[NorseViking]

The trick of Russian language is you don’t need grammar at all to be understood. Just learn the words and compile as you please and use intonation to compensate the lack of proper grammar. USSR was a Babylon with about a thousand native groups who had own language each. Most of them had their own ideas on how to speak Russian for communication with other groups based on the grammar of their languages and the rest learnt to live with it. There are no grammar Nazis in Russia.

[hanamizu]

There are no grammar Nazis in Russia.

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There were two Russian teachers at my university. One was an American and one was an actual Russian (rather rare in the mid-60s). My teacher, the American had the attitude that since he learned Russian perfectly, by God, we’d learn it perfectly too. The Russian teacher’s approach was “I know how hard it was for me to learn English, so I know it must be hard for you to learn Russian.” He’d actually help you on your final exam. My Russian teacher was a grammar Nazi.