TO all of you who want to learn Russia but are scared to get started. DON'T BE!!! I was scared too, putting off starting for months and months because everywhere I went people would tell me how impossible and complicated it is. Well now I have started I cannot believe how anyone can find it hard. It is just as easy as a simple language such as Spanish. There is nothing difficult about the case system, in fact it is quite logical and makes sense. I have only been studying it 3 months and can already understand a lot on the radio and on websites. LEARN RUSSIAN NOW. IT IS EASY!!
Uli,
While the difficulties of the Russian language and alphabet have been exagerated in the West, it still presents some learning problems for English speakers because they would find much of the vocabulary to be unfamiliar.
Take the English term "domestic violence," for instance. In French it would be 'la violence domestique' and in Spanish, 'la violencia doméstica' but in Russian, 'nasilie v sem'ye.' Likewise, in English a phrase such as 'A winter sports paradise' would be Een paradijs van de wintersporten in Dutch and Ein Wintersportsparadies in German, both still intelligible to an English speaker, but in Russian it would be said: 'Raiskii uglok dla liubitelei zimnik vidov sporta.' Not recognizable.
However, you are right in telling people not to be afraid of learning it. One British author of a Russian language book I once read said that even a person of average intelligence can eventually learn Russian through patience and practice. My advice to anyone who has any amount of linguistic talent and wants to learn Russian is "Go for it!."
One relatively simple aspect of Russian is that you don't have to learn as many sets of endings for verb tenses as you do with, for example, the romance languages. (However, you have to learn pairs of verbs to represent the perfective and imperfective. But in most cases they have the same root.)
I don't have any qualms about attempting to learn any language, except for my reticence in speaking because I don't want to be caught making mistakes, and that even applies to speaking my native language. But Russian didn't seem any more difficult than any other language. There always seems to be something that's easier in one language to make up for something that's more difficult. My only problem when I started studying Russian was that I hadn't studied *anything* for about 17 years, and I'd forgotten how to go about memorizing. But it came back quickly enough.
One important question though is how easy is the case system in Russian to use, though, in practice? For example, while German is in theory a bit case-heavy as "modern" Indo-European languages (as opposed to "old" Indo-European languages like Latin, Lithuanian, Icelandic, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and so on) go, its case-heavy-ness in practice is far less than one may superficially presume, because it is primarily managed through determiners and adjectives combined with noun genders, rather than using much actual direct noun inflection, with declensions and what not, per se. On the other hand, though, from what I'm reading on Wikipedia about Russian grammar, it does have a number of different declensions with respect to nouns themselves, even though they aren't nearly as numerous in number as, say, declensions in Latin, so hence while it technically does have Latin-style noun case inflection, it may not be nearly as problematic as one may initially presume.
Travis, for me, learning the case endings for nouns and adjectives was like learning multiplication tables. What's more problematic is knowing which case to use with various prepositions. Sometimes it's logical and sometimes it seems arbitrary. So I think that's something you just have to learn by lots of exposure to the language. My mother started studying Russian at about the same time I did, but she had taken an intensive summer course about 25 years earlier. In her later studies, she despaired of learning the case endings, yet her teacher would throw phrases at her to translate, and the correct endings would come out of nowhere, seemingly. Well, of course, they came out of her long-term memory.
I cannot be an impartial judge to tell whether Russian is easy, because I grew up speaking another Slavic language, Serbo-Croatian, besides my own (its level of difficulty is much the same as that of Russian). I think Slavic languages may be a little more difficult when getting started, but once you're on the right track, they are rather logical. The use of the right prefix with verbs is not more difficult than learning phrasal verbs in English, indeed, I think it is even smoother once you have some practice. The number of verbs is smaller than in English, at any rate - you can get by with several hundreds of verbs plus prepositions.
Yes, it seems to me that learning verbs in Russian has to be easier than learning verbs in English.
I definantly think the pronunciation is a lot more difficult. Then again, I only speak English and Spanish fluently, and a little bit of Italian.
The only that I can think of for why Russian would be more difficult to pronounce than English is simply the extreme prevalence of palatalization or iotation (for those who don't know about Slavic language phonology here, this refers to vowels gaining onglides in word-initial position, instead of palatalizing a preceding consonant, had there been a consonant before said vowel). Of course, though, palatalization is nothing alien to English at all, even though it isn't formalized as part of how the orthography operates as a whole, unlike in Russian, and also palatalization in English is nowhere as systematic as it is in Russian, either.
There are alot of languages that seem hard to learn but in fact are easy. While I don't doubt that Russian is easy to learn, I would like to draw some of your attention to Korean. The written language is easy to learn because it is phonetic and has a much more regular pronounciation from spelling than English or other languages.
OK, I know that has nothing to do with Russian, but go learn a language.
Well, there's plenty of languages which are interesting from my standpoint, as a whole, but I myself plan on becoming fluent in German, before I try learning any further languages, and then, I am rather interested in relearning my Japanese from middle and high school, which I unfortunately did not pick up too well then, and which did not stick very well then either. Hence, it would probably be a while until I'd actually consider really learning either Russian or Korean, to refer to two examples from this thread, myself.
A language with a non-Latin alphabet SEEMS harder for an English speaker. Certainly, it's yet another thing to learn.
Well, for me at least, learning Kana, especially Hiragana (and not as much Katakana, simply because I used it less than Hiragan), was one of the easier parts of studying Japanese during middle and high school as a whole, and I don't have any reason to believe why learning Cyrillic would be any more difficult, especially considering that Cyrillic is alphabetic, while Kana is (mostly) syllabic. For me, at least, the difficult parts of Japanese were Kanji and especially simply trying to get vocabulary to stick, which seems to be far more difficult than getting, say, German vocabulary to stick, as a whole. While Japanese is grammaticaly not much like English, grammar was actually one of the easier parts of Japanese as a whole, simply due to Japanese grammar being highly regular as a whole, and due to it lacking any kind of case declension systems or like, even though there are some little phonological details of verb conjugation which must be minded in Japanese, but these are regular as a whole.
Learning the pronunciation of 33 characters is easy, and a few of the characters even have the same pronunciation as in the Latin alphabet. If you're also familiar with the Greek alphabet, it's even easier.