How difficult is it for an English speaker to learn Russian?

4 Comments

1. Viktoriya says:

   November 5, 2009 at 1:20 am

   It’s difficult but not impossible! Everything is possible and at the end it doesn’t really matter if you have accent or not and whether you can pronounce some letters the way they should. As long as people understand you and able to reply to you – you are on the right track. I would start from alphabet but don’t do the whole thing do the easy letters first (the ones that sound the same and look the same) and then the ones that sound familiar and then the difficult ones. Just get some kind of russian training course – they all follow pretty much the same pattern. Meanwhile try and learn as many words as you can and build up your vocabulary. Once your vocabulary is big enough you can try and learn different ways russian grammar transforms them. Good luck!
2. La DoNNa a CapO di tuTTi i CapI says:

   November 5, 2009 at 1:20 am

   Russian language is really hard for English people, because English is soft language and Russian isn’t, I mean I’ve seen and heard how Americans or English are trying to pronouns words with lots of "R’s" Sht, "pr" and so on…
3. Inness T says:

   November 5, 2009 at 1:20 am

   I’ve never seen native English speaking Russian without accent or mistakes in the endings. Even those who have lived in Russia for many years cannot get rid of their English accent entirely. Cases, genders, declinations, conjugations, different alphabet with confusing letters like ‘y’, ‘c’, ‘x’, ‘p’…. I guess that looks horrible for non-Russian speakers. But it gets interesting to learn when you’re beginning to understand some things.

   As well as we Russians always struggle in acquiring English accent as it requires total readjustment of our organs of speech.
4. Steve G says:

   November 5, 2009 at 1:20 am

   It’s definitely challenging for an English speaker. The key differences are:

   - Russian uses gender (masculine, feminine and neuter)

   - Russian has six "cases" which indicate how to change the ending of a word to show it’s correct meaning in the sentence (ie. whether it is the subject, or object, etc.) As you know, in English you need to put words in a certain order in the sentence… Well, in Russian you don’t. You use the six cases to indicate what is happening ("who is doing what to whom").

   The best way to start out is:

   - learn the alphabet as soon as possible. There are 33 letters, and this will make a huge difference to how quickly you can learn Russian.

   - learn the basic grammar rules and practice writing and saying sentences to help you get familiar with these rules. (Especially for the six cases.)