Russian is very simple.
10 endings for conjugation and declension.
No silent or substitute letters.
No same sounding or same spelled words having different meanings.
Simple phonics.
RE: English is a horrible language to try to learn. Nothing to do with “white supremacy”. Russian is very simple.
Esperanto is the SIMPLEST. But it never caught on. Less than 2 million people in the world speak Esperanto.
I worked with 5 or 6 different native born Russians, in California. All the Russians I asked, (three of them) said Russian was far more difficult to learn, than English. I have never tried to learn Russian. All I know, is what native born Russians told me.
Spanish is even easier than Russian, verbs and gender notwithstanding. Portuguese also, except pronunciation can be a bear.
Bet you can’t speak Pottawatomi...
Megwetch NiCan...
Au contraire! English spelling and/or pronunciation is horrible to learn.
Russian is very simple.
Russian grammar is a nightmare.
Five cases (six if you include - Bozhe Moje! - the Vocative, which has admittedly pretty much died out [but is still alive and well in the sister Slavic languages of the Balkans]).
Then, three genera (masculine, feminine, neutral - granted, the word ending usually reveals clues as to the respective genus) and two numeri (singular and plural).
One also has to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects.
How do you say, "I need one hundred and two books" in Russian? How do you say, "I need the one hundred and second book" in Russian?
This explains why Russian - when translated literally into English - usually sounds so coarse and impolite: The Russian language forces speakers to be blunt.
If the Russian speaker were to instead employ all of the little polite words and verb forms his language theoretically allows, the resulting sentences would be nightmarishly difficult to formulate!
Regards,
English is a horrible language to try to learn. Nothing to do with “white supremacy”.
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I always thought of Chinese being a difficult language to learn. Being character based instead of phonetic, one has to learn thousands of characters to read the language. Then to ice the cake, pronunciation is based on tone, so depending on how you say a sound, the meaning can be four completely different words.
I learned Russian.
Its complicated in different ways.
Having gender assigned to everything affecting word endings amd having to remember what objects are which gender is archaic. Plus inconsistent because other languages may classify objects in a different gender and so often people who learned a prior language with gender got confused.
Second for many people it can be weird to have sentences where predicate is before the subject, ie the action/verb phrase is before the noun. The equivalent of “Ran to the store, did Ivan.” Or even “Ran Ivan to the store.” I mean you can figure it out but it sounds clunky to an english speaker and as an english speaker saying it in Russian, would always phrase is subject/predicate.
Third the dialects are different based on where you are which makes it difficult. Moscow speakers don’t speak it the same as those in different rural areas.
I had a hardcore russian lady teacher from the former soviet union teaching me, plus some emigrated russians in my family. I am also part Russian.
You mentioned Russian…. I know zip about Russian language. However, on several occasions, I have referred to scientific papers in Russian and have been relieved that abstracts, tables and graphs generally are in English and with standard scientific units. That's been good enough for my purposes. I will say, if a scientific paper wants to have much if any impact outside of Russian borders, it had better publish in English or be a forgotten curiosity.
My son knows English, Spanish, German and Japanese. Drives me nuts. I'll ask him what he thinks.
I grew up in Santa Fe and Tesuque, New Mexico. My parents from Oklahoma had a time with understanding me from toddler through elementary school. Jumbled up Spanish and English. Spanish faded when we moved back to OK. Spanish revived with high school then college studies.
Spanish has long been faded to where I can only legibly read, pronounce words but don't know what the words mean. Spanish is sort of backwards from an English language sentence structure and thus your brain is twisted a bit differently.
A curious feature of the Russian language is that there is no present tense of the verb To Be. In Russian, to say I am home, is “Ya doma”. Takes some getting used to.
Most people are surprised by this but I read a Russian language course-one book and after about 15 hours of it could read the language well enough -slowly but functional
Pronunciation on the other hand probably will never work out well after >50 years of speaking Texan