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Comment by danjac | Hacker News Reader

The hardest things I found in Russian were the mobile stress - the way the stress on the noun or verb moves around depending on tense/case etc - and the sheer amount of irregularity in the inflections. The vocabulary is smaller though and it's also shared among other Slavic languages - I can get at least the gist of a newspaper headline in Polish or Bulgarian based on my knowledge of Russian, and I can imagine if you're a Slav native speaker it will be much easier than English.

That all said I found Finnish far easier, consistent and logical, even though it's not even in the same Indo-European family.

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I'm Greek, so not a Slav, technically, but once I was in Plovdiv in Bulgaria and I realised I could read all the store signs. Not only where they in an alphabete very similar to the Greek alphabet (compared to the Latin one anyway), the words themselves were also often similar. For instance, I remember looking at a grocer's shop and the sign that said "Oranges", which looked very much like "Πορτοκάλια" in Greek.

Normally Slavic languages don't have Greek roots or vice-versa, so I was a bit surprised by those similarities.

>> That all said I found Finnish far easier, consistent and logical, even though it's not even in the same Indo-European family.

Isn't Finnish the language with 50 noun declensions or something mad like that?

The balkan countries have a long history of mutual cultural influence which mostly exolains this. In particular, there is a large Trukish influence common for things like exotic fruits and foods. The name for oranges is similar in Romanian (a romance language - portocală/portocale), Bulgarian (a slavic language - Портокали / портокали), and Greek (Πορτοκάλι / πορτοκάλια), all borrowed from Turkish (a Turkic, far-eastern language - Portakal / portakal).

The same is true for tea (Ceai, Чай, Τσάι, Çay), but it is not true for older local foods - for exmaple cheese is Brânză in Romanian, Сирене in Bulgarian, Τυρί in Greek and Peynir in Turkish; apple is măr, Ябълка, μήλο, elma.

Interestingly, while they don't generally share much vocabulary, the Balkan languages all share certain grammatical traits despite their very different origins origins (some examples are the use of articles even in slavic languages, a preference for the subjunctive instead of the infinitive, the lack of a proper future form for verbs, using a compound with "want" instead).

I think the term for this is Sprachbund[1] - where a number of languages in close geographical proximity pick up each others' grammatical and other traits despite belonging to different families.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund

> Isn't Finnish the language with 50 noun declensions or something mad like that?

I think you mean cases? These are mostly simple suffixes you attach on the end of the noun/adjective: for example talo (house), talossa (in the house, i.e. house-in). There's some rules around vowel harmony (same as with other Uralic languages like Hungarian, as well as Turkish) and consonant mutation (so a t becomes a d in a closed syllable) but these follow regular rules with a few exceptions for some foreign loanwords.

Vocabulary is quite small with lots of compound words - however other than some aforementioned loanwords (mostly from Swedish and more recently English) the core vocabulary is pretty alien to an Indo-European speaker. Spelling is completely phonetic (everything written as it's spelt) although as with most languages there are strong regional dialects.

Finnish has a lot of up-front rules to learn, but for the most part it's pretty regular with few exceptions (there's also the lack of grammatical gender, another feature of Uralic languages). Russian on the other hand is exceptions all the way down.

Seconding this. Endings are very regular, much more so than even (say) in Estonian. The base vocabulary is small (compared to English) and is acquired by sheer repetition (both active and passive). You need to retune your ear from English though, because both vowels and consonants differentiate between single and doubled (think: I scream, ice cream, ice scream).

> For instance, I remember looking at a grocer's shop and the sign that said "Oranges", which looked very much like "Πορτοκάλια" in Greek.

And interestingly to extend this chain of connections I just read your comment and through my basic knowledge of the Greek alphabet gained through maths, and a rough proficiency in pronouncing Cyrillic I could spot that the word is very close to the Turkish “portakal” (I know a few words from spending some time there over the years).

I moved to Finland, and find Finnish quite hard.

On the one hand it is very consistent and regular, on the other hand the suffix-approach means it requires a lot of concentration in speech. (Which then often results in Finnish people replying to me in English.)

Russian I love to hear, and I love the Russian naming system (Anna -> Anya).

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