences?
"Never believe they are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. By giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."
You're really deep into painting everyone with the same brush, aren't you?
Define russian federation first. Am I it? Is it land? Is it government? Is it those zombie mercenaries who execute criminal orders? Is it those who got jailed after protests against war? Is it those who got conscripted? Those who fled the country to avoid that? Those who struggle to meet ends? Those cruising aboard 150 meter yachts?
When the russian military fired missiles and drones at my house, I should just accept it because some of my distant ancestors persecuted brown people. Is that your take?
Also, russia’s war against Ukraine enjoys popular support in russia today. Is your argument that the majority of UK and/or US citizens are eager for their respective countries to engage in war against former colonies today?
I think that if you clicked on the links and reviewed the original claim, you'd see that you removed every single word and concept and overwhelmingly mutually agreed upon fact and then replaced it with nonsense.
Russian and English are both languages of empires that have engaged in countless acts of violence and aggression. They are not equivalent, but to deny this or heavily qualify it (like dismissing acts of war and violence that happened literally yesterday as "distant") in either direction is inherently hypocritical and dehumanizing.
Honestly, I am starting to suspect you are a Kremlin agent designed to make europeans opposed to their war look so crazy that global opinion shifts against the Ukrainians by tying them to denial of and advocacy for the worst acts of europeans.
> Honestly, I am starting to suspect you are a Kremlin agent
Ok, I'll clarify my position, for the avoidance of doubt.
The terrorist state of russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and ongoing genocide is the darkest chapter in European history since the Holocaust. The putin regime has no regard for human life, and russian soldiers brag about raping women, and murdering children, sometimes by shooting them in the head at point-blank range. Many of these rapes and murders are even encouraged by the wives of russian soldiers — thousands of kilometres away from the front lines. We have it all on tape.
While I am not a soldier, I have two medals from the Ukrainian military for volunteering, and I will continue to help Ukrainian soldiers protect civilians in Ukraine, and to put russian invaders in the ground where they belong.
Unfortunately that just leads to more questions, since you did not answer the previous ones at all, and personally volunteering is what most double agents and saboteurs do in order to be in a position to cause more harm by first gaining trust.
Numerically, the numbers of civilians killed are far greater and we have substantive evidence of rape as military policy along with the murder of children.
In order to clear things up, you need to explain if you believe that either:
A) Those lives less valuable by some measure? Ie, did they deserve it, is it all a hoax and no one died, or is there something about them that makes those lives inherently worth far less than yours?
B) You have reason to believe the Ukrainian government is lying about the casualty figures and that over 600,000 Ukrainian soldiers and over 200,000-500,000 Ukrainian civilians including ~50,000 Ukrainian children have already been killed.
Is it A or is it B?
If you can tell me if you agree with statements like this made by Ukrainian officials about Indians and Chinese being inferior races of lesser intelligence, I think that would clear things up also: https://www.livemint.com/news/world/ukrainian-official-says-...
Polish is great because there is a lot of content to learn from. And it is a gateway to other western slavic languages in the region. I basically forced myself to learn it because Manga was all in polish at the time. Their movie industry is great as well.
Do you believe that a significant proportion of native English speakers support the idea of imperialistic invasion and occupation, and the rape and torture of women and children?
I think you miss the point. I am talking about the incentive to learn somebody’s native tongue. I doubt people want to know it to meet an emigrant in Germany and have a conversation in russian. Equally I do mot learn spanish to talk to my neighbours but to have a conversation with a local in spain.
But by your own reasoning, you're also saying it's reasonable to learn Russian as a way to better understand Russia because your country happens to be opposed to them.
If you accept that this relatively obscure reason is a valid motivation (which I agree it can be) then you must also accept that there are all sorts of other motivations that are equally valid including "so I can speak to emigrants" or even just "because I find it fun".
It's not an obscure reason, many people engage with the enemy professionally. That's one of the most frequent motives to learn a language probably. Either you want to immigrate to a country or you want to conduct business with it or it's your enemy and you need to undersrand it. First two options are out for the Western world at the moment
There are some good people among Russian citizens, abroad or not. Some great people even. Unfortunately they are few and far between and are not representative of the mindset, aspirations and values of their home nation. So saying "the Russians are the enemy" is entirely fair. It is an actively hostile society much like Nazi Germany was during the WW2 and this nitpicking over good individuals is not making the blanket evaluation unfair in any way.
Wrong in Russia you mean. If they stop assassinating people, threatening nuclear strikes, conventional attacks, and so on, they wouldn't be anyones enemy.
Careful, by learning russian you also become an oppressed russian minority that needs to be "liberated". It's not just your brain that will get bombarded.
You've just associated actions of a certain fascist government with the whole language spoken by hundreds of millions of people who are against the war it waged and which is orders of magnitude older.
That's not very bright of you, to put it mildly.
Mind you, the language argument was just as well employed by the putin's propagandists, as in something along the lines of "just listen how silly Ukrainian sub-language sounds, lol".
Which is an argument every sane human being finds disgusting and stupid beyond all comprehension, of course.
Their propaganda was saying a lot of different things, including both mentioned above.
Ukrainian is magical language that is both the same as russian (so not real language of its own) and difficult to learn, so russian not being an official language is literally genocide.
A certain part of speakers - yes. A large part, no doubt, otherwise there'd be no one to fight this war.
But what about the other part?
The part that is guilty fell for the same trick that you're falling for - they perceived the whole nation as one single entity that, as they were told by the propaganda, was all Nazis, from newborns to the elderly.
We both know that was bullshit, but you keep painting all Russians in the same way the zombified part of Russians has been painting Ukrainians.
There is a large, growing Russian diaspora and many writers/artists create works in exile. The language helps if you want to understand the millions who left their homes out of principle, but they are not the "enemy".
"The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government."
So are you implying that I should start treating every foreigner as an enemy just because we as a humanity didn't, and maybe will never come up with a political system that will bring peace on Earth once and for all?
Allright then, I'll still regard most of you at least as non-enemies, if you so object being friends with me;
but you are free to continue considering me your enemy if your current political fartwinds turn your wind vane that way.
I used to love learning russian. My russian speaking, moscow educated ukrainian friend used to teach me, but she doesn't want to do that anymore. Hopefully sometime in the future I can pick it up again.
If you’re referring to Lolita, the novel is written from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, that Nabokov very clearly holds in complete contempt. You would know this if you had actually read the book.
vunderba | 16 hours ago
For anyone looking to study Russian, I highly recommend spending a few days familiarizing yourself with Cyrillic first. Toss it into an Anki deck (or download one) and use FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler).
It’s phonetic and consists of only 33 letters, I memorized it on a ~12-hour flight to Moscow many years ago.
owyn | 16 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 15 hours ago
Korean, too.
talideon | 5 hours ago
BalinKing | an hour ago
However, Japanese also has allophony (the moraic nasal and devoicing both come to mind) and kana aren't entirely phonetic (e.g. ha/wa, he/e, ou/ō, ei/ē). I don't know enough about Korean to know if the "irregularities" are also this minor or not—can any Korean speakers/readers enlighten me?
bugglebeetle | 15 hours ago
Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).
that_ant_laney | 15 hours ago
But yes, grammar-wise Mandarin is definitely easier than both Japanese and Korean.
TazeTSchnitzel | 15 hours ago
xelxebar | 6 hours ago
Just to add context to a sibling comment, Japan's first "writing system" was literally just Chinese.
I don't mean Chinese characters, I mean that if you wanted to write something down, you had to communicate in written Chinese. Over time this written Chinese accumulated more and more transformations bringing it in alignment with spoken Japanese until we get what we see today. However, this means that, to a first approximation, modern Japanese is some amalgamation of Old Chinese and Middle Japanese.
Actually, use of Chinese co-existed alongside the whole transformation process, so we actually see this funky mix of Early and Middle Japanese with Wu, Han, and Song Chinese. Character readings varied by region and time period, and so the the reading of a compound kanji term in Japanese mostly reflects the time period when that word was imported. This is why a single kanji ends up having multiple readings. Later, people began backporting individual characters onto native Japanese words, giving yet another reading.
The character 行 is a particularly illustrative example: 行脚 (an-gya), 行動 (kou-dou), 行事 (gyo-ji). The first reading "an" comes from 7th century Chinsese or so, "kou" comes a bit later from the Han dynasty, and "gyo" even later from Song. Then we have the backports: 行く末 (yu-ku-sue), 行く (i-ku), 行う (okona-u). The first "yu" reading is from Middle Japanese, "i" from Modern Japanese, and "okona" from I have no clue when. That's six different readings for 行 alone!
Oh, and then there are "poetic" readings that are specific to usage in people's names: 弘行 (hiro-yuki) etc. Granted, these are often quite evocative of the above readings or that of synonym characters.
The historical introduction process also explains why older readings tend to be more obscure, 1) they had less time to accumulate usage, and 2) they tend to be specific to Buddhist and administrative themes.
Note: The above is just what I've pieced together osmotically over the years, so I'm sure there are errors.
hackshack | 14 hours ago
yread | 10 hours ago
vunderba | 13 hours ago
Unfortunately, some of the 注音 symbols are remarkably similar to Japanese kana, and I found that my familiarity with hiragana and katakana actually caused me constant grief, as I kept mixing up the pronunciations.
jwrallie | 8 hours ago
ljlolel | 15 hours ago
triword | 15 hours ago
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venn_diagram_showing...
cynicalkane | 15 hours ago
ipeev | 15 hours ago
ljlolel | an hour ago
owenversteeg | 13 hours ago
huhtenberg | 6 hours ago
The only letter that never saw any use in proofs was ι (iota).
Koshkin | 4 hours ago
Forgeties79 | 15 hours ago
ljlolel | 13 hours ago
Koshkin | 4 hours ago
lII1lIlI11ll | 10 hours ago
integralid | 9 hours ago
At least you can pretty much always tell how to read a word looking only at its spelling.
talideon | 5 hours ago
dfawcus | 2 hours ago
e.g. ch, th, sh, wr, oo; etc
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English
That page lists 15 such over and above the doubled letters.
nosianu | 8 hours ago
Koshkin | 4 hours ago
talideon | 5 hours ago
Generally speaking, if you've a language with heavy use of palatalisation in its phonology and grammar, the Latin alphabet is going to struggle without hacks. Irish and Scottish Gaelic similarly struggle with the inherent limitations of the Latin alphabet, but chose a different set of hacks (necessarily, given the Irish has the second oldest written vernacular language in Europe after Greek).
Similarly, the Latin alphabet is poorly suited to the Germanic languages, Danish and English in particular, because of their large vowel inventory.
chromatin | 4 hours ago
dfawcus | 3 hours ago
AdrianB1 | 7 hours ago
__jonas | 6 hours ago
d_silin | 16 hours ago
Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language. It is not that different from German in this matter.
kemitchell | 16 hours ago
In addition to noun inflection, verb aspect, pronunciation stress, and punctuation trouble many native English speakers. That's in addition to all the simple irregularities, like irregular nouns and verbs.
Stress even troubles native speakers. When I lived there, I saw slideshow "where 's the stress?" quizzes used to fill time on screens in taxi buses, waiting rooms, and the like.
d_silin | 16 hours ago
Punctuation is secondary, just put commas, colons and semicolons where you feel they should go, most Russians don't know any better themselves.
Noun and verb inflections you will master with enough practice, yeah.
Maybe overall a more difficult language than English or German, but not in the same league as Chinese or Arabic, in my humble opinion.
kemitchell | 16 hours ago
d_silin | 16 hours ago
nfc | 15 hours ago
vkazanov | 13 hours ago
This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.
RugnirViking | 4 hours ago
optymizer | 13 hours ago
jandrewrogers | 13 hours ago
The aspects that make languages difficult for a native English speaker vary quite a bit with the language. I would expect individual experiences with the languages to have high variance as a consequence.
troupo | 12 hours ago
E.g. both Turkish and Russian are in Category 3, but Turkish is trivial compared to Russian.
Turkish grammar is extremely regular, and follows easily defined rules that fit about two pages of easily digestible tables.
In comparison, Russian is a separate class tought in Russian schools for four years to native Russian speakers. And you still get people who can't properly inflect numerals, for example.
Anonyneko | 10 hours ago
integralid | 10 hours ago
dfawcus | 3 hours ago
All through middle and high school, so for 7 years from around 10 to 16. It did become one eventually in primary school, so probably the last 2 or 3 years there.
shawn_w | 2 hours ago
orthoxerox | 20 minutes ago
"I want to swim" in Russian is "ja hoću plavatj", "I" + "want" + "to swim". The only difficulties are the conjugation of "want" and the aspect of "to swim". In Turkish it's "yüzmek istiyorum", where "-mek" is "to" and "-um" is "I". Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.
braincat31415 | 16 hours ago
vkazanov | 13 hours ago
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
jandrewrogers | 13 hours ago
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
dkga | 7 hours ago
throw-the-towel | 4 hours ago
realusername | 12 hours ago
Vietnamese is massively harder to pronounce with way less room for mistakes whereas reading is easier.
somenameforme | 11 hours ago
It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.
mlrtime | 8 hours ago
Likewise, learning to speak the tone is just another grammar dimension, memorization.
Listening for tone is the hard part, but once you know enough grammar AND know the context of the sentence, it falls into place.
YMMV, also Cantonese is more difficult here (IMO).
nephihaha | 7 hours ago
nephihaha | 7 hours ago
Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.
cyberax | 15 hours ago
The difficulty is that the stress pattern is not fixed and needs to be memorized, and it often changes the inflection of the word. E.g. "домá" means "houses", while "дóма" means "at home". Another tripping point is that the stress placement is almost always different in Russian when compared to English.
I'm volunteering as an English teacher for Ukrainian refugees, and one of my rules of thumb is: "If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable". It works surprisingly well.
Muromec | 10 hours ago
gldrk | 7 hours ago
Most of these are Latin and French loanwords where Russian (same as e.g. German) carried the accentuation over from the source language. English is the odd one out as it insists on putting the primary stress on either of the first two syllables, except in some recent loans (and those still get a secondary stress). With nouns the preference is for the first syllable. Russian surnames get similarly butchered, including notably Nabokov, which could have been adopted unchanged.
Sam6late | 13 hours ago
deaux | 8 hours ago
Only because we're in a language thread: i.e. is "that is" (id est) e.g. is "example given" (exempli gratia)
cyberax | 16 hours ago
That's saying that getting to the lunar orbit is the only difficult part in landing on the Moon. The whole complexity of inflectional languages is in the inflections. It's also why Slavic (or Turkic) languages form such a large continuum of mutually almost-intelligible languages.
Compared to inflections, everything else in Russian is simple. The word formation using prefixes and suffixes is weird, but it's not like English is a stranger to this (e.g. "make out", what does it mean?). The writing system is phonetic with just a handful of rules for reading (writing is a different matter).
d_silin | 15 hours ago
vkazanov | 13 hours ago
cyberax | 12 hours ago
integralid | 9 hours ago
mndgs | 9 hours ago
sakopov | 12 hours ago
usrnm | 11 hours ago
kvemkon | 8 hours ago
Never thought the difference mastering writing can be so significant. Just like to add what I understand regarding this. It's rather about not making any mistake writing by hand ca. 1-2 DIN A4 pages while someone reads a text (slow enough). I can't remember exactly but making only one (or two) mistake(s) and it is not anymore excellent (just good). Making 4-7 mistakes and it is not good (just sufficient). Making few more and it is bad which means failed. It's a long text with a very short path to fail.
Ukrainian is less difficult to write. There are claims that standardization/reform of Russian made it more artificial (far from natural people language) with overtaking too many words from Latin languages. When I read / listen to Belorussian I think they have even more luck with matching pronunciation/writing than Ukrainian. Which suggests this language is even closer to the common roots old language. (I'm not a linguist.)
nephihaha | 7 hours ago
vladgur | 11 hours ago
integralid | 10 hours ago
Native English speakers make spelling mistakes quite often. But as a language learner I struggled with everything, except spelling - I always knew how to spell a word, even if I don't know how to pronounce it. It's the opposite of native speaker experience.
nephihaha | 7 hours ago
The state of English spelling has deteriorated a lot since the simpler minded started going online.
By the way, I far prefer Russian orthography to Polish which has me baffled a lot of the time.
nkrisc | 7 hours ago
nephihaha | 3 hours ago
vatsachak | 2 hours ago
Where is "here"? They've been a thing for 200 years so I'm curious
nephihaha | 2 hours ago
Not the USA. :)
pessimizer | 25 minutes ago
English spelling doesn't represent any pronunciation. English spelling represented pronunciation before the Normans, and afterwards was turned into something that would allow Norman speakers to do nearly-intelligible imitations of unpronounceable English words. Even worse, 1) French spelling also had drifted far from pronunciation (although not as far as now), and 2) English picked up a ton of that French and further mispronounced it.
Such as how place names that now end in "-shire" pre-conquest ended in "-scr," which is how they're still pronounced.
> However what we gained is a common orthography for all the different dialects and accents of English.
True, but those dialects came after the spelling changes. Vowels in English multiplied out of control and became more of a system of how vowels could relate to each other rather than specific sounds, like in (very regular) Old English when a long or doubled vowel was simply the same vowel sounded longer. Germanic vowels are crazy and got crazier.
To understand somebody's English, you listen to them for a while and figure out what they're doing with their vowels - we know from experience that some vowel sounds move together with each other, so when we hear X we can guess Y, and we then look for exceptions and mergers. Once we've figured out the vowels, the words become clear. A fun example is when you compare the Canadian accent to the US accent, and you see some words rhyme in both British and Canadian English that don't rhyme in US English.
IIRC, English is often described as having between 16 and 22 vowels, depending on who is speaking it. Writing that would be hellish, and as you say, you'd have to change spellings when you crossed rivers. English orthography is more like Chinese orthography than one would think.
kgeist | 11 hours ago
Russian inflection changes the stress. In German it's fixed. Inflectional forms are much more varied in Russian. Colloquial German is much more analytical (past tense is almost always "ich habe" + participle). German has devolved to basically 3 cases at this point (with genitive dying out), compared to Russian's 6. But conceptually, they're very similar indeed.
If you just want to be understood, Russian is not very hard. I think it's true for any language. To master it, however...
eukgoekoko | 10 hours ago
I've met several Germans who spoke Russian fluently, none of them has really mastered the instrumental case, not even a friend of mine who worked at the German embassy in Moscow. Although you might say it's a minor grammar difference, this particular grammar case seems hard to grasp for people who are not accustomed to it through their native language.
Also, from my personal experience, quite a few Germans who learnt Russian had a real struggle understanding the concept of perfective/imperfective aspect.
adrian_b | 8 hours ago
After learning 3 or more languages that are not closely related, one is usually exposed to most grammatical features that can be encountered in the majority of the languages, so usually grammar no longer poses any challenges, but only memorizing the unfamiliar words and pronouncing sounds that do not exist in the native language.
forinti | 8 hours ago
Remembering all the verb couples, that's what takes some effort.
oytis | 10 hours ago
Gender in Russian is much easier than in German though - most of the time you can tell it by the word itself
tguvot | 16 hours ago
Saying this as a native Russian speaker
CGamesPlay | 16 hours ago
SanjayMehta | 15 hours ago
My grandfather used "laal" which is usually used for red. I used to wonder if he was colour blind.
leephillips | 2 hours ago
cyberax | 15 hours ago
The Russian word for "brown" is literally "cinnamon-colored" ("коричневый"). And the Chinese language just uses the literal "coffee-colored" phrase (咖啡色).
d_silin | 15 hours ago
koakuma-chan | 15 hours ago
galkk | 15 hours ago
koakuma-chan | 14 hours ago
d_silin | 14 hours ago
koakuma-chan | 14 hours ago
tguvot | 14 hours ago
it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
koakuma-chan | 14 hours ago
If the context is clothes, people would likely be able to guess, sure. But consider another example "кофейная чашка" ("a coffee mug"). In this context, it would most certainly be interpreted as "a mug for coffee" and not as "a coffee-coloured mug." In other words, you must include the word "цвет" ("color") for it to be correct and unambiguous.
> it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
I don't think this is unique to Russian. I'm sure you can do the same in English and Japanese at least.
tguvot | 12 hours ago
Don't know japanese, but english been main language that i consume in past 25 years or so. i never saw it abused to same degree as russian gets abused
LudwigNagasena | 12 hours ago
tguvot | 11 hours ago
tguvot | 15 hours ago
Won't be surprised if there is "pumpkin latte" color nowdays.
koakuma-chan | 14 hours ago
d_silin | 14 hours ago
tguvot | 12 hours ago
inkyoto | 15 hours ago
For instance, Japanese and Vietnamese do not differentiate between blue and green and require context specific clarification, e.g «traffic light blue-green».
rvrs | 11 hours ago
nephihaha | 7 hours ago
cryptoegorophy | 14 hours ago
selcuka | 14 hours ago
It's coffee-colour (kahverengi) in Turkish as well, but I don't find it interesting. The English word "orange" is after a fruit as well (which is also the same in Turkish: "portakal rengi", or "turuncu").
lordgrenville | 12 hours ago
adrian_b | 8 hours ago
I believe that most such claims, if not all, were wrong. The problem is that when reading an ancient text in which colors are mentioned it is very difficult to guess which is the color that is meant by some word and it frequently is difficult to even be sure that the word refers to a color and not to some other kind of property of an object.
There are very rare cases when the text says something like "this object is X like blood", so you can infer that X = "red", or "this object is Y like the sky", so you can infer that Y = "blue".
Brown is a color for which it is even rarer to find suitable comparisons in a text, from which the color can be inferred, than for colors like red, green or blue, which are typically compared to blood, grass and sky.
So when various authors have claimed that there was no word for "brown" in some old language, the truth was that they just were unable to find any word whose meaning could be determined with certainty to be "brown", in the preserved texts, even if there were plenty of words that most likely meant "brown".
Moreover, in nature there are many shades of brown, lighter or darker, more reddish or more yellowish, which is why in many languages there are multiple words for brown, which are derived from various things that have that particular shade of brown, e.g. words that mean coffee-brown, chestnut-brown, dry-earth brown, brown like the fur of certain animals, etc. Such words that identify a particular shade with reference to a familiar object have been renewed from time to time, in function of which objects have become more familiar or less familiar. After coffee became a very popular beverage, in many languages it has replaced whatever reference object was previously used for a dark brown.
As an example, many have claimed that Ancient Greek had no word for "brown". However, when reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, i.e. the oldest Greek texts except for the Mycenaean tablets, there already are a lot of places where there is no doubt that "brown" was meant by the word "aithono-". This is an adjective derived from the verb "to burn", and most dictionaries say that it means "burning". However, in the actual texts there are plenty of places where it does not mean "burning", but it means "burnt", more precisely "having the color of burnt wood", i.e. brown. This is not surprising. Another word used in the same way is "anthrakos", which can be used either for an object red like a burning ember (e.g. for red garnets or rubies) or for an object black like an extinguished ember (e.g. for charcoal or coal).
integralid | 8 hours ago
adrian_b | 7 hours ago
So the color was recognized, even if it did not have a special name.
jeroenhd | 7 hours ago
Names change as language changes. It's hard to imagine Georgian didn't have a word for brown, but that would've been a completely different word that got displaced over time, like yellow-red was displaced by orange.
CGamesPlay | 7 hours ago
wartywhoa23 | 5 hours ago
It stems from корица (cinnamon), which was first introduced to Russia in 16th century, and literally means "the color of cinnamon".
But before that they used бурый, from turkic bor/bur, meaning bay, as in horse color.
I guess there must be an older synonym for "color of coffee" in Georgian too.
ffuxlpff | 15 hours ago
davidgh | 14 hours ago
culebron21 | 10 hours ago
It's so widespread that today if you want to play word guessing with gestures, and you have several words, you just imitate that underline style, and everybody understands it. (Just remembered, we also did a lot of word analysis, marking up prefix, root, suffixes and ending, and everyone knows this markup too.)
eszed | 13 hours ago
This is speculation, but I wonder if the period of emphasizing explicit grammatical instruction wasn't an accidental interregnum. That is to say, back in the days when Latin and/or Greek were part of the ordinary curriculum students learned grammar much as I did, as a "natural" excelerant to interpreting a foreign tongue. Once those languages were dropped educators noticed students couldn't do grammar analysis anymore, and so tried teaching it directly, without fully considering when and why it might be useful. I don't know how well the dates line up, but it would be interesting to look into.
Tomte | 12 hours ago
Best class I ever had!
HPsquared | 6 hours ago
AnonymousPlanet | 6 hours ago
AnonymousPlanet | 10 hours ago
This is one of the reasons why Latin is tought. You learn transferring a gramatically hard language into your own, having to learn the ins and out of your own language's grammar. No grammatically complex situation in your own language can fluster you afterwards.
tguvot | 10 hours ago
I won't really agree that mastering grammar of native language limits on how well you can learn other languages. Maybe it matters in the way how it taught in college, when you are older and approach to learning language is "more structured". But when I learned Georgian at age of 6 and Hebrew at 12 (through very deep immersion. Teachers spoke only Hebrew), English at 14 (I had 5 months of private lessons following by dial-up connection to mostly english internet), it didn't matter. At least not for me.
There was also this interesting phenomena, that immigrant when they went to local school, their scores in hebrew grammar classes were usually higher than those of native speakers.
volemo | 15 hours ago
tguvot | 15 hours ago
Russian is seriously messed up language. Especially after learning Hebrew (which is simple and algorithmic) , I was able to look back in Russian and realize what a horrible mess of a language it is.
vkazanov | 13 hours ago
Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences.
A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.
rgblambda | 10 hours ago
I had heard somewhere that much of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew consists of loanwords from Arabic. Is this correct and if so, would it mean that the "cleanliness" of the language is more a reflection of Modern Standard Arabic?
Apologies in advance if this is seen as some falsehood or if it's a sensitive topic.
vkazanov | 10 hours ago
nephihaha | 7 hours ago
Adverblessly | 6 hours ago
The number one source was unsurprisingly Hebrew with 11 words. This includes biblical sources as well as medieval and more modern sources, typically Jewish scholars writing in Hebrew in exile.
The second most common source was Greek with 5 words and relatedly Latin had 1 word. A lot of them you'd probably recognize in many languages e.g. whatever way you say Democracy probably has the same origin (sounds like Demokratia in Hebrew).
The third most common source was ancient Hebrew-adjacent languages, 2 for Aramaic, 1 for Ugaritic, 1 for Akkadian. You could include the 2 for Arabic here as well.
The fourth would be modern loanwords with 1 for English and 1 for Italian ("Pizzeria").
It is also worth noting that some words with a foreign origin still have a Hebrew counterpart. For example דיאלוג==Dialog==Dialogue is not from Hebrew, but you can say דו-שיח instead.
Additionally, Wiktionary does slightly bias towards the words you'd want to look up and is not as comprehensive as a real dictionary, so not a perfect sampling.
My personal guess is that this isn't too far off of reality. A more comprehensive sampling will probably diversify the various European languages rather than just being Greek (i.e. probably a bit more German via Yiddish, a bit of French etc.) and maybe make Aramaic a bit more prominent, but overall it doesn't feel insanely off base.
Muromec | 10 hours ago
Then 1918th spelling reform was a thing. It's of course always easier to reform other languages to make it closer to yours than change yourself. Those silly natives can't ever figure out the spelling and dictionary themselves without a bit of a genocide.
lovegrenoble | 12 hours ago
tguvot | 11 hours ago
nephihaha | 7 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_h541RkCTI
tguvot | 2 hours ago
the rest of complaints can be equally applied to any given language i guess.
nephihaha | an hour ago
tguvot | 57 minutes ago
hebrew is learned in ulpans with teachers that speak only hebrew. vowels (nikud) will be used only for first month or two when people figure out basics of the language.
given the way that hebrew structured, it's trivial to figure out words even if you don't know them.
the really hard problem is borrowed words that are written without nikud. for example something like: _nvrst .
nephihaha | 35 minutes ago
delitrem | 7 hours ago
Some (most?) national languages, which developed chaotically, are very illogical, with weird constructions and some inexplicable features (Russian and English are examples of this). Artificial/planned languages such as Esperanto are a different matter -- they are very easy to learn and very pleasant to the ear.
yongjik | 14 hours ago
koiueo | 9 hours ago
But it's not about complexity really. I think it's more caused by the deeply ingrained superiority complex in most russians. And just in case, most russians != every russian.
mlrtime | 8 hours ago
You could live there until very late in life never needing to know more than a few sentences.
eudamoniac | 3 hours ago
koiueo | an hour ago
My hypothesis: I understand russian and register cases like this easily. Otoh, I don't understand Chinese, so the ones with whom I have ever had any communication, are the ones who learned any of the languages I understand. Similar story with Spanish, my level is ~A2, so there's bias here too, although slightly less prominent.
Do you understand russian?
tguvot | an hour ago
so they either don't learn native language of the country where they live or learn it to bare minimum
pmontra | 15 hours ago
It's a little bit like moving from Italian/French/Spanish to English, except that English has some tenses with no direct equivalent in those languages and a ton of phrasal verbs to learn, but that's vocabulary and not grammar.
tguvot | 15 hours ago
About English there is a Russian saying: "in english you write Manchester but you read Liverpool"
paganel | 8 hours ago
culebron21 | 11 hours ago
Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object. Some people can't wrap their head around that it can be the other way around, e.g. Italian "sua madre/suo padre" can mean both his and her mother/father. In German, they must concord with both, sein Vater, seine Mutter, ihrer Vater, ihre Mutter. But Russian regional dialects do have the same feature, and if your teacher isn't a mad purist, they can easily give examples: евойная, еёйный.
Otherwise, indeed, there are less features. And in Indo-European, they're all the same: compound past tense, participles, compound past and future.
To give an example of another system: Turkic languages. 4 modal verbs (to run, to walk, to stand, to lay down), that must be applied to everything except the verb "to be", they indicate how much hurry you have doing what you're doing. It's a bit similar to Russian aspect (complete/incomplete), but way more complex. Plus you have noun cases, and everything is a suffix, and the verb is always the last. So, "I don't do X" will be something like "I <verb+ing> <stand>+me+not" (like those German prefixes that fall down in the end of the sentence.) My colleague, a Kazakh born in Russia, learns it as a foreign language, and he says it's hard.
zzless | 6 hours ago
This is only true in third person singular. For example, in first person singular: 'моя чашка' (my cup, 'cup' is feminine) vs. 'мой ключ' (my key, 'key' is masculine). Third person plural: 'ихнее дело' (their business, neuter) vs. 'ихняя забота' (their concern, feminine) although most educated Russian speakers would object to these pronouns as a bit too colloquial (although not as colloquial as 'евойная'). Same in second person singular: 'твой друг' (your friend, masculine) vs. 'твоя подруга' (your friend, feminine). In all of the examples above, the gender of the speaker/owner cannot even be determined (grammatically speaking).
gldrk | 6 hours ago
volemo | 15 hours ago
Funnily enough, I was told the exact same thing about English when I was learning it as a Russian native.
lostlogin | 12 hours ago
Forgeties79 | 6 hours ago
nephihaha | 3 hours ago
bell-cot | 5 hours ago
Cockbrand | 11 hours ago
anal_reactor | 11 hours ago
snthd | 9 hours ago
abc123abc123 | 8 hours ago
nephihaha | 7 hours ago
Scarblac | 4 hours ago
potato3732842 | 4 hours ago
stickfigure | 3 hours ago
nephihaha | 2 hours ago
But the endgoal is to produce a homogenised world culture. You can see this being pushed by groups such as FIFA and Global Citizen (the name isn't even subtle) in the last few weeks with the lead up to the World Cup, and the repeated use of platitudes like "we are one" and "unite for our future".
anticodon | 22 minutes ago
American music seems to lost a lot of popularity here as well. When I hear American music on the radio, it is usually 30-50 years old or more, not the current music which feels totally commercial and artificial.
jaapz | 6 minutes ago
Honestly can't believe I'm out here defending FIFA for god's sake, but it's obvious that they mean everyone should be good to eachother even though we are all different. It has nothing to do with cultural colonisation.
There's a lot wrong with FIFA, but trying to get people to hate eachother a little less isn't one of them
potato3732842 | 4 hours ago
McDonalds, Hollywood, etc, etc. would love nothing more than to have nearly everyone consume one class of products and the bureaucrats and academics who know best would love nothing more than to have simple rules that can apply to nearly everyone.
nephihaha | 2 hours ago
It was an eyeopener (earopener?) to hear most stations in South America, Asia and Australia playing the same crappy pop songs. Not even very good ones either. Some stations played local music as well which was of far more interest to me than hearing more or less the same pap.
throw-the-towel | 17 minutes ago
Scarblac | 4 hours ago
I don't think it's something that can be prevented or encouraged, it's too many people trying to improve their lives to control it. Especially in a time when we're making most of the tropics uninhabitable with climate change.
rfrey | 3 hours ago
EliRivers | 3 hours ago
oytis | 10 hours ago
dnemmers | 3 hours ago
Here is what I assume was referenced:
https://chicagomaroon.com/5454/viewpoints/op-ed/why-russians...
ted_bunny | 8 hours ago
ge96 | 10 hours ago
I think it's crazy so many other countries learn English, I mean lucky us who are ignorant here in the states and don't even speak a second language.
apples_oranges | 10 hours ago
ge96 | 10 hours ago
I know the Greek alphabet but only because I learned it in a frat from a YT song.
KomoD | 8 hours ago
To practice I like going on r/EnglishCyrillic and trying to read some of the posts
leshenka | 8 hours ago
Alex2037 | 7 hours ago
sallveburrpi | 6 hours ago
Alex2037 | 5 hours ago
pavel_lishin | 2 hours ago
And even without that, my vocabulary has huge gaps. Why would a ten year old need to know the word for "rent"? I didn't learn it until several years ago, in my 40s.
But I disagree about eloquence. We're just out of practice. If we spent six months of the year in Moscow and six in New York, we'd both be perfectly fluent in both.
ge96 | 2 hours ago
fuzzfactor | an hour ago
I feel as lucky as can be, I speak zero languages fluently :)
sfc32 | 9 hours ago
Also: https://www.ijlll.org/2024/IJLLL-V10N6-557.pdf
knuckleheads | 6 hours ago
zkmon | 8 hours ago
iv11 | 8 hours ago
nephihaha | 7 hours ago
vaskebjorn | 8 hours ago
talideon | 6 hours ago
vaskebjorn | 5 hours ago
Example: https://youtu.be/oSIPAMoCzhA?t=195
BalinKing | 2 hours ago
Telaneo | 5 hours ago
gala8y | 8 hours ago
oytis | 8 hours ago
nephihaha | 3 hours ago
By the way, the last tsar's daughters reportedly picked up a slight Irish accent from one of their tutors. He was sacked and replaced by someone more pukka.
vaskebjorn | 5 hours ago
grishka | 7 hours ago
But I suppose it also depends a lot on that person's native language — the people I most commonly hear speak Russian as a foreign language are migrant workers, whose native languages are usually Turkic. Those don't have grammatical genders. It feels like learning Russian would be easier for someone who is native in, for example, a Roman language (Spanish/French/Portuguese/Italian) or German.
lucms_ | 6 hours ago
jbstack | 6 hours ago
This extends to other words that must agree. Instead of thinking "the noun is masculine so the adjective must be masculine as well", think "the article is 'il' therefore the adjective is 'buono' instead of 'buona'".
grishka | 6 hours ago
btilly | an hour ago
For non-Russian speakers, the two letters get the sound that you expect if stressed, and otherwise sound like а. This rule also applies to borrow words that were transliterated into Cyrillic. So the English computer becomes компью́тер, and the stress goes on ...пью́т... (the English ...put... bit of the word). As a result that first о became an а sound.
My wife's reassurances that Cyrillic is phonetic likewise didn't work out for me. You can't pronounce the written word correctly without knowing where the stress is. You can't write down the spoken word correctly without knowing which unstressed а sounds are written as о.
Of course this is far better than English spelling...
grishka | an hour ago
hn_throwaway_99 | 22 minutes ago
I always felt like Russian was a pretty easy language to learn because it was so regular. Yes there are a lot of cases and declensions, but once you learn the rules, you can get like 95% of the way there, and then even the last 5% of exceptions are quite "regular exceptions", e.g. the "ogo" written -> "ova" pronounced rule.
tchalla | 5 hours ago
sublimefire | 4 hours ago
AFAIK there is no evidence to suggest that the uptake of german is easier for people living in the eastern parts of europe
nephihaha | 3 hours ago
ponector | an hour ago
gcanyon | 2 hours ago
throw-the-towel | 14 minutes ago
ajsnigrutin | an hour ago
With some rarer ones (eg. slovene), you even have a special dual form (singular, dual, plural).
And then there are different declinations when eg counting:
eno pivo (1 beer)
dve pivi (2 beers, dual)
tri piva (3 beers, plural)
štiri piva (4 beers, plural)
pet piv (5 beers, plural, but now in genitive case for some reason, same for higher numbers, eg sto (100) piv)
On the other hand, knowing slovene and being able to read (usually the serbian form of) cyrillic makes you understand 2/3 of the russian texts out there, which is especially useful for dodgy forums with semi-legal knowledge not available anywhere else and which google can't/won't fully translate (unless you copy-paste the text into a translation window).
grishka | 56 minutes ago
samus | 15 minutes ago
rescbr | 41 minutes ago
aleph_minus_one | 31 minutes ago
My experience differs:
In terms of vocabulary: the vocabulary in Russian often has little relationship to words in German, English or French, so you really have to learn very "foreign" words.
In terms of pronounciation, learning is made more difficult since many vowels are pronounced differently depending on whether the syllable is emphasized or not, and where the vowel is in the word. Additionally, some consonant clusters are pronounced differently from what you'd expect (simple example: the "в" in Здравствуйте is silent). Additionally, some consonant cluster don't exist in German or English, so you have to get used to them.
In terms of grammar, a difficulty with Russian as a beginner is rather that there exist lots of cases (6-7, depending on whether you consider locative case as a separate case from prepositional case or not), and you of course have to learn which preposition demands which case, and then you obviously have to use the properly declinated noun/adjective.
So, there is simply an insane amount of tables to cram.
I wouldn't claim that the latter is inherently difficult per se, but rather it's a huge amount of material that you have to get very certain in that slows your learning down.
EDIT: Another difficulty is the irregularity of emphasis in verb conjugation:
приходи́ть: e.g. мы прихо́дим
говори́ть: e.g. мы говори́м
i.e. a very different syllable is emphasized in the verb conjugation.
Even native Russian speakers couldn't explain why this is the case, and told me to simply cram the verb conjugation.
samus | 25 minutes ago
sublimefire | 7 hours ago
Slavic languages are similar, IMO you just need to bombard your brain with a lot of it to start discerning the patterns (just like any other language I guess). Reading is not necessary, writing likewise. I never had a single lesson but speak fluently in russian and ok polish, can understand ukrainian, can read also.
Given that you need content for your brain it would be hard to find something nice created in russia recently, might be easier to start with polish if you are in the west.
jwr | 7 hours ago
As for Russian, I also don't see any point in learning it. I was forcefully taught Russian in primary school back when Poland was under Russian yoke. The general idea here is that we'd like not to be in that situation ever again. Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
fasbiner | 6 hours ago
Are you a european/white supremacist who doesn't consider the victims of the anglosphere to be human, or are you historically illiterate, even of extremely recent history?
I don't see a third option here since you learned english also, would appreciate an explanation for this special pleading rather than furious downvoting when identifying basic empirical discrepancies in the face of what looks to be materially false claims.
sublimefire | 6 hours ago
the references were about russian federation waging an imperialistic type of a war to conquer land when they have the most land already
fasbiner | 5 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
This kind of historical blindness and hysterical hypocrisy has never ended well.
Is HN becoming a place where we should expect people to lie to us and promote trivially disprovably rationales in order to foment cultural and racial hatreds based on current political conveniences?
"Never believe they are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. By giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."
wartywhoa23 | 5 hours ago
Define russian federation first. Am I it? Is it land? Is it government? Is it those zombie mercenaries who execute criminal orders? Is it those who got jailed after protests against war? Is it those who got conscripted? Those who fled the country to avoid that? Those who struggle to meet ends? Those cruising aboard 150 meter yachts?
Who is this elusive mrs. russian federation?
yakshaving_jgt | 3 hours ago
Also, russia’s war against Ukraine enjoys popular support in russia today. Is your argument that the majority of UK and/or US citizens are eager for their respective countries to engage in war against former colonies today?
Fucking wild.
fasbiner | 2 hours ago
Russian and English are both languages of empires that have engaged in countless acts of violence and aggression. They are not equivalent, but to deny this or heavily qualify it (like dismissing acts of war and violence that happened literally yesterday as "distant") in either direction is inherently hypocritical and dehumanizing.
Honestly, I am starting to suspect you are a Kremlin agent designed to make europeans opposed to their war look so crazy that global opinion shifts against the Ukrainians by tying them to denial of and advocacy for the worst acts of europeans.
yakshaving_jgt | an hour ago
> Honestly, I am starting to suspect you are a Kremlin agent
Ok, I'll clarify my position, for the avoidance of doubt.
The terrorist state of russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and ongoing genocide is the darkest chapter in European history since the Holocaust. The putin regime has no regard for human life, and russian soldiers brag about raping women, and murdering children, sometimes by shooting them in the head at point-blank range. Many of these rapes and murders are even encouraged by the wives of russian soldiers — thousands of kilometres away from the front lines. We have it all on tape.
While I am not a soldier, I have two medals from the Ukrainian military for volunteering, and I will continue to help Ukrainian soldiers protect civilians in Ukraine, and to put russian invaders in the ground where they belong.
Does that clear things up for you?
fasbiner | 32 minutes ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0kpd97qqko
Numerically, the numbers of civilians killed are far greater and we have substantive evidence of rape as military policy along with the murder of children.
In order to clear things up, you need to explain if you believe that either:
A) Those lives less valuable by some measure? Ie, did they deserve it, is it all a hoax and no one died, or is there something about them that makes those lives inherently worth far less than yours?
B) You have reason to believe the Ukrainian government is lying about the casualty figures and that over 600,000 Ukrainian soldiers and over 200,000-500,000 Ukrainian civilians including ~50,000 Ukrainian children have already been killed.
Is it A or is it B?
If you can tell me if you agree with statements like this made by Ukrainian officials about Indians and Chinese being inferior races of lesser intelligence, I think that would clear things up also: https://www.livemint.com/news/world/ukrainian-official-says-...
sublimefire | 6 hours ago
otabdeveloper4 | 6 hours ago
So, when do you plan to unlearn English?
yakshaving_jgt | 3 hours ago
Koshkin | 4 hours ago
A nation doesn't own the language.
bromuro | 7 hours ago
sublimefire | 6 hours ago
jbstack | 6 hours ago
If you accept that this relatively obscure reason is a valid motivation (which I agree it can be) then you must also accept that there are all sorts of other motivations that are equally valid including "so I can speak to emigrants" or even just "because I find it fun".
oytis | 5 hours ago
FpUser | 3 hours ago
The West still trades with Russia. Obviously at reduced rate and sometimes under the table.
varjag | 6 hours ago
FpUser | 3 hours ago
What the fuck is wrong with the world?
varjag | 23 minutes ago
tokai | 6 minutes ago
b42 | 6 hours ago
wartywhoa23 | 6 hours ago
That's not very bright of you, to put it mildly.
Mind you, the language argument was just as well employed by the putin's propagandists, as in something along the lines of "just listen how silly Ukrainian sub-language sounds, lol".
Which is an argument every sane human being finds disgusting and stupid beyond all comprehension, of course.
dandanua | 5 hours ago
Lie #1. If they were against the war there would be no war.
> That's not very bright of you, to put it mildly.
Lie #2. He tells facts.
> "just listen how silly Ukrainian sub-language sounds, lol".
Lie #3. This is not what Russian propaganda said. They said Ukraine will not allow to speak Russian and will punish for speaking it.
> Which is an argument every sane human being finds disgusting and stupid beyond all comprehension, of course.
The language itself is not guilty, of course. It's the speakers.
Muromec | 5 hours ago
Ukrainian is magical language that is both the same as russian (so not real language of its own) and difficult to learn, so russian not being an official language is literally genocide.
dandanua | 5 hours ago
yakshaving_jgt | 3 hours ago
What… the fuck?
ponector | 25 minutes ago
wartywhoa23 | 5 hours ago
But what about the other part?
The part that is guilty fell for the same trick that you're falling for - they perceived the whole nation as one single entity that, as they were told by the propaganda, was all Nazis, from newborns to the elderly.
We both know that was bullshit, but you keep painting all Russians in the same way the zombified part of Russians has been painting Ukrainians.
bawis | 5 hours ago
ponector | 29 minutes ago
licyeus | 6 hours ago
wartywhoa23 | 6 hours ago
Мы не враги, друг мой..
sublimefire | 6 hours ago
wartywhoa23 | 6 hours ago
throw-the-towel | 5 hours ago
wartywhoa23 | 4 hours ago
"The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government."
So are you implying that I should start treating every foreigner as an enemy just because we as a humanity didn't, and maybe will never come up with a political system that will bring peace on Earth once and for all?
Allright then, I'll still regard most of you at least as non-enemies, if you so object being friends with me;
but you are free to continue considering me your enemy if your current political fartwinds turn your wind vane that way.
throw-the-towel | 4 hours ago
The nations who quite officially see me as not really human, with widespread popular support? As much as I want it to be different, yes.
I mean, conflict is an inherent part of life. It's possible to hate the fact it happens, yet not ignore its existence.
listeria | 4 hours ago
Translated books lack the nuance or tone of the originals, which you would be missing out of, and most of the time you don't even realise.
Razengan | 3 hours ago
Oh but that's fine because they're the Good Guys™
> It is not like many of us can even visit the place without consequences.
There are traveloggers on YouTube visiting Russia in recent months and they seem to be fine.
> Given that you need content for your brain it would be hard to find something nice created in Russia recently
Oh boy.. wow.. really
_DeadFred_ | an hour ago
ponector | 35 minutes ago
moralestapia | an hour ago
I've never seen the appeal of this guy's famous novel and find it quite weird how it's supposedly a literary masterpiece. Sick people.
squidsoup | an hour ago