6 ms·

Very funny and snobbish too, nothing less expected from Nabokov. Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language

• kemitchell 10mo ago
  What's difficult really depends on the languages you already know. 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.
  • d_silin 10mo ago
    Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement, except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock). 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.
    • kemitchell 10mo ago
      You may find this interesting: https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages
      • d_silin 10mo ago
        Difficulty scale looks about right.
      • nfc 10mo ago
        It seems like an extremely coarse classification. Category 3 contains languages with very different degrees of difficulty, while Bulgarian and Russian are both Slavic they are nothing alike in terms of difficulty since Bulgarian is the most analytic of Slavic languages (has the less inflection). That makes it extremely easy to learn compared to Russian.
        • vkazanov 10mo ago
          What is also interesting is how written Russian was heavily influenced by old Bulgarian. In fact, written russian includes a lot of older written bulgarian vocabulary. This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.
          • RugnirViking 10mo ago
            This happens in other languages too - danish and Norwegian are almost the same written, such that most products just combine the two on the packaging. But spoken it can be very difficult to comprehend
            • vkazanov 10mo ago
              So... codified written languages are similar but real spoken ones have diverged? Is this only in the way things are pronouced or the differemce is deeper?
        • optymizer 10mo ago
          I speak Russian and some Bulgarian as third/forth languages, and while I agree that Russian is more difficult, I wouldn't say Bulgarian is "extremely easy" in comparison. It's maybe ~20% easier at best.
          • cpursley 10mo ago
            I think Bulgarian is considered the easiest Slavic language in terms of grammar because it has a simplified case system similar to how English dropped its cases over time.
      • jandrewrogers 10mo ago
        On a superficial level that seems like a roughly correct ranking in my experience. On the other hand, I picked up one of the category 3 languages pretty easily. I think some of these are more "weird" to a native English speaker than "hard" per se. 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.
      • troupo 10mo ago
        As others hsve pointed out, it's a very coarse (and rather arbitrary) categorization. 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.
        • Anonyneko 10mo ago
          Not for four years, for all eleven years...
        • integralid 10mo ago
          Isn't English also a separate class taught in English schools to native English speakers?
          • dfawcus 10mo ago
            Yes. All through middle and high school, so for 7 years from around 10 to 16. It did become one eventually in primary school, so probably the last 2 or 3 years there.
          • shawn_w 10mo ago
            English classes (at least at my high school) were largely about literature, less the language itself. Though I did take one elective class on grammar.
          • nephihaha 10mo ago
            Not always well. One of the problems is that English speakers do not get taught the proper parts of speech. I learnt far more about English from learning other languages than I ever did in English class. We would get told off for bad spelling and grammar, but very little on the actual mechanics.
        • orthoxerox 10mo ago
          Turkish has a completely different vocabulary (loanwords aside) and a completely different grammar. "I want to swim" in Russian is "ja hoću plavatj", "I" + "want" + "to swim". The only difficulties are the conjugation of "want" and the aspect of "to swim". In Turkish it's "yüzmek istiyorum", where "-mek" is "to" and "-um" is "I". Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.
    • braincat31415 10mo ago
      I find Mandarin Chinese a lot easier than Russian.
      • vkazanov 10mo ago
        Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with. So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
        • jandrewrogers 10mo ago
          Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language. I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
          • dkga 10mo ago
            So Vietnamese is the “Danish” of East Asia it seems
            • throw-the-towel 10mo ago
              Or the Golang of East Asia.
        • realusername 10mo ago
          Personally I find Vietnamese and Chinese to be about the same difficulty overall, just not on the same areas. Vietnamese is massively harder to pronounce with way less room for mistakes whereas reading is easier.
      • somenameforme 10mo ago
    • cyberax 10mo ago
      > Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement 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.
      • Muromec 10mo ago
        Stress pattern in russian is not just different from English, it's also different from Ukrainian half the time.
      • gldrk 10mo ago
        >If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable 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.
    • Sam6late 10mo ago
      As an Arabic speaker I enjoyed learning Russian because we share verbless sentences, and you could just put the words together in any order and you get your idea across and you could be spot on too. So 'what is the time?'(Kotoryy chas) is 2 words as in Arabic for asking the time and other questions in conversation. And some Russian words have lovely music to my ears, as with ice cream and of-course, мороженое и, конечно.
    • deaux 10mo ago
      > except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock). Only because we're in a language thread: i.e. is "that is" (id est) e.g. is "example given" (exempli gratia)
• cyberax 10mo ago
  > Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language. 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).
  • d_silin 10mo ago
    Well, yes.
  • vkazanov 10mo ago
    Add baltic languages to the mix as well! Lithuanian is like a slavic language with all the inflection drama but with additional word types that are currently mostly gone from slavic languages.
    • cyberax 10mo ago
      Well, Lithuanian is also a Proto-Indo-European language. But the one that somehow got sucked into a time warp from the past. And it even has a tonal pitch accent in addition to the stress pattern, just to make it more interesting.
      • integralid 10mo ago
        Wow, I had no idea. This sounds extremely interesting. I need to read more about Lithuanian language (at least grammar, sadly I don't have time to learn yet another language)
      • mndgs 10mo ago
        Maybe because Lithuanian has 3 kinds of stresses...
• sakopov 10mo ago
  The only difficult part of Russian is writing it. Most native Russian speakers, myself included, can't write properly even after completing 11 years of Russian language in school. Hundreds of rules nobody remembers.
  • usrnm 10mo ago
    Your experience as a native speaker is completely different from learning the language from scratch as an adult, to the point that it's almost irrelevant. Writing Russuan is not that difficult, it's just the only part that you had to actually do any work to learn
    • kvemkon 10mo ago
      > Writing Russuan is not that difficult 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.)
      • nephihaha 10mo ago
        Poles will hate me saying this, but I've always really struggled with their orthography, even though I am used to the Roman alphabet. I can see what is going on in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian, maybe even Czech to some extent. Polish is bizarre. Szcz is one letter in Cyrillic. I'm still baffled by l with the line through it.
• kgeist 10mo ago
  >It is not that different from German in this matter. 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...
• eukgoekoko 10mo ago
  > It is not that different from German in this matter. 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.
  • adrian_b 10mo ago
    These kinds of grammatical difficulties are typical for people who are learning only their second language after their native language. 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.
  • forinti 10mo ago
    I find the concept of perfective/imperfective verbs quite easy to grasp. Remembering all the verb couples, that's what takes some effort.
• oytis 10mo ago
  German inflection is pretty minimalistic. There are just four cases, and it's mostly the article that is being changed with only occasional and predictable changes to the noun itself. Meanwhile in Russian there are six cases and no article, so it's the word itself that has to change. Also there are three different declensions not counting exceptions. Gender in Russian is much easier than in German though - most of the time you can tell it by the word itself
  • FabHK 10mo ago
    That's declension of nouns. Then there's the conjugation of the verbs, which is reasonably regular in German and similar to Latin (three persons, two numbers, three basic tenses each with a "perfect", two voices, across four moods).