9 ms·

I took several years of Russian in college and am now trying to pick up a little German. Word of mouth had taught me to fear the German case system but... after

• amaccuish 8y ago
  I find german and russian weirdly close to each other. Ok so there are the obvious words like кино, but also other things like the fact that in german, it's "jemande/m/ helfen" and in russian "кому-то помогать/помочь", both taking dative. There's loads of other similarities. Maybe it's the fact they're both indo-european, I'm sure someone more knowledgeable could explain.
  • int_19h 8y ago
    Proto-Indo-European was fusional and pretty crazy on declensions, with plenty of cases for nouns and pronouns, verb aspects and moods, grammatical numbers (it had dual) etc. When you see the same in a European language, that's usually where it comes from, so it's not a coincidence. It seems that languages tend to shed that complexity over time, some (e.g. English) faster than others.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• Maultasche 8y ago
  Yeah, Russian is far worse. I learned Polish for a while, which I understand has a lot of similarities to Russian, and it was far more difficult than German. I remember having decline words differently depending on which number came before it.