If I speak Serbian and Croatian, how hard will it be for me to learn Russian?

2 Comments

1. Srce ♥ Hrvatsko says:

   July 10, 2010 at 8:26 pm

   Russian is a language in itself, it has advantages when you also write Cyrillic kann.Ich’ve also learned Serbo-Croatian, but no Russian at that time in Germany in the Schoole.Wenn you’d enjoy the language they learn, I’d rather understand Italian, it also like to speak more languages but I do not trust nicht.Je currently rules it is so beneficial to you, everything in America is a country without borders is not possible as in
   Germany, a lot of success in learning.
2. Carolina says:

   July 10, 2010 at 8:26 pm

   Well, it really depends. How much time are you willing to sacrifice spending to learn it? It always takes some effort to learn a foreign language. Russian has one of the most complicated grammars, which can be taught for years and then still be not understood.

   It’s true that both Serbian (I will not bother mentioning Croatian since it is actually a variation of Serbian with minor differences, except the cyrillic – latin thing) and Russian are Slavic languages, but there is still quite a lot of differences. Even Russian cyrillic itself differs from Serbian cirillic.

   Russian language is known to be more delicate, it has it’s own phonetics. Russian has one of the most complicated grammars, which can be taught for years and then still be not understood. It combines difficult understanding of future, present and past tenses, where the endings of the words change every time, and complex punctuation. Russian has palatal secondary articulation of consonants, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found in almost all consonant phonemes and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels, which is not entirely unlike that of English. Stress in Russian is generally quite unpredictable and can be placed on almost any syllable. Syllabic stress is one of the most difficult aspects for foreign language learners.

   The Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters, which can be divided into three parts: vowel, consonants and mute letters (there are 10, 21 and 2 of them respectively). The interesting fact about mute letters is that there are no words in Russian language, which begin with these letters as they used just for sounds of the words. Also, Russian has some tricky words. Thus, one word can have different meanings in different contexts and if the person, who was not involved in conversation, accidently engaged with others, they can be lost in this conversation due to not knowing the topic.