Realistically, how difficult is it for a native English speaker to learn Russian?
Saturday, May 22nd, 2010 at
8:27 am
I have decided to learn Russian, and was wondering exactly what I'm in for here... can anyone share their experiences?
Specifically, how different is Russian grammar compared to English and to Latin based languages (I've studied French and Spanish)? ...I was teaching myself Japanese a while ago, and was doing pretty well with it. How difficult is Russian compared to Japanese?
Any help is appreciated!
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Tagged with: experiences • languages • russian grammar
Filed under: Russian Language
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Things that make Russian hard:
Much like English, pronunciation doesn’t follow any sort of pattern (like it does with Spanish). Pronunciation is also generally difficult for native English speakers, largely due to phonemes not found in English that we have a hard time even hearing, much less pronouncing (palatalized consonants, for example). In my first quarter, I found it very useful to watch the mouth of our Ukrainian TA as she taught us the alphabet and words. And just hearing it over and over and over again.
The grammar is difficult. There are 6 cases (with gender, in the singular or plural) and they are pretty much critical to understanding anything, knowing vocabulary won’t help very much without knowing these, especially as word order is not important (i saw my mom, my mom i saw, mom my saw i, saw i mom my…).
Russian aspect– aspect is a very difficult concept if your native language doesn’t use it.
Verb conjugations are harder than in Spanish, though are generally not too hard to follow (compared to other aspects of the language)
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I am two years into studying Russian at the university level, and we are still learning new things about cases (though we covered the basics in the first year). Furthermore, none of the non-native speakers (including myself) are able to speak or read fluidly, so it can be very frustrating in this regard. I’ve studied Spanish on and off, and it’s much, much easier. However, I think Russian is such a beautiful language that it’s worth the effort. I feel pretty strongly that immersion is crucial to speaking Russian at any sort of useful or satisfying level. My mom studied Russian both as an undergraduate and graduate student (and taught it for awhile), and one professor put it something like this "Intensive study of French might lead to complete fluency in 4 years, whereas for Russian it would be more like 7."
Russian is not difficult per se, but the grammar and structure of sentences is quite different from the languages you’ve studied (I’m fluent at both Spanish and French too). However, it doesn’t make it anymore difficult (I’m studying Russian). As far as I know, Japanese is harder, but I’ve never taken it, so I’m not sure.
I’ve never tried Japanese but I found Russian easier than German.
I’m bilingual Welsh and English so I found the Russian pronunciation easier than most english speakers,
If you learn the alphabet initially then it helps with pronunciation as it’s a phonetic written language.
As for Grammar it was a complete headache but even Russians admit that they rarely get it right all the time!
I do not agree with previous answer ,it’s not true that russian grammar is easy ,it’s very difficult ( i do not intend to scare you
) ,latin based languages are much easier.I’m from Europe and yes i know russian ,but was easy for me to learn because i have been learning sens i was 3 or 4 .The reason i decide to answer is ,my bf is trying to learn russian ,he is american ,and it’s very , very difficult for him ,especially with verbs ,past tens ,future tens and almost everything ,the only one thing was alphabet.
But i do not know your abilities ,maybe very easy for you .
Good luck.