Nabokov's guide to foreigners learning Russian
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Vocabulary is especially wild to watch mutate across languages with, e.g., brother recognizable in most languages once you know about mutation between b-p-f and th-t-d-* (the * indicating omission) and it’s almost the same word in most of the IE languages I know except Spanish (which lost it’s frater-derived noun for hermano which comes from the Latin germanus which is the root of the English germane among other words) and Greek ἀδελφός which etymologically means from the same womb.
Well, English has inherited a lot of such families ultimately from Latin: admit, commit, remit, transmit.
Funnily enough, I was told the exact same thing about English when I was learning it as a Russian native.
Here is what I assume was referenced:
https://chicagomaroon.com/5454/viewpoints/op-ed/why-russians...
It took an embarrassing long time reading through the article, waiting for the pivot to ‘Russian Smiling’, only to realize by almost the very end, that clearly, I had been hoodwinked.
Linking the proper article after this endeavor seemed appropriate to save others the same grief.
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.
Gender in Russian is much easier than in German though - most of the time you can tell it by the word itself
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only because we're in a language thread: i.e. is "that is" (id est) e.g. is "example given" (exempli gratia)
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.
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
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.
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.
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.
Remembering all the verb couples, that's what takes some effort.
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...
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).
The language seems to have more archaic features and forms than, say, closely related slavic languages, and its vocabulary has more similarities to old sanscrit than one's average european language.
For curios language learners this means that the grammar is harder than even (already hard enough) slavic grammars.
If English was logical "make out" would mean somethibgg like "throw out". But "to make out" means something else obviously. And you dont throw out your trash. You throw them away...
The one that gets me as a native speaker is the difference between stand up and stand down. Or write up and write down.
Many phrasal verbs are fairly logical, and so don't require much attention.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What the fuck is wrong with the world?
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".
Мы не враги, друг мой..
"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.
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.
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.
A nation doesn't own the language.
So, when do you plan to unlearn English?
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.
the references were about russian federation waging an imperialistic type of a war to conquer land when they have the most land already
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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'".
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...
It didn't work for me in Mandarin though, where I can recall the sounds of words but not the tone.
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.
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).
No idea about the Hungarian grammar. I heard that Finnish has a lot of cases
AFAIK there is no evidence to suggest that the uptake of german is easier for people living in the eastern parts of europe
As a native German speaker: cases mostly work like the type system of a programming language - they help you to immediately detect when there is something off. The "type" that the clause has in a sentence has to match the type that the predicate expects - otherwise the type checker will "reject" the sentence.
Yes, I would say that my thinking about the German language deeply influences my thinking about programming. I asked Russian native speakers who work as programmers whether this also holds for them for the Russian language, but they said the Russian language does not have a similar influence on their thinking about programming as I claim and explained about the German language for me.
Of course, the German case system has been reduced so far that only the genitive (which is also on its way out) still modifies the noun. Articles have taken up the task of carrying the endings, with only pronouns still being fully declined.
Languages without case systems have other means to achieve this of course.
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.
ç != hj
ETA: Wikipedia notes:
> The sound at the beginning of huge in most British accents is a voiceless palatal fricative [ç], but this is analysed phonemically as the consonant cluster /hj/ so that huge is transcribed /hjuːdʒ/. As with /hw/, this does not mean that speakers pronounce [h] followed by [j]; the phonemic transcription /hj/ is simply a convenient way of representing the single sound [ç].
So maybe ç == hj.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#cite_note-18
Example: https://youtu.be/oSIPAMoCzhA?t=195
I recommend you read up on English phonology, as a video for German learners really isn't a good source.
Yes, one does not NEED to have the mouth open wide to express the "voiceless palatal fricative" but if you do not do it with a "slight smile" as described in that video it will not sound right.
I truly hope you know something about German pronunciation, otherwise I don't know what would compel you to even comment on the thread.
Not mentioned is that Russian is well populated with loan words from other European languages (especially technology terms) , but about the only Slavic loan word in European languages I know of is "robot" (work) - samizdat being a more recent arrival.
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.
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.
Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).
But yes, grammar-wise Mandarin is definitely easier than both Japanese and Korean.
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.
Korean, too.
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?
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.
At least you can pretty much always tell how to read a word looking only at its spelling.
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.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venn_diagram_showing...
If you grew up in Christian family, you know the Greek letters Χ (chi), Ρ (rho):
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_Rho
P.S. I am aware that "Windows XP" jokes that arise from this Chi Rho symbol are very easy to write ...
The only letter that never saw any use in proofs was ι (iota).
However that is true that many of Ukrainians are bilingual, due to decades of russian occupation and ethnic cleansing.
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.
I know the Greek alphabet but only because I learned it in a frat from a YT song.
To practice I like going on r/EnglishCyrillic and trying to read some of the posts
I feel as lucky as can be, I speak zero languages fluently :)
Saying this as a native Russian speaker
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").
The Russian word for "brown" is literally "cinnamon-colored" ("коричневый"). And the Chinese language just uses the literal "coffee-colored" phrase (咖啡色).
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.
So the color was recognized, even if it did not have a special name.
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.
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).
My grandfather used "laal" which is usually used for red. I used to wonder if he was colour blind.
For instance, Japanese and Vietnamese do not differentiate between blue and green and require context specific clarification, e.g «traffic light blue-green».
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.
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.
Best class I ever had!
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
About English there is a Russian saying: "in english you write Manchester but you read Liverpool"
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.
You could live there until very late in life never needing to know more than a few sentences.
so they either don't learn native language of the country where they live or learn it to bare minimum
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?
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.
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.
It has evolved naturally to some extent over that time, but much less than other languages - a modern Hebrew speaker can more easily understand medieval Hebrew than an English speaker Medieval English.
What has been synthesised a century ago is additional vocabulary for modern concepts, and this is ongoing for Hebrew as it is for every other language.
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.
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.
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.
the rest of complaints can be equally applied to any given language i guess.
I am sorry I can’t see this in good faith, but I would need to see an attempt at how this is meant for curiosity’s sake and not propaganda.
I am on here a lot, I am a person. And this is what I think when I see the title. I am sorry for the bad vibes but I say no to Russia and learning Russian (for now).
I am okay with potential downvotes. I still think this needs to be said. I wish I could be above this but I can’t.
For the record, I had the exact opposite feeling when i saw that title: I was glad the poster was not feeling obliged to not mention a culture because of a war.
I'm glad you expressed your own view so candidly though, as I did myself, and would not want to discourage that. But you understand you are playing "their" game by helping erecting those fences, right?
The human brain is a hyperactive pattern recognition machine and it is actually usual for it to make associations that don't hold up to intellectual scrutiny. Otherwise it'd be quite difficult to believe things that aren't true. It is expected that people will do this. The real miracle is something like the legal system where a many people have been convinced to follow an evidence- and precedent- based process rather than making decisions based on what they think it true in the moment flowing from their thoughts and feelings.
Not to excuse the behaviour, it is terrifying and generally generally harmful. But it is at least easy to understand - for any random pairing of things there is going to be a large chunk of the population who associates them without any underlying causal reason beyond that they've been spotted together once. Like the Russian language and war. Then political choices flow on from that reality.
Russia and Russians have a long history of exterminating local languages and culture in territories they control.
Colonization of eastern parts of russia involved forced conversion to christianity, violence, rape, mass murder, but not language extermination
Even culture extermination is an exaggeration, sure some areas got forcibly "converted" to christianity (if they were unlucky to be invaded before USSR) but you will see mosques/buddha statues/whatever is applicable and all the local traditions and beliefs mostly going like before
Actually in areas where local languages exist they kept schools teaching local languages and official signs are duplicated in both local and Russian all the way from USSR. I know this first hand;) but even the article you linked will tell you that.
So it was maybe not as good as support for indigenous languages in Canada but not extermination
Only since 2018 it is optional to teach local language in schools, previously there were at least some schools that teach it in every area like that. thank Putler for that too.
Entire history of Ukraine since russia became a thing is a constant struggle for preserving its own language.
Look at what happens now: 1. russia demands russian language to be declared official in Ukraine. 2. russia targets Ukrainian cultural institutions in its airstrikes, trying to destroy anything Ukrainian 3. first things russians do after occupying a territory is "reeducation" of Ukrainian-speaking representatives of the population and burning Ukrainian books
I can continue this list.
Seeing original post at times like this is genuinely confusing. But OTOH, many still choose to be wrong understanding russia's warv against Ukraine. pUtin explicitly said he intends to solve "Ukrainian question" once and for all.
as Lithuania - this is absolutely not true. Even before Soviet union the Russian empire was exterminating language to the point where there's an entire Lithuanian history chapter on Lithuanian book smugglers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_book_smugglers
Soviet empire wasn't better either. My great grandmother who was a Lithuanian language teacher was sent to Siberian gulags _for_ teaching Lithuanian. Luckily she survived and lived to a 100 just to prove these disgusting people wrong.
when they are over my place for more than a couple of hours, there is always conversation about russia trying to suppress anything tatarian: both culture and language.
this is their first hand expirience. from few past decades
Every state has a long history of opressing others, I'm sure Russia did it too, but to be honest being from western Europe I have my own colonial history to come to terms with before looking at others'. What I know about XXth century Russia, though, is that at some point and in some places at least they went as far as inventing writing systems for local languages that had none so that teaching could be done in that language; so that exemple alone is enough to tell me that your viewpoint lacks nuance, to put it very mildly.
History of civilizations is certainly interresting but this is not even the point; the point was: why should the interrest of a text from Nabokov about the Russian language be seen through the lense of some modern episode of political violence? This is obvious nonsense, yet it appears to come up frequently, sometimes, with some people. Why? And what can be done to stop the contagion before mankind revert back to clan warfare? (because if we want to look for reasons to hate each others in past or modern politics, sure enough we will get there!)
Languages have died throughout time, as long as the language is preserved in a book for scholarly reasons I see no issues.
It also depends on how it's done, politically or through violence.
> But you understand you are playing "their"
Who's "their"? West tried to play nice for years, welcoming Russians despite active aggression and it yielded nothing.
Yes, actually, I am. And not only that, I'm also wondering why you think the linked post is "glorifying" anything.
As a Ukrainian, seeing how US sometimes romanticizes Russia and takes active interest in its culture is heartbreaking. But I guess having an ocean between you and the continent with Russia does that to you.
As a Ukranian you should know that there is a lot of shared [positive] culture between the two, so where do we decide where the interest lays?
But I agree that we shouldn't promote or glorify any aspect of the Russian culture, including the language, until they face the truth and start making amends for their history. Instead they are currently doubling down on the atrocities and russification.
So yes, this article is misplaced here.
I'm not sure I agree with the original commenter, but I see the merit in their perspective.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
Kinda sad as russian language is quite incredible but any sane individual must sanitize their environment for their own sake and abandoning russian culture is a perfectly reasonable take.
You mean not the level you would feel satisfied, there are plenty showing resistance, they just disappear. Very easy to judge others when you have little risk.
The ones showing resistance are leaving Russia and immigrating to other countries if they can.
My good friend once taught me that people without shame are the most dangerous people. I am shocked by how much russian-speaking people are shameless.
When russia starts the biggest war since WWII using language/national justification¹, promoting russian culture is shameless beyond limits.
¹ putin promised to solve "Ukrainian question" ("украинский вопрос" – an obvious reference to "Judenfrage" which later was used by German fascists to justify holocaust) when he announced his svo
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.
Glad you enjoyed it, I guess.