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. It is not that different from German in this matter.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
As a native Russian speaker who speaks English and Turkish:
The question isn't about alienness. It's about difficulty. Turkish is trivial compared to Russian. You can learn all the grammar rules you'd ever need in a week or so (though most study materials make it harder than necessary). The rest is just learning vocabulary. Which is just as alien to an English speaker as Russian.
As for the example...
Here's a valid three word sentence in Russian: Ya idu domoj (I'm going home).
Depending on context, mood, feel, etc. any permutation of those words is a valid sentence: ya domoj idu, idu ya domoj, idu domoj ya, domoj ya idu, domoj ya idu.
And that's before we get into inflections, conjugations, gender etc. that neither English nor Turkish have. Or somewhat arbitrary pronunciation rules (korova is pronounced kahrohva) whereas in Turkish every word is pronounced exactly as written (with very few quite regular contractions in regular speech like yapacağım -> yapıcam) etc.
The original link is specifically about difficulty to native English speakers, which is certainly linked to its alienness.
Russian: extremely complicated grammar using concepts entirely alien to English (declensions, inflections, conjugates, grammatical cases, genders, transgressives, and even plurals are weird), has free-form-not-really sentence structure, jumping stress. Oh, and a completely different alphabet to boot.
Yes, phonetic spelling but you won't be able to read anything much before WW1.
Note: 99.9% of Turks are not able to read much of anything before WW1.
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.
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.
Why would you want to? Pitch also provides connotations / emotions in Mandarin.
> It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue.
That will never happen. Your bad pronunciation can aggravate other problems, but if your sentence is otherwise good, ignoring the tones will still leave it fully intelligible.
(I once asked a student in a Chinese school whether a particular class wasn't occurring, and he responded "poss". After some confusion, he was frustrated that the pronunciation difference between "poss" and "pause" should make such a difference in communicating with an English speaker.
But of course, it doesn't. If "pause" were a valid way to respond to "is chemistry class happening today", I would have had no difficulty understanding "poss". His problem was in bad knowledge of the language, not bad pronunciation.
You appear to be making the same mistake here. If you try to communicate, and fail, that is not evidence that you are qualified to diagnose what the problem was.)
Likewise, learning to speak the tone is just another grammar dimension, memorization.
Listening for tone is the hard part, but once you know enough grammar AND know the context of the sentence, it falls into place.
YMMV, also Cantonese is more difficult here (IMO).
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
Vietnamese is massively harder to pronounce with way less room for mistakes whereas reading is easier.
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.
English spelling wasn’t normalized until long after the Normans. Norman scribes did their part but it was the printing industry in London that crystallized it.
Among the major languages, French is also pretty awful. Its orthography is much less practical than Spanish or Italian.
Tibetan orthography is notoriously bad, but is neither alphabetic nor logographic. This is a result of Tibetan changing a great deal since it was first transcribed.
That vast majority of words among all English dialects are spelled similarly and go back to the 16th century or thereabouts.
Where is "here"? They've been a thing for 200 years so I'm curious
Not the USA. :)
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.)
Whenever I, Czech, try to read such stuff, I feel a bit high. As in "what funny mushroom did I just eat"?
Hearing spoken Polish, on the other hand, is quite positively magical. But the orthography is, well, necromancy.
> Whenever I, Czech, try to read such stuff, I feel a bit high
well, duh, it's from a comedy film script. It's exaggerated for fun.