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Comment by ender7 | Hacker News Reader

Russian is a famously difficult language to speak at a fluent level. You can make yourself understood fairly easily, but the nuances of both the pronunciation and grammar are quite hard to get 100% correct.

In particular, its system of declension for nouns and adjectives (and some other noun-like things) tends to drive non-native speakers batty. Wikipedia gives a good overview:

"Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, demonstratives, most numerals and other particles are declined for two grammatical numbers (singular and plural), three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and six grammatical cases (see below). This gives dozens of spelling combinations for most of the words, which is needed for grammatical agreement within and (often) outside the proposition. Also, there are several paradigms for each declension with numerous irregular forms."

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I was born in Russia, and moved to America when I was ten. After graduating college, I moved to another city, and took a Russian language 101-equivalent course to meet some people with common interests.

I would not have passed that class if I hadn't already been mostly fluent in the language.

Verbs are no joke too. Many students of Russian seem to be bewildered by movement verbs in particular.

Could you give an example?

I'll leave it to the native speakers to provide some examples. But basically, Russian (along with a few other Eastern Slavic languages) has an entire system of verb organization (this business of "aspect") that has counterparts in only a handful of other languages (outside that family). It's totally pervasive in the language, and way more complex than, say, gendering for nouns or pronouns, or even most verb tense distinctions.

Thanks, I didn't know how is this called. For the native speakers only the perfect/imperfect aspect is noticed as the verb's "kind" (вид) but there are indeed many more.

> ...that has counterparts in only a handful of other languages (outside that family)

Obligatory aspect marking is extremely common all around the world. While within the Indo-European family Russian might represent more hassles for the learner than certain other languages, it is not particularly unusual in this respect.

(Within the IE family, incidentally, combined aspect, deixis and path is marked on motion verbs also in Ossetian. I am sure there are some other IE languages that do it too.)

Obligatory aspect marking is extremely common all around the world.

Right, but usually (except in a few corner cases) this is done with separate helping words (e.g. in English: "to cook up" v. "to cook") which are usually pretty uniform and easy to pick up through osmosis. Such that it generally isn't even taught in grammar courses (and even educated English speakers most likely won't even be even consciously aware this is what they're doing).

Meanwhile in Russian it's a much bigger thing -- the markings are much more complex, and every grammar book and every dictionary addresses the subject.

> Right, but usually (except in a few corner cases) this is done with separate helping words (e.g. in English: "to cook up" v. "to cook")

No, there are a large number of languages around the world that mark aspect with affixes, apophony or root suppletism just like Russian. I can only assume your knowledge is limited to a small handful of probably mainly IE languages. I strongly recommend looking at an introduction to aspect whose examples are drawn from a wide range of linguistic typologies such as the Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect.

Your background knowledge is impressive, but this is way off topic.

Recall I was simply attempting to explain why Russian verbs are sometimes confusing to foreign speakers. My quantification of the distinctiveness of the Russian system may not have been quite correct -- but it was completely ancillary to the broader point I was making.

Your background knowledge is impressive,

This sounds a bit obnoxious, actually. I should have said something like "Your clarification is very helpful, and your points are perfectly valid."

For example, intransitive "to go" (and "to be") take either of two prepositions "в/на" (in/on) depending on destination. You go in school but on class, you go in bedroom but on kitchen etc. I am not sure if there is a system for this. Different objects also use different verbs to stay in place. E.g. silverware lays on a table but a pan stays there.

Well, that sounds weird to me.

My native tongue is of the Romance family, and yet I've always thought that Russian is not particularly hard to learn. Perhaps that's because I've been exposed to a variety of Slavic languages when I grew up.

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