How hard is it to learn Russian?
Monday, June 28th, 2010 at
3:45 pm
How long would it take for a westerner to speak fluent Russian?
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Tagged with: westerner
Filed under: Russian Language
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I have met Americans that speak Russian fluently. One guy was a Russian language professor in college. When I first talked to him, I thought he was Russian. He said he learned Russian in college for 2 years, which got him to speak, write, and understand perfectly. He was only able to get rid of his accent when he lived in Russia for 5 years.
Another friend, has been learning Russian for 6 months now by using books, CDs, and Rosetta Stone. He speaks very good and could carry a simple conversation. However, pronunciation is very difficult for him, but he is doing much better than I expected.
Another person I have met, took one Russian class in High School, and 3 Russian classes in college. He speaks very good, and understands perfectly, but that’s because he speaks the language at his job.
You cannot learn to speak fluently unless you learn and speak on a regular basis.
As Russian is NOT a Romantic Language, it would be very difficult to learn the pronunciation and to read the Cyrillic Alphabet. To be fluent in any language it takes at least a couple of years if you dedicate and study the language everyday. Also for a westerner to learn a language difficult like Russian, they should invest in a good teacher to help with the pronunciation and sentence structures especially.
To speak Russian fluently? You would actually have to live in Russia for at least 5 years I suppose. Russian language has a completely different phonetic, grammar and sentence structure than the Latin/Germanic based languages and a different alphabet as well.
I am Russian and I moved to the United States when I was 10 and although I’ve lived here for 10 years now and can speak English fluently I still have a mild accent going on. So, I think it would be even harder for an American to learn Russian fluently since it’s more complex than English.
Depends on which language you speak. The tricky thing about Russian is not the alphabet but the grammar and structure. It is my impression that Germans and to some extent people who speak the Roman languages, they can catch on pretty fast. For people who speak English and the Scandinavian languages, it is very very hard to speak grammatically correct. Also, there is a very low degree of transparency in the words. On the positive side counts, that the pronunciation isn’t too hard. Things are generally pronounced in the same way as they are spelled.
To learn Russian well enough for your everyday life doesn’t require many months, but cracking the grammar will require serious studying, and lots of talent. You can always try to test it on Rosetta Stone.
I have never met any foreigner speaking Russian perfectly. You should be born Russian to speak this language perfectly.
To communicate fluently depends on your work-rate, language ability and your age. With a Russian teacher, you could be fluent in five years. In terms of difficulty, it comes after Spanish, French and German.
To speak Russian without an accent is extremely hard. When I speak Russian, they instantly know I’m foreign. I have met a couple of Russians in Moscow whose English was so good, that I really couldn’t place their nationality.
Hard but not impossible and depends on the person. It took me about two years to get to a level where I have a fairly large vocabulary and am very comfortable conversing. I am not fluent though. However, that is 2 years of extremely relaxed study. If you were a dedicated student, you could probably reach the same level faster.
Individual linguistic ability also comes into play. Mine seems to be higher than most people I know, I think because when I was a child I learned several languages. It sort of causes your brain to wire itself a little differently. I’ve seen this with other people too, those individuals I know who speak, or at least learned at some time, many different languages, seem to find it easier to pick up a new one.
Finally, not all "Westerners" will learn Russian at the same rate, because depending on your native tongue, there may be more or less in common with Russian. For example, German uses cases, has a formal/plural and informal "you" like Russian does, and there is some (not huge amount, but some, more than English I think) amount of overlapping vocabulary. So maybe it’s easier for a German to learn it than an American.
It’s pretty hard.
There are something like 32 letters in there.
And in english, there are like no rules or anything (grammar stuff), but in russian, there are a bunch of useless grammar rules that you shouldn’t care about but they still make you learn it. And you never use those rules in your life. So yeah. Wtf.