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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

Russians are so extreme.

Even though my favourite professors at Waterloo in Canada were Russian, it wasn't until I learned some basic Russian that I finally got over the typical view of them drilled into people by Hollywood.

Your run of the mill Russian is honest about their feelings. Not honest about the facts, no, they can cheat on an insurance filing just fine. But that coldness that so many of them seem to have is often just an outer shell. Once one of them trusts you and gets to know you they're so warm and intense about their love for you. So excited to show you something dear to them. Even devoted enough to learn a new language just to speak to you, even if they're a senior[0]. It doesn't mean the relationship always survives, because that intensity is still there when they're angry, but the highs are so high.

I do not regret learning basic Russian.

[0] This happened to me. Twice.

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A few years ago Masha Gessen did an episode of Conversations With Tyler, a podcast hosted by Tyler Cowen, and at one point she said this about Russian friendships [1]:

> ... I think that — and this may answer your question — Russian friendships are much more emotional and intense than American friendships [...] When I moved back to [the USA] five and a half years ago, it was like this sense of whiplash because I had a lot of friends here, but I had been absent for 20 years. I would get together with my friends, and then two hours later, our get-together would be over. I’m like, “Well, what was the point of that? Was that just to let each other know that we still exist?” Because you don’t really get into deep conversation until about four hours in and a number of bottles of alcohol [...] I think that maybe that’s what you’re referring to. Maybe you’re just referring to the emotional intensity of Russian friendship, where it’s hard. It’s like lovers, even in this country, don’t really drift apart usually. You have to break up. You can’t just stop calling, and go from talking every day to talking every few weeks, and then forget about each other’s existence.

I usually take claims about what people from a country are like with a big grain of salt, but it's interesting to see this in your comment, too. Maybe I should pursue some Russian friendships.

[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/masha-gessen/

That is a great quote, though I have a minor quibble about alcohol being necessary as some of the Russians I befriended were former alcoholics and sober for years. Though others drank beer at dawn.

I found I made deep friendships more easily after speaking even a bit of Russian. If you can say "My name is X" and "awesome" and a couple other small phrases it helps. That said, it wasn't until I had put in around 1000 hours of practice until things really opened up. It's such a hard language and I'm below average in my ability to learn human languages. But I did make steady progress with Verbling and I even met up with my tutor when I was in Ukraine.

One of the things that learning Russian clears up is why they sound so angry to English ears. The language doesn't use tone for emphasis as much as English. It uses word order because the grammar is more flexible so they're able to put the important stuff at the end. Plus the sounds are more constant based. So once your ears get used to the language, you don't really hear Russian (or a Russian accented English) the same anymore. It sounds more human. Plus you learn so many words, you end up finding some of the endearing / superior to the English translation.

Could you give some examples of some Russian words that are more enduring than English words? I've always been fascinated by this.

Молодец, нельзя, фу, тоска, почемучка.

When learning Russian these are just a few of the words I found myself saying even when speaking English. Which gives a hint that a good direct translation maybe isn’t quite there.

There's a rule in linguistics, that the more often a word is used, the shorter it will be -- almost like Huffman coding.

In that light, comparing the one-syllable English "Why?" to the three-syllable Russian "почему?" says something about the safety of asking questions in different countries.

It is no surprise that the English word is shorter, as - unlike English - Russian has two words for "why".

"почему" asks - how did things come to be this way?

"зачем" asks - what is the purpose of things being this way?

Note the difference in implication if I ask you "why" you were late for work. "почему" allows room for circumstances beyond your control, while "зачем" places the blame squarely on your shoulders.

English speakers may be completely unconscious of the overloaded nature of "why" - such is the value of learning other languages.

> Unlike English, Russian has two words for "why".

English has at least three in the same space, two of which are in modern use.

> "почему" asks - how did things come to be this way?

In English, that's, unambiguously, “How". Which is kind of why your own translation starts with it.

> "зачем" asks - what is the purpose of things being this way?

In English that is, again unambiguously, though somewhat archaic, “wherefore”.

“Why” can mean either and is usually disambiguated by context (but is usually read modernly as “wherefore” if the context isn’t otherwise unambiguous, though the existence of the archaic phrase “whys and wherefores” which seems to mean the same as the modern “whys and hows” suggest to me that the bias has flipped over time.)

Though I know very little Russian, I know enough to say that "how" and "pochemu" do not map 1:1 -- If I asked, in English, "how is this cardboard box flat?", the natural response would be "it's designed to be flattened" rather than "someone folded it down", but the natural response to "pochemu" would be the second. The full translation that was given would be necessary to disambiguate.

"Pochemu" is closer to "why" than "how", it asks why something happened regardless of how.

"zachem" is closer to "what for".

I think you are on the right path, it also explains why Russians are so good at Math because сколько is a 2 syllable word vs. "how many" 3 syllables and two words.

To be serious, Russian morphology restrict the number of short words. A verb or a noun will have a suffix that changes by plurality, case, gender, tense etc. and often a prefix. E.g. a pretty common word such as "come" in "Come to dinner with us" will have four syllables in 'заходите' because its root has a vowel, prefix has a vowel and suffix has two.

Question words are grammatically pronouns in Russian so they have all the morphological features of nouns.

I think that “почему/зачем?” is more of an entertainment question in Russia, because the most popular answer would be “it just so happens”. Like, all by itself. You will generally spend much more than three syllables (and maybe some amount of alcohol) to get your answer even from friends. Another fun observation about “почему” is that “normal” russians mostly deal with consequences of the processes out of their direct control. Snow and cold? Ok, find a shelter. Alien invasion? Ok, burn them down and return to a shelter. New “strange” law? Ok, it can’t be properly enforced, or someone will come up with a countermeasure in a week, no need to even leave a shelter. It’s all weather, you don’t question weather.

(Disclaimer: I do not smile)

> There's a rule in linguistics, that the more often a word is used, the shorter it will be

I’m really interested in linguistics, but I’ve never heard of such a rule. Could you give a source please? I’d be curious to know if this is true.

(A striking counterexample I ran into just yesterday: the Urim word for ‘head’ is tukŋunakŋ, and ‘we (incl.)’ is mentepm-. I don’t think this is because Urim people avoid talking about heads or groups of people. That being said, it’s tricky concluding anything from a sample size of n=1.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brevity_law

This is just a statistical tendency. It doesn’t license the inference that any given long word is rarely used.

Interesting — I’ll have to look into this. Thank you!

Hence Russian has a concise word for elephant, slon, and a three-syllable word for hen, kuritza.

fun. did you happen to learn those words from some dog-owner, by chance?

There is single word from dog-owner - фу

all except тоска could be used easily in some way

>> One of the things that learning Russian clears up is why they sound so angry to English ears.

Funny. To me (I'm Greek) Russians sound like they're always complaining about something. It's Germans that sound angry.

Edit: I wonder what Greek sounds like to foreign ears. The closes I've come to understanding it is hearing Spanish people talk, who sound a lot like Greek -that I don't understand.

Both Spanish (The Spain-version, not the Mexico-version) and Greek have a bunch of S sounds _everywhere_.

That's what makes them sound similar to people who don't speak the language that much.

Interesting. Do you have a recommended method for learning Russian?

Eh. "Friend" in English just isn't a good translation, it should be something like "BFF". You aren't expected to have 50 friends in Slavic countries because it would be too much of an investment and in English people call others friend after they waited together for 20 minutes at a train station.

But the concept exists, it's just a different word.

I once met a russian person online who had learned portuguese, my native language. I was extremely impressed. To this day I've never seen anyone else learn portuguese as a second language.

On my travels, I have met several people who, after living in Brazil for only a few months, learned to speak Portuguese fluently. This always impressed me hugely, because English speakers normally have a really hard time learning a language that has "gendered" nouns and inflected articles/adjectives/pronouns, for example... but many of them seem to do just fine! But I met enough of them to now think Portuguese must be quite easy to learn (or maybe, due to the fact that they MUST learn Portuguese when living in Brazil, given most people only speak Portuguese there).

Being surrounded by talkative people helps a lot, and then you get to learn the actual constructs, not the theoretical grammar. Not being facetious, I think that's the main thing behind "it's harder to lear a new language as an adult". I think it's less due to ability and more to do with the contexts and opportunities to practice.

(Though yes, by how they learn you notice what they get easily and what confuses them)

I also think Americans have more of a passive awareness of Spanish than even Americans themselves realize (a whole generation watched Dora the Explorer, for example). A lot of that will translate well learning Portuguese

Where were the people you met from? In my city there's a lot of japanese people, they helped create a thriving steel industry here many decades ago. Many of them learned some portuguese, they could communicate but not fluently. Gendered words in particular seemed to be particularly difficult. The russian I met on the other hand spoke it fluently, maybe even better than native speakers.

Hard to remember them all :) but two were Australians who spent a few months backpacking in Brazil... one was a German girl who just blew my mind how well she could speak Portuguese. Another was a Swedish man who just casually started helping a group of Brazilians, in Portuguese, to order something in a restaurant... I think there were many other cases over the years but it's not like a keep track of them all, so I can't give more examples that I remember for sure... but enough, as I said, to convince me that it's not very rare.

What I find interesting (I speak not a word of Portuguese) is the multitude of Portuguese-X creole languages, particularly the ones tha flourished and are some time still spoken in Sout Asia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese-based_creole_langua...

I think many originated as trade languages, but I find it interesting that languages with such very different roots would mix and create a new language (a Creole, more so; not just a pidjin).

I'm Dutch and learned it as a second language, when I moved to Brazil (at age 24). I met some Europeans who did the same.

Well, it's usually the third or fourth rather than the second (second tends to be English or Spanish).

Portugese is a really nice sounding language. I love it. It's on top of my "to learn" list. Spanish on the other hand no, though I like better how it's spoken in the Americas.

>> Your run of the mill Russian is honest about their feelings. Not honest about the facts, no, they can cheat on an insurance filing just fine. But that coldness that so many of them seem to have is often just an outer shell. Once one of them trusts you and gets to know you they're so warm and intense about their love for you. So excited to show you something dear to them. Even devoted enough to learn a new language just to speak to you, even if they're a senior[0]. It doesn't mean the relationship always survives, because that intensity is still there when they're angry, but the highs are so high.

I'm not a great fan of serious literature, but I've read a bit here and there and I think the above should be blindingly obvious to anyone who's read at least as little as I have (basically, Crime and Punishment, three or four pages from The Idiot and Gorsky's The Flaming heart of Danko). Or, anyone who's listened to the music (hello, Chaikovsky? Black Swan? You wanted feelsies?) or watched the movies (Tarkovsky) etc.

I think in the past the literature and the art in general would have been where Western people learned about Russians (and everyone else not in the West, also, but the Russians have a lot of literature). It's a bit of a shame if this has really been replaced by tinny stereotypes promulgated by Hollywood.

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