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Comment by ge96 | Hacker News Reader

I could do the speaking but the letters are crazy. I was trying to learn it in college to impress this Russian chick. All I got was kak dela privjet.

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.

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Hm but a set of letters takes how long to learn? A weekend?

You're saying the Russian cyrllic letters takes a weekend to learn? Maybe, that would be impressive, not for me. I think it would take me longer.

I know the Greek alphabet but only because I learned it in a frat from a YT song.

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

I envy those who doesn't need a second keyboard layout on their computers haha

ditto. I believe it is impossible to be proficient and eloquent in more than one language at a time.

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 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 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.

>lucky us who are ignorant here in the states and don't even speak a second language.

I feel as lucky as can be, I speak zero languages fluently :)

That's the easiest part.

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