Having studied at various levels about half a dozen languages (mostly Indo-European but also Hebrew), it’s fascinating to see the various features that are common across them. Most IE languages (but not English) create families of verbs by prefixing them with prepositions (we get some of this in borrowed vocabulary such as attain, obtain, sustain, detain, etc.). Greek makes this most obvious since some of its verb inflections happen as prefixes which end up in the middle of these preposition-inflected verbs. The reflexive pronoun se/sa/si manages to stay pretty consistent across languages, although there are some interesting cases where in, Spanish, e.g., se becomes me/te/nos/vos in the first and second person, but in Czech remains se (with declensions).
Vocabulary is especially wild to watch mutate across languages with, e.g., brother recognizable in most languages once you know about mutation between b-p-f and th-t-d-* (the * indicating omission) and it’s almost the same word in most of the IE languages I know except Spanish (which lost it’s frater-derived noun for hermano which comes from the Latin germanus which is the root of the English germane among other words) and Greek ἀδελφός which etymologically means from the same womb.
I think it may actually be from _Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor_ instead. I spent an hour or so last night after seeing this tweet trying to track down the rest of this essay, and it took me a while to find the exact book it was from and find a copy of it. The funny part to me was that the whole essay was actually included in the tweets (aside from a footnote), it's very sort and pithy.
Thank you for that, I only dug out the HN discussion, having read the article back when it was on the front page. Weird that the link changed like that!
It took an embarrassing long time reading through the article, waiting for the pivot to ‘Russian Smiling’, only to realize by almost the very end, that clearly, I had been hoodwinked.
Linking the proper article after this endeavor seemed appropriate to save others the same grief.
On a tangent - I've moved abroad to work in a multinational corporation, and I noticed that similar cultures cluster together. I spend most of my time with other Eastern Europeans.
Mass immigration has always happened over the millennia. Sometimes peoples are replaced, sometimes they end up mostly merged after a few generations.
I don't think it's something that can be prevented or encouraged, it's too many people trying to improve their lives to control it. Especially in a time when we're making most of the tropics uninhabitable with climate change.
Forcing people to move to another country en masse sounds like the failures wouldn't be caused by a culture clash so much as more fundamental issues around being forced to move to another country.
I believe part of the endgoal is to create a fairly homogenous global culture. If you listen to radio stations across the world, many play the same rotten manufactured pop songs... Hollywood and Google/Wikipedia complete the Coca Colonisation.
The more peaky the bell curve the more money you can make by targeting your product (or extractive tax policy) at the middle of that curve.
McDonalds, Hollywood, etc, etc. would love nothing more than to have nearly everyone consume one class of products and the bureaucrats and academics who know best would love nothing more than to have simple rules that can apply to nearly everyone.
More or less... I used to have the Radio Garden app where I could listen to stations across the world until bureaucracy intervened.
It was an eyeopener (earopener?) to hear most stations in South America, Asia and Australia playing the same crappy pop songs. Not even very good ones either. Some stations played local music as well which was of far more interest to me than hearing more or less the same pap.
Interesting -- that doesn't match my experience with South America at all! Everywhere you go, the venues mainly play local music, except maybe in Chile.
There is no person with enough agency to have that kind of thing as an end goal. It's effect of a lot of other things, mostly US dominance and globalisation.
There are plenty. Hollywood has massive dominance in the international film industry as does the American music industry. The USA has spent a lot of time and money promoting its culture. It is partly a consequence of the Cold War.
But the endgoal is to produce a homogenised world culture. You can see this being pushed by groups such as FIFA and Global Citizen (the name isn't even subtle) in the last few weeks with the lead up to the World Cup, and the repeated use of platitudes like "we are one" and "unite for our future".
"we are one" is not equal to "we are exactly the same"
Honestly can't believe I'm out here defending FIFA for god's sake, but it's obvious that they mean everyone should be good to eachother even though we are all different. It has nothing to do with cultural colonisation.
There's a lot wrong with FIFA, but trying to get people to hate eachother a little less isn't one of them
LGBT propaganda... Funny how people who have been gobbling up propaganda about something, always think "the other side" is the one producing the actual propaganda
And yes, i see the irony of this statement
But some dudes kissing in a movie is not propaganda
Isn’t whether or not something is propaganda determined by the intent of those producing or distributing it?
If the intent of someone including two men kissing in a movie is to promote approval of homosexual relationships, OR is to promote the idea that men kissing doesn’t imply homosexuality, then that’s propoganda, but if the intent is just “the movie sells better if there’s a scene pandering to yaoi fangirls”, or “the screenwriter found something that happened with two guys they know to be compelling”, then it isn’t propaganda,
You're probably right, but my main point was that it's funny that people who have been spoon fed propaganda about something always think the opposite of what they now believe is the actual propaganda
Honestly, pretty impressive by the russian government how they are able to do that
Then again, in many cultures (even in more tolerant ones like here in the netherlands) there's always somewhere a latent hatred and/or disgust towards LGBT. So maybe it's nit that hard to bring that back to the surface after all
But how do you know it's "overrepresentation"? It's media not a strict reflection of population.
Anyway, so you don't like gay people, but tough luck. Just like you can like or dislike whoever you want, people can like and talk about whoever they want. Sorry to break it to you but its not a conspiracy it's just modern society.
Wow. Interesting. I just mentioned overrepresentation, which is a fact that even you can't deny, and you go to such lengths to frame me as a conspiracy theorist and gay hater. I can even read hate in your writing tone.
Why? What makes you so aggressive? What makes you hate someone who points out obvious facts? What is the reason for your denial and hate?
You're doing the old Soviet thing of accusing people of the thing you're doing. Did you use to live in that environment?
Everything you say is unfounded and makes little sense. You seem to be read things that are not there.
I'm just saying that what you think is an acceptable amount of gay "representation" does matter and that it merely reflects your own biases. Your views don't matter in this respect because if you live in a free country the media can "represent" anything it likes and if you don't like it you can turn it off. And complain about it I guess.
That's what it's all about freedom. Preserving freedom. Trying to take away other people's freedom to express themselves is not what its about.
Overrepresentation is when something appears in media way more often than in the real life.
Gay behaviour is overrepresented in the media.
You can frame it with Soviet union, freedom of any kind, human right, democracy, religion, right to consume or not. You can try to make it about me or you and call me whatever.
What you can't do is deny overrepresentation. Because it's the fact, whether you like it or not. And that's the only thing I said, everything else is your projection and false accusation.
You can't notice that in the last 20 years it became obligatory. It is included in almost every movie and every book. It reminds me of Soviet times, when every book, including Sci-Fi about deep space exploration, should've devoted some pages to promoting ideas of communism.
And it wasn't "conspiracy". I doubt there ever was a requirement to do it. Simply, your book had less chance of publishing if you don't do it. I think it is the same in US an EU now: if you don't include 1-2 bits of propaganda or more, your book has less chances to be mentioned in the bestsellers section or something like that.
You don't need a person. It's just a result of the systems we've set up and how they incentives everyone with any agency to act when they do get to use that agency.
While you might have a few global super stars (Lady Gaga, Black Pink, ...) everywhere, the average pop radio station in the USA, Russia, China will be very different from each other.
German inflection is pretty minimalistic. There are just four cases, and it's mostly the article that is being changed with only occasional and predictable changes to the noun itself. Meanwhile in Russian there are six cases and no article, so it's the word itself that has to change. Also there are three different declensions not counting exceptions.
Gender in Russian is much easier than in German though - most of the time you can tell it by the word itself
That's declension of nouns. Then there's the conjugation of the verbs, which is reasonably regular in German and similar to Latin (three persons, two numbers, three basic tenses each with a "perfect", two voices, across four moods).
What's difficult really depends on the languages you already know.
In addition to noun inflection, verb aspect, pronunciation stress, and punctuation trouble many native English speakers. That's in addition to all the simple irregularities, like irregular nouns and verbs.
Stress even troubles native speakers. When I lived there, I saw slideshow "where 's the stress?" quizzes used to fill time on screens in taxi buses, waiting rooms, and the like.
Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement, except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock).
Punctuation is secondary, just put commas, colons and semicolons where you feel they should go, most Russians don't know any better themselves.
Noun and verb inflections you will master with enough practice, yeah.
Maybe overall a more difficult language than English or German, but not in the same league as Chinese or Arabic, in my humble opinion.
As an Arabic speaker I enjoyed learning Russian because we share verbless sentences, and you could just put the words together in any order and you get your idea across and you could be spot on too. So 'what is the time?'(Kotoryy chas) is 2 words as in Arabic for asking the time and other questions in conversation. And some Russian words have lovely music to my ears, as with ice cream and of-course, мороженое и, конечно.
> Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement
The difficulty is that the stress pattern is not fixed and needs to be memorized, and it often changes the inflection of the word. E.g. "домá" means "houses", while "дóма" means "at home". Another tripping point is that the stress placement is almost always different in Russian when compared to English.
I'm volunteering as an English teacher for Ukrainian refugees, and one of my rules of thumb is: "If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable". It works surprisingly well.
>If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable
Most of these are Latin and French loanwords where Russian (same as e.g. German) carried the accentuation over from the source language. English is the odd one out as it insists on putting the primary stress on either of the first two syllables, except in some recent loans (and those still get a secondary stress). With nouns the preference is for the first syllable. Russian surnames get similarly butchered, including notably Nabokov, which could have been adopted unchanged.
It seems like an extremely coarse classification. Category 3 contains languages with very different degrees of difficulty, while Bulgarian and Russian are both Slavic they are nothing alike in terms of difficulty since Bulgarian is the most analytic of Slavic languages (has the less inflection). That makes it extremely easy to learn compared to Russian.
What is also interesting is how written Russian was heavily influenced by old Bulgarian. In fact, written russian includes a lot of older written bulgarian vocabulary.
This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.
This happens in other languages too - danish and Norwegian are almost the same written, such that most products just combine the two on the packaging. But spoken it can be very difficult to comprehend
I speak Russian and some Bulgarian as third/forth languages, and while I agree that Russian is more difficult, I wouldn't say Bulgarian is "extremely easy" in comparison. It's maybe ~20% easier at best.
I think Bulgarian is considered the easiest Slavic language in terms of grammar because it has a simplified case system similar to how English dropped its cases over time.
On a superficial level that seems like a roughly correct ranking in my experience. On the other hand, I picked up one of the category 3 languages pretty easily. I think some of these are more "weird" to a native English speaker than "hard" per se.
The aspects that make languages difficult for a native English speaker vary quite a bit with the language. I would expect individual experiences with the languages to have high variance as a consequence.
As others hsve pointed out, it's a very coarse (and rather arbitrary) categorization.
E.g. both Turkish and Russian are in Category 3, but Turkish is trivial compared to Russian.
Turkish grammar is extremely regular, and follows easily defined rules that fit about two pages of easily digestible tables.
In comparison, Russian is a separate class tought in Russian schools for four years to native Russian speakers. And you still get people who can't properly inflect numerals, for example.
Turkish has a completely different vocabulary (loanwords aside) and a completely different grammar.
"I want to swim" in Russian is "ja hoću plavatj", "I" + "want" + "to swim". The only difficulties are the conjugation of "want" and the aspect of "to swim". In Turkish it's "yüzmek istiyorum", where "-mek" is "to" and "-um" is "I". Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.
> Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.
As a native Russian speaker who speaks English and Turkish:
The question isn't about alienness. It's about difficulty. Turkish is trivial compared to Russian. You can learn all the grammar rules you'd ever need in a week or so (though most study materials make it harder than necessary). The rest is just learning vocabulary. Which is just as alien to an English speaker as Russian.
As for the example...
Here's a valid three word sentence in Russian: Ya idu domoj (I'm going home).
Depending on context, mood, feel, etc. any permutation of those words is a valid sentence: ya domoj idu, idu ya domoj, idu domoj ya, domoj ya idu, domoj ya idu.
And that's before we get into inflections, conjugations, gender etc. that neither English nor Turkish have. Or somewhat arbitrary pronunciation rules (korova is pronounced kahrohva) whereas in Turkish every word is pronounced exactly as written (with very few quite regular contractions in regular speech like yapacağım -> yapıcam) etc.
Turkish is regular, has well specified rules you can learn in a week, is extremeley easy to read (pronounce as written, there's no floating/jumping/changing stress). Oh, and the alphabet is latin-based.
Russian: extremely complicated grammar using concepts entirely alien to English (declensions, inflections, conjugates, grammatical cases, genders, transgressives, and even plurals are weird), has free-form-not-really sentence structure, jumping stress. Oh, and a completely different alphabet to boot.
Not always well. One of the problems is that English speakers do not get taught the proper parts of speech. I learnt far more about English from learning other languages than I ever did in English class. We would get told off for bad spelling and grammar, but very little on the actual mechanics.
All through middle and high school, so for 7 years from around 10 to 16.
It did become one eventually in primary school, so probably the last 2 or 3 years there.
I have been generally successful at learning Russian as an adult, but tonal languages are something that I just struggle with on a fundamental level. I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.
> I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
Why would you want to? Pitch also provides connotations / emotions in Mandarin.
> It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue.
That will never happen. Your bad pronunciation can aggravate other problems, but if your sentence is otherwise good, ignoring the tones will still leave it fully intelligible.
(I once asked a student in a Chinese school whether a particular class wasn't occurring, and he responded "poss". After some confusion, he was frustrated that the pronunciation difference between "poss" and "pause" should make such a difference in communicating with an English speaker.
But of course, it doesn't. If "pause" were a valid way to respond to "is chemistry class happening today", I would have had no difficulty understanding "poss". His problem was in bad knowledge of the language, not bad pronunciation.
You appear to be making the same mistake here. If you try to communicate, and fail, that is not evidence that you are qualified to diagnose what the problem was.)
Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
Fiendish logographic writing system (Chinese) vs fiendish grammar (Russian). I'm not a fan of Pinyin transliteration aesthetically.
Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.
> It is not that different from German in this matter.
I've met several Germans who spoke Russian fluently, none of them has really mastered the instrumental case, not even a friend of mine who worked at the German embassy in Moscow. Although you might say it's a minor grammar difference, this particular grammar case seems hard to grasp for people who are not accustomed to it through their native language.
Also, from my personal experience, quite a few Germans who learnt Russian had a real struggle understanding the concept of perfective/imperfective aspect.
These kinds of grammatical difficulties are typical for people who are learning only their second language after their native language.
After learning 3 or more languages that are not closely related, one is usually exposed to most grammatical features that can be encountered in the majority of the languages, so usually grammar no longer poses any challenges, but only memorizing the unfamiliar words and pronouncing sounds that do not exist in the native language.
>It is not that different from German in this matter.
Russian inflection changes the stress. In German it's fixed. Inflectional forms are much more varied in Russian. Colloquial German is much more analytical (past tense is almost always "ich habe" + participle). German has devolved to basically 3 cases at this point (with genitive dying out), compared to Russian's 6. But conceptually, they're very similar indeed.
If you just want to be understood, Russian is not very hard. I think it's true for any language. To master it, however...
> Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language.
That's saying that getting to the lunar orbit is the only difficult part in landing on the Moon. The whole complexity of inflectional languages is in the inflections. It's also why Slavic (or Turkic) languages form such a large continuum of mutually almost-intelligible languages.
Compared to inflections, everything else in Russian is simple. The word formation using prefixes and suffixes is weird, but it's not like English is a stranger to this (e.g. "make out", what does it mean?). The writing system is phonetic with just a handful of rules for reading (writing is a different matter).
Add baltic languages to the mix as well! Lithuanian is like a slavic language with all the inflection drama but with additional word types that are currently mostly gone from slavic languages.
Well, Lithuanian is also a Proto-Indo-European language. But the one that somehow got sucked into a time warp from the past. And it even has a tonal pitch accent in addition to the stress pattern, just to make it more interesting.
Wow, I had no idea. This sounds extremely interesting. I need to read more about Lithuanian language (at least grammar, sadly I don't have time to learn yet another language)
English phrasal verbs make completely zero sense since there is no logic involved
If English was logical "make out" would mean somethibgg like "throw out". But "to make out" means something else obviously. And you dont throw out your trash. You throw them away...
The only difficult part of Russian is writing it. Most native Russian speakers, myself included, can't write properly even after completing 11 years of Russian language in school. Hundreds of rules nobody remembers.
I think as a native speaker it's different to you.
Native English speakers make spelling mistakes quite often. But as a language learner I struggled with everything, except spelling - I always knew how to spell a word, even if I don't know how to pronounce it. It's the opposite of native speaker experience.
English spelling is one of the hardest parts of the language to learn because the spelling represents ~16th century pronunciation. However what we gained is a common orthography for all the different dialects and accents of English. I can barely understand some people from Appalachia or Western England when they speak, but if they write it down it’s no problem.
> English spelling is one of the hardest parts of the language to learn because the spelling represents ~16th century pronunciation.
English spelling doesn't represent any pronunciation. English spelling represented pronunciation before the Normans, and afterwards was turned into something that would allow Norman speakers to do nearly-intelligible imitations of unpronounceable English words. Even worse, 1) French spelling also had drifted far from pronunciation (although not as far as now), and 2) English picked up a ton of that French and further mispronounced it.
Such as how place names that now end in "-shire" pre-conquest ended in "-scr," which is how they're still pronounced.
> However what we gained is a common orthography for all the different dialects and accents of English.
True, but those dialects came after the spelling changes. Vowels in English multiplied out of control and became more of a system of how vowels could relate to each other rather than specific sounds, like in (very regular) Old English when a long or doubled vowel was simply the same vowel sounded longer. Germanic vowels are crazy and got crazier.
To understand somebody's English, you listen to them for a while and figure out what they're doing with their vowels - we know from experience that some vowel sounds move together with each other, so when we hear X we can guess Y, and we then look for exceptions and mergers. Once we've figured out the vowels, the words become clear. A fun example is when you compare the Canadian accent to the US accent, and you see some words rhyme in both British and Canadian English that don't rhyme in US English.
IIRC, English is often described as having between 16 and 22 vowels, depending on who is speaking it. Writing that would be hellish, and as you say, you'd have to change spellings when you crossed rivers. English orthography is more like Chinese orthography than one would think.
I should have said it represents the pronunciation of English in and around London in the 16th century.
English spelling wasn’t normalized until long after the Normans. Norman scribes did their part but it was the printing industry in London that crystallized it.
Some of it is. Some of it is arbitrary. The "h" in "ghost" is said to be partly accidental. The "b" in "debt" due to folk etymology. There will be numerous other examples.
In his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, John DeFrancis calls the English orthography the worst among the alphabetic ones, and Japanese the worst among the logographic ones.
Re English, maybe among major languages. Faroese orthography is bad in phonetic terms, but Faroese is not a well known language. I'm sure other smaller languages have even worse systems than English.
Among the major languages, French is also pretty awful. Its orthography is much less practical than Spanish or Italian.
Tibetan orthography is notoriously bad, but is neither alphabetic nor logographic. This is a result of Tibetan changing a great deal since it was first transcribed.
Sure, there are some recent exceptions. But nearly all words that contain vowel pairs like “ea” and “ai”, for example, represent a much older pronunciation regardless of the current one. Words like “hear” and “wear” would have rhymed at one point. Most words ending in “ed” would have had that syllable fully pronounced instead of reduced to a “t” sound.
That vast majority of words among all English dialects are spelled similarly and go back to the 16th century or thereabouts.
Your experience as a native speaker is completely different from learning the language from scratch as an adult, to the point that it's almost irrelevant. Writing Russuan is not that difficult, it's just the only part that you had to actually do any work to learn
Never thought the difference mastering writing can be so significant. Just like to add what I understand regarding this. It's rather about not making any mistake writing by hand ca. 1-2 DIN A4 pages while someone reads a text (slow enough). I can't remember exactly but making only one (or two) mistake(s) and it is not anymore excellent (just good). Making 4-7 mistakes and it is not good (just sufficient). Making few more and it is bad which means failed. It's a long text with a very short path to fail.
Ukrainian is less difficult to write. There are claims that standardization/reform of Russian made it more artificial (far from natural people language) with overtaking too many words from Latin languages. When I read / listen to Belorussian I think they have even more luck with matching pronunciation/writing than Ukrainian. Which suggests this language is even closer to the common roots old language. (I'm not a linguist.)
Poles will hate me saying this, but I've always really struggled with their orthography, even though I am used to the Roman alphabet. I can see what is going on in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian, maybe even Czech to some extent. Polish is bizarre. Szcz is one letter in Cyrillic. I'm still baffled by l with the line through it.
There is a saying that you should learn the enemy language to understand them. I suppose the time has come again. Why else would you learn it otherwise? It is not like many of us can even visit the place without consequences. The books were translated years ago anyway.
Slavic languages are similar, IMO you just need to bombard your brain with a lot of it to start discerning the patterns (just like any other language I guess). Reading is not necessary, writing likewise. I never had a single lesson but speak fluently in russian and ok polish, can understand ukrainian, can read also.
Given that you need content for your brain it would be hard to find something nice created in russia recently, might be easier to start with polish if you are in the west.
Careful, by learning russian you also become an oppressed russian minority that needs to be "liberated". It's not just your brain that will get bombarded.
You've just associated actions of a certain fascist government with the whole language spoken by hundreds of millions of people who are against the war it waged and which is orders of magnitude older.
That's not very bright of you, to put it mildly.
Mind you, the language argument was just as well employed by the putin's propagandists, as in something along the lines of "just listen how silly Ukrainian sub-language sounds, lol".
Which is an argument every sane human being finds disgusting and stupid beyond all comprehension, of course.
Their propaganda was saying a lot of different things, including both mentioned above.
Ukrainian is magical language that is both the same as russian (so not real language of its own) and difficult to learn, so russian not being an official language is literally genocide.
A certain part of speakers - yes. A large part, no doubt, otherwise there'd be no one to fight this war.
But what about the other part?
The part that is guilty fell for the same trick that you're falling for - they perceived the whole nation as one single entity that, as they were told by the propaganda, was all Nazis, from newborns to the elderly.
We both know that was bullshit, but you keep painting all Russians in the same way the zombified part of Russians has been painting Ukrainians.
Wrong in Russia you mean. If they stop assassinating people, threatening nuclear strikes, conventional attacks, and so on, they wouldn't be anyones enemy.
There are some good people among Russian citizens, abroad or not. Some great people even. Unfortunately they are few and far between and are not representative of the mindset, aspirations and values of their home nation. So saying "the Russians are the enemy" is entirely fair. It is an actively hostile society much like Nazi Germany was during the WW2 and this nitpicking over good individuals is not making the blanket evaluation unfair in any way.
>"There are some good people among Russian citizens, abroad or not. Some great people even. Unfortunately they are few and far between and are not representative of the mindset, aspirations and values of their home nation."
You lost me here. You sound exactly as the people you are trying to put a blame on.
Well I for one didn't start, participate in or have supported the ongoing war of extermination and conquest. And I am not trying to win any Russian hearts and minds; that's one thing about being enemies.
I think you miss the point. I am talking about the incentive to learn somebody’s native tongue. I doubt people want to know it to meet an emigrant in Germany and have a conversation in russian. Equally I do mot learn spanish to talk to my neighbours but to have a conversation with a local in spain.
But by your own reasoning, you're also saying it's reasonable to learn Russian as a way to better understand Russia because your country happens to be opposed to them.
If you accept that this relatively obscure reason is a valid motivation (which I agree it can be) then you must also accept that there are all sorts of other motivations that are equally valid including "so I can speak to emigrants" or even just "because I find it fun".
It's not an obscure reason, many people engage with the enemy professionally. That's one of the most frequent motives to learn a language probably. Either you want to immigrate to a country or you want to conduct business with it or it's your enemy and you need to undersrand it. First two options are out for the Western world at the moment
There is a large, growing Russian diaspora and many writers/artists create works in exile. The language helps if you want to understand the millions who left their homes out of principle, but they are not the "enemy".
"The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government."
So are you implying that I should start treating every foreigner as an enemy just because we as a humanity didn't, and maybe will never come up with a political system that will bring peace on Earth once and for all?
Allright then, I'll still regard most of you at least as non-enemies, if you so object being friends with me;
but you are free to continue considering me your enemy if your current political fartwinds turn your wind vane that way.
Polish person here. Don't try to learn Polish. It's insanely difficult, the "rules" make no sense whatsoever, and almost anybody that you'll want to talk to will be able to communicate with you in English.
As for Russian, I also don't see any point in learning it. I was forcefully taught Russian in primary school back when Poland was under Russian yoke. The general idea here is that we'd like not to be in that situation ever again. Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
Polish is great because there is a lot of content to learn from. And it is a gateway to other western slavic languages in the region. I basically forced myself to learn it because Manga was all in polish at the time. Their movie industry is great as well.
As someone studying Polish, and making excellent progress, I mostly agree with your take. If you want to explore other languages, something like Spanish will get you much more mileage. Polish is difficult and the community of speakers isn't exactly warm to foreigners or people acquiring the language. On the other hand, if you truly enjoy languages and are passionate about them, I have found Polish to be really interesting and beautiful in its own way. Definitely not recommended, but still enjoyable to read/write/speak.
Do you believe that a significant proportion of native English speakers support the idea of imperialistic invasion and occupation, and the rape and torture of women and children?
Which war? The Iraq War started with around 62% support. When the US started its involvement in the Korean War (one of the biggest mass atrocities we'd carried out since, well, about 5 years earlier when we atom bombed Japan...), around 78% supported it. Around 71% of Americans supported a large scale troop invasion of Afghanistan when it started.
Honestly, even for the wars with bad public perception, like Vietnam, it was mostly because Americans were tired of our guys being drafted just to be turned into dogfood on the other side of the world, not because we were occupying and brutalizing them.
I think the essence of my question is what did "support" look like here?
I can empathise with the position that the invasion of Iraq was warranted (which is not to say that I agree with it), in the context of the September 11 attacks. What I haven't seen is any popular support for the slaughter of civilians or the annexation of territory — there is no grand narrative that the USA is actually liberating its historical lands in Iraq. I think the support was conditional, and based on claims that later collapsed. The end goal was withdrawal after regime change.
What I haven't seen is any analogue to egregious instances like this[0], of which there are many in russia's war against Ukraine.
You're ignoring the mass atrocities committed by both sides in the Donbas throughout much of the 2010s that provided easy propaganda to achieve the same outcomes as the Iraq War propaganda.
I have another example of a "war" carried out recently with overwhelming support in its nation and in the US (initially) due to rapid propaganda around an attack that was likely intentionally intensified in effect by things like moving civilian events next to a military target the day before. But I won't post that one lol
Ah, the usual whataboutism that derails rational discussion. While the world isn't black and white, there are rare situations where things actually are totally black and white, and we are witnessing one of them right now.
> Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
Are you a european/white supremacist who doesn't consider the victims of the anglosphere to be human, or are you historically illiterate, even of extremely recent history?
I don't see a third option here since you learned english also, would appreciate an explanation for this special pleading rather than furious downvoting when identifying basic empirical discrepancies in the face of what looks to be materially false claims.
You're really deep into painting everyone with the same brush, aren't you?
Define russian federation first. Am I it? Is it land? Is it government? Is it those zombie mercenaries who execute criminal orders? Is it those who got jailed after protests against war? Is it those who got conscripted? Those who fled the country to avoid that? Those who struggle to meet ends? Those cruising aboard 150 meter yachts?
It's pretty simple, actually. Do you hold a Russian passport? You're Russian.
If you "don't support" the invasion and killing, either start changing the system, or get rid of the passport. Yes, it's inconvenient. So are the missiles and bombs falling on the heads of people in Ukraine for them.
> start changing the system, or get rid of the passport
Right after you, my friend, as soon as you singlehandedly stop the US special military operation in Venezuela and extrajudicial killing of people off its coasts, or jail the commanders and mercenaries of EU forces in Syria, Afghan and Libyian war, depending on your passport. Or get rid of it.
And before you deploy your strawman about "terrorists" - that's exactly the same term that has been used by the kremlin to excuse the invasion into Ukraine.
Your illusion of possibility to change the system shall pass soon, rest assured.
This kind of historical blindness and hysterical hypocrisy has never ended well.
Is HN becoming a place where we should expect people to lie to us and promote trivially disprovably rationales in order to foment cultural and racial hatreds based on current political conveniences?
"Never believe they are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. By giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."
When the russian military fired missiles and drones at my house, I should just accept it because some of my distant ancestors persecuted brown people. Is that your take?
Also, russia’s war against Ukraine enjoys popular support in russia today. Is your argument that the majority of UK and/or US citizens are eager for their respective countries to engage in war against former colonies today?
I think that if you clicked on the links and reviewed the original claim, you'd see that you removed every single word and concept and overwhelmingly mutually agreed upon fact and then replaced it with nonsense.
Russian and English are both languages of empires that have engaged in countless acts of violence and aggression. They are not equivalent, but to deny this or heavily qualify it (like dismissing acts of war and violence that happened literally yesterday as "distant") in either direction is inherently hypocritical and dehumanizing.
Honestly, I am starting to suspect you are a Kremlin agent designed to make europeans opposed to their war look so crazy that global opinion shifts against the Ukrainians by tying them to denial of and advocacy for the worst acts of europeans.
> Honestly, I am starting to suspect you are a Kremlin agent
Ok, I'll clarify my position, for the avoidance of doubt.
The terrorist state of russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and ongoing genocide is the darkest chapter in European history since the Holocaust. The putin regime has no regard for human life, and russian soldiers brag about raping women, and murdering children, sometimes by shooting them in the head at point-blank range. Many of these rapes and murders are even encouraged by the wives of russian soldiers — thousands of kilometres away from the front lines. We have it all on tape.
While I am not a soldier, I have two medals from the Ukrainian military for volunteering, and I will continue to help Ukrainian soldiers protect civilians in Ukraine, and to put russian invaders in the ground where they belong.
Unfortunately that just leads to more questions, since you did not answer the previous ones at all, and personally volunteering is what most double agents and saboteurs do in order to be in a position to cause more harm by first gaining trust.
Numerically, the numbers of civilians killed are far greater and we have substantive evidence of rape as military policy along with the murder of children.
In order to clear things up, you need to explain if you believe that either:
A) Those lives less valuable by some measure? Ie, did they deserve it, is it all a hoax and no one died, or is there something about them that makes those lives inherently worth far less than yours?
B) You have reason to believe the Ukrainian government is lying about the casualty figures and that over 600,000 Ukrainian soldiers and over 200,000-500,000 Ukrainian civilians including ~50,000 Ukrainian children have already been killed.
Is it A or is it B?
If you can tell me if you agree with statements like this made by Ukrainian officials about Indians and Chinese being inferior races of lesser intelligence, I think that would clear things up also: https://www.livemint.com/news/world/ukrainian-official-says-...
> Those lives less valuable by some measurement you need to explain
I do not believe the lives of different races/ethnicities of humans are of different intrinsic value.
What an incredibly fucked up, sick question.
> Numerically, the numbers of civilians killed are far greater and we have substantive evidence of rape as military policy along with the murder of children.
Comparing death rates numerically like this is also incredibly fucked up, and you should be ashamed of yourself. I am disgusted by this.
> You have reason to believe the Ukrainian government is lying about the casualty figures
Where are you getting your figures? I have strong reason to believe that it's near enough impossible to determine accurate figures since so many civilians were slaughtered by russian soldiers and then buried in mass graves on territory that russian soldiers are still occupying. That, and the Ukrainian government explicitly does not divulge how many military casualties they've taken.
> If you can tell me if you agree with statements like this made by Ukrainian officials about Indians and Chinese being inferior races of lesser intelligence, I think that would clear things up also
I do not agree with this racist statement by one Ukrainian politician.
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Nobody should take your geopolitical analysis seriously, since you cite kremlin apologists like Mearsheimer and Sachs. You just don't know what you're talking about.
My claim is that we see the same terrible violence and wars of aggression with subsequent public support (for a time) in both the Russia and the West. Ie, there is a fundamental hypocrisy to either set of alliances to condemn wars of aggression and the mass murder of children. It's quite clear that both sets of elites consider either one to be a policy option if they think it will get them results they want.
And your response is that things should "not be counted numerically" and that it is "incredibly fucked up" to consider human lives to be of equal value.
Altogether, it seems like you can only see things in terms of one ethnically european empire or another as morally righteous, with no other options. You cannot understand or imagine the perspective of someone who considers neither empire to be moral agents who deserve to have their crimes ignored or downplayed.
You have made no argument and your emotional appeal looks identical to eurocentric white supremacy which denies its nature but can only use emotional blackmail and threats when people point out the discrepancies.
It is not disgusting to ask why some raped and murdered civilians are "the worst thing since the holocaust" while others which preceded it that are of a larger scale are not merely forgotten but denied.
All of the current western leaders who forced Ukrainian denuclearization and talk openly about using Ukrainian lives as a "cheap" way to harm Russia are your true friends...
Why did one "Kremlin apologist" argue persuasively that Ukraine must keep its nuclear weapons to prevent a situation exactly like this war, and why did the other do everything he could to make Poland a stronger country? You have left reality behind.
Your "support" is so irrational that when Putin and Lavrov dishonestly argue there is no one credible to negotiate with on the other side, people around the world who want a lasting peace will reluctantly conclude that while they often lie, this time they are telling the truth.
I continue to think you are being paid by Russia or Russian proxies or that you are functionally equivalent to someone who is. Your rhetorical tactics and emotive language are so similar to RT and other Kremlin propaganda outlets that collusion seems more likely than linguistic convergence at this point.
All that said, Russia was in the wrong to invade and as someone with many Ukrainian friends who are now refugees, I hope you can understand why I hope the Ukrainian authorities are able to identify you and access your personal devices and documents.
An investigation seems warranted to find out if you're really this mentally ill or if you're being paid to make it seem like most Ukraine supporters are, especially since you're a decorated volunteer in a military conflict.
This is the most unhinged load of drivel I have ever read on this website. Ever.
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> And your response is that things should "not be counted numerically" and that it is "incredibly fucked up" to consider human lives to be of equal value.
You have very clearly twisted my words.
I do not think it is moral to turn human suffering into a pissing contest.
I very clearly stated that it is incredibly fucked up to compare human suffering in the way that you're doing. In fact, my first sentence was "I do not believe the lives of different races/ethnicities of humans are of different intrinsic value". You are framing your attack as though I said the complete opposite of what I actually said. What you are doing here is dishonest, and frankly, disgusting.
> Meanwhile, people like Mearsheimer … and Sachs … are "Kremlin apologists."
I am not a party to the conflict and I now restrict my efforts to assisting refugees and deserters on both sides. I supported Ukraine's July offensive because it was still capable of changing the strategic balance, and I hoped for a peace with significant russian concessions to be made at the high-water mark.
Now, because of people like you who are bloody-minded and impossibly idealistic when it's not your blood and you can always walk away, it's far too late.
I regard both sides maximal war aims to be impossible in the short and medium term and that all further loss of life is for nothing other than to accelerate the demographic collapse of both Russia and Ukraine in exchange for a few hundred kilometers of nearly worthless and already-depopulated land.
I think you should contact the Ukrainian authorities and ask them if they believe your advocacy is contributing to their goals. Furthermore, you should consider how things will change if there is a peace deal, at which point it seems like you will be someone who will, from a safe location, be working to undermine the Ukrainian government and to restart a losing conflict.
You are part of a larger conflict and you do not set policy, and when it changes, if you don't change with it, you become an enemy of Ukrainian government and the majority of Ukrainians. This majority and the Ukrainian government have stated they would like to have a democratic election without martial law and press censorship in order to decide their future.
Are you against democratic elections? Would you support a coup against a civilian government in order to continue the war?
You said the invasion of Ukraine was worse than the invasion of Iraq, but you reject all quantitative measures. You also have fatal anomalies in your argument you have not refuted by citing opinion pieces that also ignore this information.
Why did John Mearsheimer say Ukraine should keep its independent nuclear deterrent? Because he regarded a war like this as inevitable and that regardless of the outcome, both sides would lose and a large number of people would die, in addition to strengthening China significantly. And so it is.
I care about the average person who is stuck in this geopolitical clash between military blocs that have no regard for russian or ukrainian lives. You seem to care about achieving a military solution with little or no diplomatic consideration.
You are unwilling or unable to comprehend that people in Venezuela and the Middle East are not in fact, members of a lesser race of humans to whom acts of war and the mass murder of civilians "don't count" and don't fundamentally change the way that 90% of people on earth see western claims of moral principle.
I think you should contact the Ukrainian authorities and prove your commitment to your beliefs by volunteering to serve on the front lines: men willing to kill and die for a field are what is most needed now. Being a propagandist trying to get other people to give their lives while refusing to risk your own shows exactly how you feel about things: your life is more valuable than anyone else's and other people's sons, brothers, husbands, should die for your beliefs.
Putin doesn't care how many Russians from rustbelt towns in central asia and small towns get killed and the strategic military balance is in his favor. It is in his interests that diplomacy be seen to fail but not be his fault, because he does care about the willingness of other countries trying to make sense of the current situation to disregard and circumvent western sanctions. So yes, every word you speak and your point of view aligns perfectly with Russian strategy.
Maybe you're simply a dupe and part of an FSB influence operation, but you could make up for it by serving on the front. Anything else is chickenhawk cowardice or a false friend with murky motives.
Age is no restriction, Ukrainian men in their 50s and 60s are on the front lines. Will you fight for the cause you believe is both realistic and a moral necessity? Or perhaps... their lives are worth less than yours?
Why is it appropriate for a Ukrainian man in his late 50s to be drafted (in a way which resembles kidnapping) to kill and die for what you say you believe in but aren't willing to risk your own life for?
If you're working for the FSB you should be ashamed, and if you're not, you should be even more ashamed!
As for myself, I am an enemy of pointless, unwinnable wars, dictatorship, and coercion, so I am an enemy of both governments and a friend of the common person who had no say in this and is trapped between two corrupt cliques that get other people's families killed while vacationing safely in luxury: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/11648
I hope you provide your personal information to a Ukrainian recruiter and put your own skin in the game, because without that, you are functionally identical to an FSB functionary.
People who alienate the 90-92% of the non-white/european global population against Ukraine by repeatedly asserting that only white european lives should have any kind of moral impact or even be remembered at all are feeding into Putin's international propaganda operation. Could it be by accident? Perhaps, but it fits so perfectly with the Kremlin's diplomatic strategy to win over the rest of the world...
Perhaps you're right and I just don't want to believe that the goons in the Kremlin are telling the truth about how ignorant and mendacious the worldview of many of their (very real victims) are.
This is poorly informed, it’s quite easy to get a visa to Russia. Easier than many other countries, actually. Just follow the laws and use common sense (same rule applies when you are traveler anywhere) and you will be fine. Don't believe me just check YouTube, plenty of bloggers go there - “Sly’s Life” channel, Russia videos. He also goes to Ukraine after before you start calling me or him a shill for Putin or whatever.
As a native speaker, one thing I see people struggle with surprisingly often is that a) every noun has a gender, and b) every word grammatically related to a noun must always match its gender, case, and plurality. The second thing is the inflections themselves, yes.
But I suppose it also depends a lot on that person's native language — the people I most commonly hear speak Russian as a foreign language are migrant workers, whose native languages are usually Turkic. Those don't have grammatical genders. It feels like learning Russian would be easier for someone who is native in, for example, a Roman language (Spanish/French/Portuguese/Italian) or German.
The gender of a noun in the native language is sometimes the opposite in the other language, so it can be difficult in its own way as well. At least this was my experience when briefly learning german as a portuguese speaker. In this sense learning english was easier, although it happened kinda passively by just being on the internet too much.
I think it depends on how you approach learning genders. As a native English speaker, when learning Romance languages I don't think of words as being feminine or masculine. I think of "il pane" as being a single unit, and "la bottiglia" as being another single unit. I've then never struggled when looking at a new Romance language because I'm not thinking "this word used to be feminine and now it's masculine" - I'm just learning new units, as if the articles are part of the word itself.
This extends to other words that must agree. Instead of thinking "the noun is masculine so the adjective must be masculine as well", think "the article is 'il' therefore the adjective is 'buono' instead of 'buona'".
That works, but Russian doesn't have articles. You can, however, mostly get away by assuming that feminine nouns end with -а, -ь, and -я, neutral ones with -о, and all others are masculine.
That helps less than I'd like with the spoken language given that a trailing о or а are pronounced like а because it won't be stressed.
For non-Russian speakers, the two letters get the sound that you expect if stressed, and otherwise sound like а. This rule also applies to borrow words that were transliterated into Cyrillic. So the English computer becomes компью́тер, and the stress goes on ...пью́т... (the English ...put... bit of the word). As a result that first о became an а sound.
My wife's reassurances that Cyrillic is phonetic likewise didn't work out for me. You can't pronounce the written word correctly without knowing where the stress is. You can't write down the spoken word correctly without knowing which unstressed а sounds are written as о.
Of course this is far better than English spelling...
As a native English speaker who learned Russian years ago, the o/a thing never felt confusing to me, perhaps because it felt very similar to what English does. Syllables that aren't stressed tend to be pronounced faster with less of a hard sound, and that's just what the o -> a rule feels like to me.
I always felt like Russian was a pretty easy language to learn because it was so regular. Yes there are a lot of cases and declensions, but once you learn the rules, you can get like 95% of the way there, and then even the last 5% of exceptions are quite "regular exceptions", e.g. the "ogo" written -> "ova" pronounced rule.
That а/о thing is taught extensively in schools. There are formal rules for everything, but of course I don't remember any. What I do remember is these are called "безударные гласные" (unstressed vowels), and "проверочные слова" (test words?) are used to figure out whether it's о or а. The idea is iirc that you find a word with the same root in a different form where that syllable is stressed. Except sometimes there isn't one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Prepositions don't change based on gender but make the word itself change case (обсуждение -> в обсуждении). The pronouns though, those are gender-specific (он/она/оно, этот/эта/это), regardless of whether they refer to people or not.
Well, you can. But if you're just learning the language, you're going to struggle to find words that don't use a predictable one. And if you do stumble across one of those, and you use 个 instead, people may not even notice.
No one is out there watching to make fun of you if you count horses in 只 instead of 匹.
That is not something that will happen with measure words. Ignoring some grammar will limit you. This is not such a case. Ignoring semantics-free measure words will make you sound like a native speaker.
Chinese measure words are not something that happens on a noun-by-noun basis. Memorizing them as part of a noun is not a well-chosen approach. Most often this will saddle you with the burden of separately memorizing "pass" and "passed" as independent forms of the verb, while providing comparable benefits.
You might have noticed that my comment above suggested that
(a) the default measure word is 个;
(b) the default measure word for a horse is not 个.
> As a native speaker, one thing I see people struggle with surprisingly often is that a) every noun has a gender, and b) every word grammatically related to a noun must always match its gender, case, and plurality. The second thing is the inflections themselves, yes.
My experience differs:
In terms of vocabulary: the vocabulary in Russian often has little relationship to words in German, English or French, so you really have to learn very "foreign" words.
In terms of pronounciation, learning is made more difficult since many vowels are pronounced differently depending on whether the syllable is emphasized or not, and where the vowel is in the word. Additionally, some consonant clusters are pronounced differently from what you'd expect (simple example: the "в" in Здравствуйте is silent). Additionally, some consonant cluster don't exist in German or English, so you have to get used to them.
In terms of grammar, a difficulty with Russian as a beginner is rather that there exist lots of cases (6-7, depending on whether you consider locative case as a separate case from prepositional case or not), and you of course have to learn which preposition demands which case, and then you obviously have to use the properly declinated noun/adjective.
So, there is simply an insane amount of tables to cram.
I wouldn't claim that the latter is inherently difficult per se, but rather it's a huge amount of material that you have to get very certain in that slows your learning down.
EDIT: Another difficulty is the irregularity of emphasis in verb conjugation:
приходи́ть: e.g. мы прихо́дим
говори́ть: e.g. мы говори́м
i.e. a very different syllable is emphasized in the verb conjugation.
Even native Russian speakers couldn't explain why this is the case, and told me to simply cram the verb conjugation.
I don't see Russian as completely alien to English. There are a lot of loanwords from English, French, German, Greek and Latin which are identifiable. Some of the native words are similar to western ones — voda is obviously similar to water, brat to brother, tri is similar to three etc. Much easier than Hungarian vocabulary which has remarkably little to latch onto.
With some rarer ones (eg. slovene), you even have a special dual form (singular, dual, plural).
And then there are different declinations when eg counting:
eno pivo (1 beer)
dve pivi (2 beers, dual)
tri piva (3 beers, plural)
štiri piva (4 beers, plural)
pet piv (5 beers, plural, but now in genitive case for some reason, same for higher numbers, eg sto (100) piv)
On the other hand, knowing slovene and being able to read (usually the serbian form of) cyrillic makes you understand 2/3 of the russian texts out there, which is especially useful for dodgy forums with semi-legal knowledge not available anywhere else and which google can't/won't fully translate (unless you copy-paste the text into a translation window).
I like to imagine Slavic languages as a sort of scale, where Russian is at one end, Polish and Serbian are at the opposite end, and Ukrainian and Belarusian are somewhere in the middle.
The scale is two-dimensional and has three poles, like RGB color charts. Polish and Czech in the west, Russian in the east, and Southern Slavic (represented by Serbian) in the south. Hungarian and Romanian split them apart, while in turn having absorbed a huge amount of Slavic words in turn.
Finnish and Hungarian, despite being spread well apart from each other, are from the same Uralian language family.
Both (and other languages in the family) share one distinctive feature – an excessively large number of noun cases (by Indo-European language family standards).
However, these languages do not have prepositions, i.e. the 16-20 odd noun cases replace them, so it makes it somewhat easier for a new learner.
The noun cases can also be thought of as postpositions despite obviously not being them, but it is a good and simple mental model.
The real outlier is Icelandic, which has a notoriously irregular grammar, multiple noun declension and verb conjugation groups, prepositions and postpositions despite a small number of noun cases.
I used the word "split apart" to express that Hungarian is not a Slavic language. If it was a Slavic Language then there would be no split between its neighboring Slavic languages, but a dialect continuum instead.
The other reason being that Russian (and other non-English) speakers are usually picking up their third or fourth language, while for English speakers it's almost universally number two, and half-hearted at that... (I say that as a native English speaker whose Spanish is muy mal).
Russians don't actually speak foreign much, a Russian person who speaks four languages is considered very smart / having too much free time for their own good / both. Definitely not West Europe levels of language prowess.
Technically at least one foreign language is required as part of basic school education in Russia. For most people my age and younger it's English. Now the problem is, the quality and methods of this leave a lot to be desired. I myself learned English mostly by spending too much time on the internet and playing games that weren't translated. Other people are much more lazy.
Two years of a foreign language were required in my K-12 schooling; I took Spanish; estudio dos años, pero requerdo poco o nada. mi español es muy mal :-(
Eastern europeans speak multiple languages where russian was a second language due to everyone being in the union (occupation). Languages are different and span multiple language groups. IMO there is no strong correlation here not to mention the fact that english is more popular. German language and its presence in the curriculum has other reasons, like the fact that german economy is closer rather than say english or american, there was more incentive to learn german due to economical necessity. But nowadays everyone chooses english as it is a simpler, and considered the real business language.
AFAIK there is no evidence to suggest that the uptake of german is easier for people living in the eastern parts of europe
I think it is generational. A hundred years ago, most Eastern Europeans would have learnt German, fifty years ago they would have learnt Russian and nowadays they all want to pick up American English.
> German native speakers might better understand how cases work
As a native German speaker: cases mostly work like the type system of a programming language - they help you to immediately detect when there is something off. The "type" that the clause has in a sentence has to match the type that the predicate expects - otherwise the type checker will "reject" the sentence.
Yes, I would say that my thinking about the German language deeply influences my thinking about programming. I asked Russian native speakers who work as programmers whether this also holds for them for the Russian language, but they said the Russian language does not have a similar influence on their thinking about programming as I claim and explained about the German language for me.
The cases contain actual information that give the speaker more flexibility in structuring their sentences: a German phrase remains syntactically valid as long as you don't move the conjunctions or the verb, while the emphasis of the sentence shifts.
Of course, the German case system has been reduced so far that only the genitive (which is also on its way out) still modifies the noun. Articles have taken up the task of carrying the endings, with only pronouns still being fully declined.
Languages without case systems have other means to achieve this of course.
I’m learning Croatian as a native Portuguese speaker, and I find out while the grammar itself is easier to think coming from Portuguese, I prefer to deal with sentence construction as if thinking about it from English.
Sort of. When I hear Nabokov speaking, he sounds like he has an unplaceable regional accent, as opposed to a "foreign" one. His writing in English is fluent, but can have a few tics in it — he repeats certain fancy words, and he tends to avoid slang.
By the way, the last tsar's daughters reportedly picked up a slight Irish accent from one of their tutors. He was sacked and replaced by someone more pukka.
Everything he says here also applies to german. For example, to actually say "ich" properly you need to have a wide kind of smile that feels incredibly strange to an english native speaker.
Why? The "ch" in "inc" is exactly the same sound as that represented by "h" in words like "human" and "huge" in English. It's a voiceless palatal fricative. It doesn't require a "wide kind of smile" unless you somehow need to also do that when saying the vowel in "team" too.
Not an expert, but some "to IPA" websites I checked transcribes "the huge human" as "ðə hjuːʤ ˈhjuːmən", but "ich" (voiceless palatal fricative) as "iç" (and "ach" (voiceless velar fricative) as "ax")).
ç != hj
ETA: Wikipedia notes:
> The sound at the beginning of huge in most British accents is a voiceless palatal fricative [ç], but this is analysed phonemically as the consonant cluster /hj/ so that huge is transcribed /hjuːdʒ/. As with /hw/, this does not mean that speakers pronounce [h] followed by [j]; the phonemic transcription /hj/ is simply a convenient way of representing the single sound [ç].
[ç] is an allophone of [h], and it's very hard for English speakers to notice that they're not just saying [h]. I've had the same problem with [e] versus [ɛ].
It very much does exist, and I chose those words on purpose as they're places where the realisation of /h/ is a voiceless palatal fricative (i.e., the German ich-laut) and not a voiceless glottal fricative. "ish" would be a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative.
I recommend you read up on English phonology, as a video for German learners really isn't a good source.
My point was that what Nabokov said about Russian "When you speak Russian your mouth ought to distend laterally at the corners" also applied to German, and that saying "ich" properly in German was an example of this.
Yes, one does not NEED to have the mouth open wide to express the "voiceless palatal fricative" but if you do not do it with a "slight smile" as described in that video it will not sound right.
I truly hope you know something about German pronunciation, otherwise I don't know what would compel you to even comment on the thread.
Not mentioned is that Russian is well populated with loan words from other European languages (especially technology terms) , but about the only Slavic loan word in European languages I know of is "robot" (work) - samizdat being a more recent arrival.
I always found Russian to be the nasties sounding slavic language. It's just unpleasant to the ears. Probably because it makes you either sound aggressive or like you're asking or begging for another bowl of porridge. I guess watching Soviet world war II movies when I was a child had an impact.
It’s a bit weird to see the English transliteration of Russian words for example, govoritz instead of говорить.
For anyone looking to study Russian, I highly recommend spending a few days familiarizing yourself with Cyrillic first. Toss it into an Anki deck (or download one) and use FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler).
It’s phonetic and consists of only 33 letters, I memorized it on a ~12-hour flight to Moscow many years ago.
Same thing with learning Japanese. Just memorize the symbols. It's phonetic. Of course there are complex meanings and subtleties but that's just how we all play with language. As a foreigner your pronunciation can be good once you get the basics. But you have to match the sounds with the letters. We all did it once. We can do it again.
Related, I spent several formative years in Taiwan. Back then, my Taiwanese phone (way before smartphones) used bopomofo as the primary input method for typing Chinese, so I had to learn it.
Unfortunately, some of the 注音 symbols are remarkably similar to Japanese kana, and I found that my familiarity with hiragana and katakana actually caused me constant grief, as I kept mixing up the pronunciations.
Almost nothing aside from children’s books is written exclusively in hiragana or katakana. You have to also memorize the variable readings of about 2000 kanji and many texts are nearly unintelligible without them. Pretty much everyone can memorize the former, but must struggle with the latter.
Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).
When I was in Japan all the street signs and train stations had a little transliteration in hiragana of the kanji name. Super useful to be able to read it
"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.
Hanzi as used in Chinese usually have exactly one reading. On the other hand, virtually all kanji in Japanese have several different pronunciations depending on context.
> What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard?
Just to add context to a sibling comment, Japan's first "writing system" was literally just Chinese.
I don't mean Chinese characters, I mean that if you wanted to write something down, you had to communicate in written Chinese. Over time this written Chinese accumulated more and more transformations bringing it in alignment with spoken Japanese until we get what we see today. However, this means that, to a first approximation, modern Japanese is some amalgamation of Old Chinese and Middle Japanese.
Actually, use of Chinese co-existed alongside the whole transformation process, so we actually see this funky mix of Early and Middle Japanese with Wu, Han, and Song Chinese. Character readings varied by region and time period, and so the the reading of a compound kanji term in Japanese mostly reflects the time period when that word was imported. This is why a single kanji ends up having multiple readings. Later, people began backporting individual characters onto native Japanese words, giving yet another reading.
The character 行 is a particularly illustrative example: 行脚 (an-gya), 行動 (kou-dou), 行事 (gyo-ji). The first reading "an" comes from 7th century Chinsese or so, "kou" comes a bit later from the Han dynasty, and "gyo" even later from Song. Then we have the backports: 行く末 (yu-ku-sue), 行く (i-ku), 行う (okona-u). The first "yu" reading is from Middle Japanese, "i" from Modern Japanese, and "okona" from I have no clue when. That's six different readings for 行 alone!
Oh, and then there are "poetic" readings that are specific to usage in people's names: 弘行 (hiro-yuki) etc. Granted, these are often quite evocative of the above readings or that of synonym characters.
The historical introduction process also explains why older readings tend to be more obscure, 1) they had less time to accumulate usage, and 2) they tend to be specific to Buddhist and administrative themes.
Note: The above is just what I've pieced together osmotically over the years, so I'm sure there are errors.
Admittedly I only know (a little) Japanese and no Korean, but I get the superficial impression that kana are generally much more phonetically faithful than Hangul (namely, because of the post-WWII spelling reform that updated all the kana spellings). Like, the fact that Wiktionary gives "phonetic Hangul" for each Korean entry, to more accurately represent the actual pronunciation, makes me really suspicious of the common internet claim that Hangul is the easiest script to learn.
However, Japanese also has allophony (the moraic nasal and devoicing both come to mind) and kana aren't entirely phonetic (e.g. ha/wa, he/e, ou/ō, ei/ē). I don't know enough about Korean to know if the "irregularities" are also this minor or not—can any Korean speakers/readers enlighten me?
Learn Cyrillic the fun way: go in vacation in Bulgaria, they have road signs in both Latin and Cyrillic. This is how I learned Cyrillic 20 years ago, driving a lot for business all over around Balkans. It was an easy curve, a few characters at a time, with a lot of repetitions and the scenery is nice.
Polish is a rather extreme case, however. Czech orthography is a bit more straightforward. In spite of that, Polish orthography still does a rather good job.
Generally speaking, if you've a language with heavy use of palatalisation in its phonology and grammar, the Latin alphabet is going to struggle without hacks. Irish and Scottish Gaelic similarly struggle with the inherent limitations of the Latin alphabet, but chose a different set of hacks (necessarily, given the Irish has the second oldest written vernacular language in Europe after Greek).
Similarly, the Latin alphabet is poorly suited to the Germanic languages, Danish and English in particular, because of their large vowel inventory.
It doesn't have a hard/soft contrast though, unlike the West and East Slavic languages. Palatalisation isn't a feature of the western South Slavic languages anymore.
Because Polish has avoided to use diacritics in many cases, many Polish words are much longer not only than their Cyrillic equivalent, but also than their Czech equivalent, where the Polish double letters are replaced by letters with diacritics.
Your are getting downvoted, but polish writing system really is not great. There are both non-english characters (ą, ę, ś, ć, ź, ż) and digraphs (rz, sz, cz, dz, dż, dź, ch). Also there is done overlap here and some sounds can be written in more than one way (h ~= ch, ż ~= rz, ć == ci, ś == si, etc).
At least you can pretty much always tell how to read a word looking only at its spelling.
At least some of that is the inevitable consequence of pronunciation changing over time ("rz" being the standout, which used to sound like the Czech soft-r, but lost its r-colouring) and others attempt to show an etymological relationship, which makes spelling a bit more difficult in some ways and easier in others.
Truly everyone assumes “learning another alphabet” is hard but it really isn’t. 1-2 weeks of 30-45min a day drills and you’ll have it down. Cyrillic is very easy to memorize.
That diagram is rather bad at what it tries to do. Those are also historically and phonetically the same:
Λ Л
Δ Д
Κ К
The first Cyrillic alphabet was using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script , curiously created by Saint Cyril, but then people found it was too difficult, so someone in the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire mashed up Glagolitic, Greek and Latin to create the new Cyrillic (probably naming it as a sorry to Cyril for butchering his nice unique alphabet).
The diagram says that (Cyrillic ∩ Greek) - (Cyrillic ∩ Latin) is 3 letters, П Ф Г but as the sibling comment says, Λ/Л, Δ/Д and Κ/К are similar enough. That only leaves you with Θ/theta (th as in thin), Σ/sigma (s as in soft), Ξ/xi (x as in fox), Ψ/psi (ps as in lapse), and Ω/omega (o as in ore.) A lot of those are close enough that you can sort of guess, if you know the English names for the letters!
Many Cyrillic letters are Latin-looking, but actually have direct Greek analogues due to the history of the writing system. If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound. If you do, it's a natural guess.
With the exception of some "ligatures" like Ю (I + O) and special characters like Ъ, Cyrillic is largely based on Greek and some Aramaic (e.g. Ш). In the past it included pretty much the entire Greek alphabet.
Duolingo Russian isn't very good overall (lack of content / grammar explanations), but it does have a page for learning the alphabet that is pretty helpful.
Regarding culture I was unfortunate I had to briefly learn some russian history.
And why not useful?
Kinda obvious if you studied russia even basic via wikipedia. Russia has absolutely nothing to offer - neither to individuals nor to the world in general. The only thing they ever did are wars. And all inventions etc they copy/steal or those very few are result of research into weapons.
And the people is another story. Go to russia and see for yourslft.
Why would one learn language of this country if you can learn spanish/portuguese etc and get actual value from it or at least be able to communicate with nice people with come culture
She's saying that Ruzzian history and culture doesn't deserve neither recognition nor effort to learn them, at this period of time. It's fine if a person is already partially or fully embedded in those, you can't "unlearn" stuff. But I'm personally baffled at the people on reddit book subs who are clearly westerners and writing that they are actively trying to learn Ruzzian to read some Tolstoevsky. Yeah, I'm impressed, twice, both at the spectacularly low reward/effort ratio and the sheer tone deafness of it all. In 2025. Or 2024. Or 2023. Etc.
russians (this time spelt with a lowercase 'r') have forfeited their right to exist as a nation.
Consistently throughout history, they have invaded, colonized, and genocided their neighbors.
They are doing it now, while the whole world watches. If anything, their brazenness is increasing - because they know there will never be any punishment.
When people wonder how Germans allowed their country to tip over into Nazism, modern russia is a perfect reenactment of that: we can see it happening, in real time.
And it's a blazing indictment that the rest of our "civilized" world is doing the absolute minimum to prevent history from repeating itself. Utterly SHAMEFUL.
> russians (this time spelt with a lowercase 'r') have forfeited their right to exist as a nation. Consistently throughout history, they have invaded, colonized, and genocided their neighbors.
Just to make sure we're on the right track here, has the UK (or maybe just England?) also earned that forfeit, or does it get a pass because it did all those things further away from home? (Except for that Ireland thing, which has produced some really 'funny' jokes about potatoes...)
England was duly humiliated for its many misdemeanors (but not all, for sure), and has entered a period of "political correctness", where its sins must be acknowledged and atoned for.
Nothing like this has ever been forced onto russia.
And russian crimes are on an unimaginably vast scale. Remember, it was Stalin who said: "Quantity has a quality of its own."
> Nothing like this has ever been forced onto russia.
All empires collapse sooner or later. Give it a few hundred (or dozen, or just a few) years. It's turn will come, just like it will for the US hegemony.
From all languages in the world that could benefit an individual and help them with future networking/career/etc - like German, Spanish, French, etc - you picked russian?
Please explain why, this is honestly a very confusing choice.
Ukraine switched off from russian so you can cross it out,
Russian in Belarus, Kazahstan etc is known only because soviet union forced it in schools. And now all those countries reduce its usage on every level.
For obvious reason - it does not bring not a little tiny thing to the table.
English does, German, mostly any language. Except russian.
I used to love learning russian. My russian speaking, moscow educated ukrainian friend used to teach me, but she doesn't want to do that anymore. Hopefully sometime in the future I can pick it up again.
In much the same way as you differentiate between "O0" and "00", or between "I1" and "11". (For example, to avoid ambiguity, a standard may prohibit the use of З in a position where 3 is allowed.)
I started learning them for fun and didn't find it to be very difficult. I agree that a weekend might be a bit fast, I'd probably say a week to a month is enough time.
To practice I like going on r/EnglishCyrillic and trying to read some of the posts
Is that a joke?
I’m eloquent in 3 languages and I don’t even consider myself to be particularly good at languages.
Or maybe you have a really high standard for eloquence.
by eloquence I mean, well, being well-spoken. I only speak two languages, and I feel that my ability to express myself in my native Russian degrades severely after periods of time away from home - for example, I often forget words, or fail to come up with a well-put way to describe a complex thing. and even when I'm home, I'm still consuming >= 95% of information and entertainment in English, and only my interactions with friends and family are conducted in Russian, so the opportunities for me to improve my Russian are very limited. the last time I've read a book in Russian was over a decade ago.
I do English/Spanish but when a fluent Spanish speaker starts speaking quickly I can't keep up. So maybe I don't know Spanish even though I studied it in school for 3 years. I watch anime/think I could learn Japanese but gotta actually immerse myself in that culture and learn it. At the very least I can discern the difference between Japanese/Korean/Chinese both written and spoken. Although I still have to sometimes check between written Japanese/Chinese.
I feel the same way as you do, regarding language degrading. I moved when I was 10, and while I can speak conversationally, unless I do it regularly I forget words.
And even without that, my vocabulary has huge gaps. Why would a ten year old need to know the word for "rent"? I didn't learn it until several years ago, in my 40s.
But I disagree about eloquence. We're just out of practice. If we spent six months of the year in Moscow and six in New York, we'd both be perfectly fluent in both.
Georgian is really interesting. Very few cognates for non-modern words. Colors in Georgian are fun: you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color" (ყავისფერი / ყავის ფერი); you don't have "light blue", you have "sky-color" (ცისფერი / ცის ფერი).
It's coffee-colour (kahverengi) in Turkish as well, but I don't find it interesting. The English word "orange" is after a fruit as well (which is also the same in Turkish: "portakal rengi", or "turuncu").
The Russian word for "brown" is literally "cinnamon-colored" ("коричневый"). And the Chinese language just uses the literal "coffee-colored" phrase (咖啡色).
"Брюки цвета кофе" ("pants of coffee color") is natural, "коричневые брюки" ("brown pants") is natural, but "кофейные брюки" is not. In fact the latter would likely be interpreted as "coffee pants" or "pants made out of coffee."
"кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
> "кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
If the context is clothes, people would likely be able to guess, sure. But consider another example "кофейная чашка" ("a coffee mug"). In this context, it would most certainly be interpreted as "a mug for coffee" and not as "a coffee-coloured mug." In other words, you must include the word "цвет" ("color") for it to be correct and unambiguous.
> it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
I don't think this is unique to Russian. I'm sure you can do the same in English and Japanese at least.
It’s fine as an occasional stylistic choice, but using it repeatedly as a regular synonym for brown is a pragmatic and collocational error. The meaning is clear, but the wording is marked, and overuse makes the speech sound odd in everyday contexts.
I admit that. I also realize that tguvot is actually arguing in my favor, as he said that coffee color is distinct from brown, and therefore the inference is that they aren't synonymous. I would summarize that they are conceptually different, as "brown" is a real color, whereas "coffee color" is a marketing color.
Uh huh. Don't forget "aliceblue" and "rebeccapurple." But seriously, those are just arbitrary marketing aliases, aren't they. I remember e-shopping for sneakers, and every brand's "off-white" was a different color.
No idea about Georgian but that's not unusual - for example English didn't have color for orange for a long time. That's why you say "red hair" even though the color is orange.
While English did not have a dedicated word for "orange" there are many examples in older English texts where there was written "red-yellow" or "yellow-red" in the places where modern English would use "orange".
So the color was recognized, even if it did not have a special name.
English didn't have the word "orange" until relatively recently (1500s) either. That's despite the word brown (which is the same colour in a different context) going back millenia.
Names change as language changes. It's hard to imagine Georgian didn't have a word for brown, but that would've been a completely different word that got displaced over time, like yellow-red was displaced by orange.
Given that this pattern appears in several Georgian colors (the color purple is also just "lilac-color": იასამნისფერი / იასამნის ფერი), I'm sure they just used a different brown thing before coffee was common.
There have been many authors who have claimed about various old languages that they lacked words for some colors, and "brown" is one of the most frequent colors about which such claims have been made.
I believe that most such claims, if not all, were wrong. The problem is that when reading an ancient text in which colors are mentioned it is very difficult to guess which is the color that is meant by some word and it frequently is difficult to even be sure that the word refers to a color and not to some other kind of property of an object.
There are very rare cases when the text says something like "this object is X like blood", so you can infer that X = "red", or "this object is Y like the sky", so you can infer that Y = "blue".
Brown is a color for which it is even rarer to find suitable comparisons in a text, from which the color can be inferred, than for colors like red, green or blue, which are typically compared to blood, grass and sky.
So when various authors have claimed that there was no word for "brown" in some old language, the truth was that they just were unable to find any word whose meaning could be determined with certainty to be "brown", in the preserved texts, even if there were plenty of words that most likely meant "brown".
Moreover, in nature there are many shades of brown, lighter or darker, more reddish or more yellowish, which is why in many languages there are multiple words for brown, which are derived from various things that have that particular shade of brown, e.g. words that mean coffee-brown, chestnut-brown, dry-earth brown, brown like the fur of certain animals, etc. Such words that identify a particular shade with reference to a familiar object have been renewed from time to time, in function of which objects have become more familiar or less familiar. After coffee became a very popular beverage, in many languages it has replaced whatever reference object was previously used for a dark brown.
As an example, many have claimed that Ancient Greek had no word for "brown". However, when reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, i.e. the oldest Greek texts except for the Mycenaean tablets, there already are a lot of places where there is no doubt that "brown" was meant by the word "aithono-". This is an adjective derived from the verb "to burn", and most dictionaries say that it means "burning". However, in the actual texts there are plenty of places where it does not mean "burning", but it means "burnt", more precisely "having the color of burnt wood", i.e. brown. This is not surprising. Another word used in the same way is "anthrakos", which can be used either for an object red like a burning ember (e.g. for red garnets or rubies) or for an object black like an extinguished ember (e.g. for charcoal or coal).
For instance, Japanese and Vietnamese do not differentiate between blue and green and require context specific clarification, e.g «traffic light blue-green».
Celtic languages, and I believe Mayan, had a similar thing going on with blue and green. A lot of languages never distinguished orange from yellow really either.
Your command and understanding of the grammar of your native language puts a hard limit to how well you can learn other languages. This has not been stressed enough and schools have all but given up trying to teach children grammar because as natives they more or less get along without it.
On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language. I mean, I used standard English intuitively, but couldn't have told you any of the technical terms. I agree with modern educators that explicit grammar instruction beyond a very, very basic level should not be a high priority. Exposure to and guided close reading of complex texts sharpens grammatical intuition, right alongside all of the other benefits of an advanced reading level. Knowing deep grammar does not so automatically improve textual interpretation.
This is speculation, but I wonder if the period of emphasizing explicit grammatical instruction wasn't an accidental interregnum. That is to say, back in the days when Latin and/or Greek were part of the ordinary curriculum students learned grammar much as I did, as a "natural" excelerant to interpreting a foreign tongue. Once those languages were dropped educators noticed students couldn't do grammar analysis anymore, and so tried teaching it directly, without fully considering when and why it might be useful. I don't know how well the dates line up, but it would be interesting to look into.
> On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language.
This is one of the reasons why Latin is tought. You learn transferring a gramatically hard language into your own, having to learn the ins and out of your own language's grammar. No grammatically complex situation in your own language can fluster you afterwards.
Agree. That's how / why students best learn grammar: for / through a practical purpose. (Deciding the practicality of Latin must remain an exercise for the reader.)
I learned (an academic expression of) German grammar at university, in computational linguistics. There was a class „Syntax I“, and it had us break down phrases and sentences in a graphs, a (constituent) C structure and a (functional) F structure.
Yeah, I loved my university-level grammar class, which I took as a requirement for a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certification. But I was able to speak and read and write at an extremely advanced level long before that. In fact - though I got a private kick out of breaking down sentences, and it certainly was a help teaching second-language speakers - I don't think it helped my own ability to express myself in English in any way. Grammar's fun for nerds, and useful for adult language acquisition, but not worth the time it takes to teach to the general population.
This. When I first started learning Russian, we immediately jumped into basic grammar rules. After two weeks of incredible frustration, I realized I did not have sufficient mastery of English grammar to be able to establish a framework for understanding Russian grammar. I often say that my first two months of learning Russian were spent learning English and it is not a joke.
Interesting. We had a lot of grammar parsing of Russian since the 2nd grade of school. Especially we analyzed parts of speech and constituents. For the latter, we'd underline words in sentences in different ways.
It's so widespread that today if you want to play word guessing with gestures, and you have several words, you just imitate that underline style, and everybody understands it. (Just remembered, we also did a lot of word analysis, marking up prefix, root, suffixes and ending, and everyone knows this markup too.)
in all countries where i lived, schools where I studied, there was heavy investment in grammar. (no, i didn't study in usa).
I won't really agree that mastering grammar of native language limits on how well you can learn other languages. Maybe it matters in the way how it taught in college, when you are older and approach to learning language is "more structured". But when I learned Georgian at age of 6 and Hebrew at 12 (through very deep immersion. Teachers spoke only Hebrew), English at 14 (I had 5 months of private lessons following by dial-up connection to mostly english internet), it didn't matter. At least not for me.
There was also this interesting phenomena, that immigrant when they went to local school, their scores in hebrew grammar classes were usually higher than those of native speakers.
I've been told that western European languages are easy for Russian speakers because you can learn them by removing parts of the Russian grammar. "Oh, they don't have A, and B and C are the same thing for them, and they don't have D too!" Is that correct?
It's a little bit like moving from Italian/French/Spanish to English, except that English has some tenses with no direct equivalent in those languages and a ton of phrasal verbs to learn, but that's vocabulary and not grammar.
Yes. Although, Romance languages have more verb tenses, generally they're easier. BTW, I only learned that Russan's past tense is the same compound past, by learning Italian. Also, Old Russian dropped participles, but re-borrowed them from Church Slavonic (southern Slavic), so we know these things, and learn them at school. (Ukrainian has participle 2, but not 1, as far as I understand.)
Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object. Some people can't wrap their head around that it can be the other way around, e.g. Italian "sua madre/suo padre" can mean both his and her mother/father. In German, they must concord with both, sein Vater, seine Mutter, ihrer Vater, ihre Mutter. But Russian regional dialects do have the same feature, and if your teacher isn't a mad purist, they can easily give examples: евойная, еёйный.
Otherwise, indeed, there are less features. And in Indo-European, they're all the same: compound past tense, participles, compound past and future.
To give an example of another system: Turkic languages. 4 modal verbs (to run, to walk, to stand, to lay down), that must be applied to everything except the verb "to be", they indicate how much hurry you have doing what you're doing. It's a bit similar to Russian aspect (complete/incomplete), but way more complex. Plus you have noun cases, and everything is a suffix, and the verb is always the last. So, "I don't do X" will be something like "I <verb+ing> <stand>+me+not" (like those German prefixes that fall down in the end of the sentence.) My colleague, a Kazakh born in Russia, learns it as a foreign language, and he says it's hard.
>Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object.
This is only true in third person singular. For example, in first person singular: 'моя чашка' (my cup, 'cup' is feminine) vs. 'мой ключ' (my key, 'key' is masculine). Third person plural: 'ихнее дело' (their business, neuter) vs. 'ихняя забота' (their concern, feminine) although most educated Russian speakers would object to these pronouns as a bit too colloquial (although not as colloquial as 'евойная'). Same in second person singular: 'твой друг' (your friend, masculine) vs. 'твоя подруга' (your friend, feminine). In all of the examples above, the gender of the speaker/owner cannot even be determined (grammatically speaking).
It's ironic, seeing tons of exclusively russian-speaking immigrants not being able to learn the native language after decades living in the country.
But it's not about complexity really. I think it's more caused by the deeply ingrained superiority complex in most russians.
And just in case, most russians != every russian.
I was surprised as well living in Hong Kong that many kids grow up never learning Cantonese being born there (Non Chinese heritage). Their parents spoke their native language, and they learned English in a private school.
You could live there until very late in life never needing to know more than a few sentences.
I don't think I've ever seen this in my life from a Russian. I do see a lot of Spanish and Chinese speaking immigrants with no interest in learning English though.
I realized, I don't know many cases of Spanish or Chinese people not learning the language.
My hypothesis: I understand russian and register cases like this easily. Otoh, I don't understand Chinese, so the ones with whom I have ever had any communication, are the ones who learned any of the languages I understand. Similar story with Spanish, my level is ~A2, so there's bias here too, although slightly less prominent.
Russian is seriously messed up language. Especially after learning Hebrew (which is simple and algorithmic) , I was able to look back in Russian and realize what a horrible mess of a language it is.
Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. Language designers really did great work on taking a core of a dead language and proposing a cleaner, more modern version of it.
Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences.
A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.
Hebrew wasn’t “literally synthesised” and wasn’t dead. Jews have continuously been writing and publishing works in Hebrew for the past 2,000 years.
It has evolved naturally to some extent over that time, but much less than other languages - a modern Hebrew speaker can more easily understand medieval Hebrew than an English speaker Medieval English.
What has been synthesised a century ago is additional vocabulary for modern concepts, and this is ongoing for Hebrew as it is for every other language.
Yeah, the story is quite a bit more involved than that.
I don't know much beyond the story of Perelman consolidating Hebrew grammar and dictionary, and having problems with popularizing the old-new language initially.
The point was that other modern languages never had a chance to get this kind of clean up.
I had heard somewhere that much of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew consists of loanwords from Arabic. Is this correct and if so, would it mean that the "cleanliness" of the language is more a reflection of Modern Standard Arabic?
Apologies in advance if this is seen as some falsehood or if it's a sensitive topic.
I couldn't find a source for how many Hebrew words have each origin, so I sampled 25 random words from the Hebrew Wiktionary and counted their sources. Where there wasn't a clear source (or a clear "way" to a source) or the word itself was spelled in English for some reason I just randomized another word.
The number one source was unsurprisingly Hebrew with 11 words. This includes biblical sources as well as medieval and more modern sources, typically Jewish scholars writing in Hebrew in exile.
The second most common source was Greek with 5 words and relatedly Latin had 1 word. A lot of them you'd probably recognize in many languages e.g. whatever way you say Democracy probably has the same origin (sounds like Demokratia in Hebrew).
The third most common source was ancient Hebrew-adjacent languages, 2 for Aramaic, 1 for Ugaritic, 1 for Akkadian. You could include the 2 for Arabic here as well.
The fourth would be modern loanwords with 1 for English and 1 for Italian ("Pizzeria").
It is also worth noting that some words with a foreign origin still have a Hebrew counterpart. For example דיאלוג==Dialog==Dialogue is not from Hebrew, but you can say דו-שיח instead.
Additionally, Wiktionary does slightly bias towards the words you'd want to look up and is not as comprehensive as a real dictionary, so not a perfect sampling.
My personal guess is that this isn't too far off of reality. A more comprehensive sampling will probably diversify the various European languages rather than just being Greek (i.e. probably a bit more German via Yiddish, a bit of French etc.) and maybe make Aramaic a bit more prominent, but overall it doesn't feel insanely off base.
No, that isn't true. Hebrew has taken a lot of Arabic words but not the majority. It has also taken a lot from Yiddish (as you'd expect) and certain modern words which are common across Europe.
>Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment.
Then 1918th spelling reform was a thing. It's of course always easier to reform other languages to make it closer to yours than change yourself. Those silly natives can't ever figure out the spelling and dictionary themselves without a bit of a genocide.
Some (most?) national languages, which developed chaotically, are very illogical, with weird constructions and some inexplicable features (Russian and English are examples of this). Artificial/planned languages such as Esperanto are a different matter -- they are very easy to learn and very pleasant to the ear.
overblown. there is no need in vowels beyond first couple of classes of elementary school and first couple of months when you learn hebrew as Nth language.
the rest of complaints can be equally applied to any given language i guess.
hebrew is learned in ulpans with teachers that speak only hebrew. vowels (nikud) will be used only for first month or two when people figure out basics of the language.
given the way that hebrew structured, it's trivial to figure out words even if you don't know them.
the really hard problem is borrowed words that are written without nikud. for example something like: _nvrst .
For what it's worth, I do think English is horrific when it comes to spelling too, but what is effectively happening with both English and Hebrew words is that people are often memorising the whole word as a symbol rather than as a set of units.
I am sorry, due to the war, I cannot see this in good faith. I am Dutch, so that’s that.
I am sorry I can’t see this in good faith, but I would need to see an attempt at how this is meant for curiosity’s sake and not propaganda.
I am on here a lot, I am a person. And this is what I think when I see the title. I am sorry for the bad vibes but I say no to Russia and learning Russian (for now).
I am okay with potential downvotes. I still think this needs to be said. I wish I could be above this but I can’t.
Your comment is troubling. I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion). This is disturbing to me because i believe this is the kind of mental confusion that actually makes this kind of political violence possible.
For the record, I had the exact opposite feeling when i saw that title: I was glad the poster was not feeling obliged to not mention a culture because of a war.
I'm glad you expressed your own view so candidly though, as I did myself, and would not want to discourage that. But you understand you are playing "their" game by helping erecting those fences, right?
> I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion).
The human brain is a hyperactive pattern recognition machine and it is actually usual for it to make associations that don't hold up to intellectual scrutiny. Otherwise it'd be quite difficult to believe things that aren't true. It is expected that people will do this. The real miracle is something like the legal system where a many people have been convinced to follow an evidence- and precedent- based process rather than making decisions based on what they think it true in the moment flowing from their thoughts and feelings.
Not to excuse the behaviour, it is terrifying and generally generally harmful. But it is at least easy to understand - for any random pairing of things there is going to be a large chunk of the population who associates them without any underlying causal reason beyond that they've been spotted together once. Like the Russian language and war. Then political choices flow on from that reality.
Every state has a long history of opressing others, I'm sure Russia did it too, but to be honest being from western Europe I have my own colonial history to come to terms with before looking at others'. What I know about XXth century Russia, though, is that at some point and in some places at least they went as far as inventing writing systems for local languages that had none so that teaching could be done in that language; so that exemple alone is enough to tell me that your viewpoint lacks nuance, to put it very mildly.
History of civilizations is certainly interresting but this is not even the point; the point was: why should the interrest of a text from Nabokov about the Russian language be seen through the lense of some modern episode of political violence? This is obvious nonsense, yet it appears to come up frequently, sometimes, with some people. Why? And what can be done to stop the contagion before mankind revert back to clan warfare? (because if we want to look for reasons to hate each others in past or modern politics, sure enough we will get there!)
Colonization of eastern parts of russia involved forced conversion to christianity, violence, rape, mass murder, but not language extermination
Even culture extermination is an exaggeration, sure some areas got forcibly "converted" to christianity (if they were unlucky to be invaded before USSR) but you will see mosques/buddha statues/whatever is applicable and all the local traditions and beliefs mostly going like before
Actually in areas where local languages exist they kept schools teaching local languages and official signs are duplicated in both local and Russian all the way from USSR. I know this first hand;) but even the article you linked will tell you that.
So it was maybe not as good as support for indigenous languages in Canada but not extermination
Only since 2018 it is optional to teach local language in schools, previously there were at least some schools that teach it in every area like that. thank Putler for that too.
Entire history of Ukraine since russia became a thing is a constant struggle for preserving its own language.
Look at what happens now:
1. russia demands russian language to be declared official in Ukraine.
2. russia targets Ukrainian cultural institutions in its airstrikes, trying to destroy anything Ukrainian
3. first things russians do after occupying a territory is "reeducation" of Ukrainian-speaking representatives of the population and burning Ukrainian books
I can continue this list.
Seeing original post at times like this is genuinely confusing. But OTOH, many still choose to be wrong understanding russia's warv against Ukraine. pUtin explicitly said he intends to solve "Ukrainian question" once and for all.
My reply is about what happened within borders of Russia to indigenous languages and cultures. if you think I'm commenting about war against another country you are very wrong
as Lithuania - this is absolutely not true. Even before Soviet union the Russian empire was exterminating language to the point where there's an entire Lithuanian history chapter on Lithuanian book smugglers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_book_smugglers
Soviet empire wasn't better either. My great grandmother who was a Lithuanian language teacher was sent to Siberian gulags _for_ teaching Lithuanian. Luckily she survived and lived to a 100 just to prove these disgusting people wrong.
i have tatarian friends. they would like a word with you on this topic.
when they are over my place for more than a couple of hours, there is always conversation about russia trying to suppress anything tatarian: both culture and language.
this is their first hand expirience. from few past decades
well... it's not something that they will discuss. especially given that many try to assimilate or already lost their native culture or don't even care about it.
don't like posts of type "ai told me so", but google nicely summarized things in this case
Language Suppression: The most significant recent development was the 2017 law that ended the mandatory study of the Tatar language in schools, making it an optional subject. This has led to a decline in new generations of Tatar speakers and marginalized the language in administration and higher education. Efforts by Tatarstan to revert their script to the Latin alphabet were also blocked by Moscow.
Political and Civic Crackdowns: The Russian government has systematically eroded the political autonomy that Tatarstan gained in the 1990s. Tatar national organizations, such as the All-Tatar Public Center, have been labeled "extremist" and banned, with activists facing fines, detention, and imprisonment for speaking out against the policies.
Historical Revisionism: Moscow promotes a single, "imperial doctrine" of history, suppressing narratives that contradict it. This includes the erasure of Tatar national heroes and the promotion of figures who align with the Kremlin's narrative. Public memorial events related to historical injustices, such as the 1944 deportation of Crimean Tatars, are restricted or prohibited in Russian-occupied territories like Crimea.
Control over Identity: The official state policy focuses on a conventional, apolitical interpretation of Tatar culture, ignoring the community's desire for genuine self-determination. The goal appears to be the destruction of distinct national identities and the creation of a unified, unitary Russian state.
this is essentially what they told me (this is why copy/pasted slop as it's easier than typing half a page), +him been dragged to FSB for "conversation" due to "extremism"
if typing is too much to make an argument then maybe it's not worth it.
extremism laws are no joke, talking about gay things is "extremism", talking about secession also "extremism". But that is true for anyone even if you're white
As a Ukrainian, seeing how US sometimes romanticizes Russia and takes active interest in its culture is heartbreaking. But I guess having an ocean between you and the continent with Russia does that to you.
I don't think he suggested hating all the Russians.
But I agree that we shouldn't promote or glorify any aspect of the Russian culture, including the language, until they face the truth and start making amends for their history. Instead they are currently doubling down on the atrocities and russification.
Majority of Ukrainians want nothing to do with Russia, Russia culture, language etc. Given that a bulk of "shared culture" is Russian attempts to suppress anything Ukrainian over past few hundred years.
This is where interest of Ukrainians lay.
And I'll quote you a Russian journalist, that had to run away from Russia and later was assassinated by Russians in Ukraine. 10 years ago or so he wrote: west should dig a deep ditch around Russia and fill it with alligators.
There is also non-zero amount of actual russians that think that russian culture brings only misery and should be destroyed together with russia (state as we know it)
No, your country genociding Palestinians, with the cruelty that would make a zetnik horrified. Saying that it, in its current state, should be destroyed certainly isn't a fringe opinion these days.
well, we have difference of opinion about genociding. and you obviously not sufficiently exposed to russian opinions about ukrainians: to kill all adults and reeducate children to be good russian and use them to fight west, is not exactly fringe opinion.
but given that we were talking about cultural suppression, in my country, there is an state financed arabic school system where everything is taught in arabic, state sponsors muslim clerics/mosques and by law all signage and documents must have arabic.
ps. kinda ironic that you actually want to genocide entire country while complaining about "genocide"
Please spare this forum the "it's not a war crime if I was having fun" argument. However many Arabic schools you have, after all that's happened in Gaza, nobody needs a morality lesson from an Israeli.
i don't have habit of giving morality lessons to somebody. especially to somebody who willingly misrepresents what happens in israel, ukraine and russia
Russian is neither a common lingua franca nor is it commonly spoken by foreigners (with the obvious exclusion of former Soviet countries). It belongs culturally to Russia and it's people. English belongs to half a dozen countries.
I'm not sure I agree with the original commenter, but I see the merit in their perspective.
Is English commonly spoken by countries that aren't former British colonies? I am a Ukranian citizen, and if I can speak Russian, and not have that kind of prejudice, you should also be able to. In fact most Ukrainians speak Russian.
It's true that Ukranian is more prevalent in western Ukraine, but that is a minority. Most people live in Kyiv, and prefer to speak Russian, including the current president of Ukraine. Or at least this was the case before the war started, and a huge chunk of population left the country.
let me guess, they consumed spiked up oranges ? and you are the only one who could resist it ? and russia launching war in the middle of the night has absolutely nothing to do with it ?
> Exactly that gives ruskies propaganda talking points to invade Ukraine by saying they don’t like how Ukrainians treated russian speakers.
The Russians have a point there. I wish the Russian language was an official language in Ukraine, and I wish I could speak Russian in Ukraine without restrictions, but unfortunately the Ukranian government chose to instead try and force people to speak Ukranian at school, etc. But that obviously doesn't justify starting a war.
> British King isn’t delusional enough to start war with neighboring English speaking country.
Do they even have a neighbouring country that speaks English? They are dumb enough to quit EU though.
Wishing a national identity and sovereignty did not exist just for your convenience is what this thread is about.
> I wish I could speak Russian in Ukraine without restrictions
There weren't meaningful restrictions. A large number of Ukrainians still speak Russian a lot. Instead this sounds like "forcing" a number of people to speak to you in a particular language in order for you to not feel "restricted".
I was forced to speak Ukranian at school. Is this not a meaningful restriction to you?
> Instead this sounds like "forcing" a number of people to speak to you in a particular language in order for you to not feel "restricted".
Unlike Ukranian government, I never forced anyone to speak any particular language. In fact, what happens when one person prefers to speak Ukrainian, and the other person prefers to speak Russian, is they just do, and they both understand each other just fine.
100%. I saw some vids from Ukrainian frontlines where people say speaking Russian is a problem because in fast situations it's more difficult to identify if you're enemy. This means even there some people speak Russian
It's just about education in schools and official use. And it's crazy to blame a country for requiring using its home language at schools
Tons of people totally speak English there. But it's not an official language. And government totally forces kids to speak French/Dutch/whatever in schools. if England invades Netherland will you say they also have a point?;)
The point is that Ukraine used to be a part of Soviet Union, and this is why "obviously" Ukranians speak Russian, and we are drawing a parallel to how former British colonies also speak English. France et al are not former British colonies, and I assume they prefer to speak their native language at home, and not English. Not because they are forced to, but because English is not their native language.
The propagation of English is due to the influence of America and Britain. If you look at the history of what those two have been up to all around the world, it's not pretty.
I speak Russian and due to war I've completely abandoned the language and the culture. Russians not showing any resistance is a good litmus test whether culture is worth being involved with and the answer is a clear no imo.
Kinda sad as russian language is quite incredible but any sane individual must sanitize their environment for their own sake and abandoning russian culture is a perfectly reasonable take.
You mean not the level you would feel satisfied, there are plenty showing resistance, they just disappear. Very easy to judge others when you have little risk.
The ones showing resistance are leaving Russia and immigrating to other countries if they can.
You should take pity on them. They are unfortunate people who live in a dictatorship. Russians who tried to protest were arrested and taken in unknown direction by authorities.
Ahem. The Baltics got independence when the Soviet regime collapsed. With all due respect to the struggle of anyone who opposed this regime while it existed, attributing the collapse of the Soviet Empire to the resistance in the Baltics is a bit too much. It was mostly driven my processes internal to Russia itself.
Hence, the weak spot in Russia‘s age old decrying of „NATO-encroachment“: It is Russia‘s neighboring countries themselves that immediately sought NATO-membership
Ah yes all the freedom fighters and culture preservationists had zero impact in securing Lithuania's freedom - what an incredibly dumb, disrespectful and frankly depressing take.
depressing - certainly, disrespectful - perhaps, but dumb? if instead of Gorbachev there had been another Stalin (or the current version of Putin), the empire would have endured that period of turbulence intact, and you would still be part of it.
also, the provinces that didn't fight for independence - Kazakhstan, for example - had got it anyway, whether they wanted it or not at the time.
No your logic is fundamentally flawed because it assumes a job has to reach 100% completion to have an effect. What if soviet empire collapsed precisely because the resistance was too costly.
In Lithuania in particular sabotage was a constant reality of the country for bigger chunk of a century. People were breaking the empire not only via outside resistance and cultural identity preservation but also by sabotaging soviet operations in daily activities. The empire fundamentally became unsustainable and collapsed under it's own weight and no new glorious leader could have saved it.
So whether Lithuanians are free because of their own efforts or because it just so happens that soviet empire collapsed is a fundamentally flawed question as these two things are not only correlating but are causal as well.
You're are feeding into a myth of unbreakable ussr and belittling efforts of former member states.
In any colonizer's strategy, this tactic achieves following goals
1. Instills fear, and demotivates and fragments resistance
2. Internalizes inferiority into a colonized nation
I might've been too hasty assuming you are doing this on purpose. But otoh, saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich. The moment Kazakh government thinks about denouncing russian as official language, putin will send a new government. Well, maybe not now, as his resources are strained.
Point is: Kazakhstan is far from independent, and Baltic states have done a lot to gain their true independence.
>otoh, saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich.
Kazakhstan is dependent on Russia and there is massive corruption, but for the most part it is independent. Just as independent as any other country with massive corruption.
Also, Russian speaking non native-Kazahk people are not treated so nicely there.
Young Kazakh people indeed started questioning the state of things. And I celebrate that.
At the same time, russia has huge influence over the country. Yes, corruption is exactly how russian influence is usually maintained.
That doesn't contradict my claim, however.
>saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich. The moment Kazakh government thinks about denouncing russian as official language, putin will send a new government
at the time of the empire's collapse, Putin was essentially a nobody. Yeltsin and the oligarchs didn't really give a fuck about Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the Baltics, and the rest. they were truly and unconditionally independent, and Russia, given its humiliating defeat in Chechnya, couldn't do shit about it even if it wanted to (which it didn't).
Oh, they gave a lot of fucks.
They ensured russian language has a special status in Ukrainian constitution, for example, despite freedom of speech and non-discrimination were already there.
They ensured the presidential candidate with strong nationalistic views, arguing for severing ties with russia, won't make it to elections.
They financed political parties pulling Ukraine back to russia.
There might've been a temporary loss of russian grip on Ukraine in those turbulent times, but that was just a tiny blip on the scale of whole timeline
I honestly do take pity on russians but I also chose to not engage with russian culture to sanitize my own environment as it's just too ruined for any healthy engagement.
As Russian many crazy supporters of Putin and Ukraine war I met outside of Russia are foreigners speaking English. Sure it's worse among Russians but if you were serious about anti war position you would want to speak Russian more because that helps spread your position. It's not like PRC yet, people can disagree with government without being so afraid
My good friend once taught me that people without shame are the most dangerous people.
I am shocked by how much russian-speaking people are shameless.
When russia starts the biggest war since WWII using language/national justification¹, promoting russian culture is shameless beyond limits.
¹ putin promised to solve "Ukrainian question" ("украинский вопрос" – an obvious reference to "Judenfrage" which later was used by German fascists to justify holocaust) when he announced his svo
If you’re referring to Lolita, the novel is written from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, that Nabokov very clearly holds in complete contempt. You would know this if you had actually read the book.
Face it. You have grown up thinking that all teachers should be as kind as your kindergarten teacher and the amount of details about verbs should not exceed the your gaming console instructions.
Having studied at various levels about half a dozen languages (mostly Indo-European but also Hebrew), it’s fascinating to see the various features that are common across them. Most IE languages (but not English) create families of verbs by prefixing them with prepositions (we get some of this in borrowed vocabulary such as attain, obtain, sustain, detain, etc.). Greek makes this most obvious since some of its verb inflections happen as prefixes which end up in the middle of these preposition-inflected verbs. The reflexive pronoun se/sa/si manages to stay pretty consistent across languages, although there are some interesting cases where in, Spanish, e.g., se becomes me/te/nos/vos in the first and second person, but in Czech remains se (with declensions).
Vocabulary is especially wild to watch mutate across languages with, e.g., brother recognizable in most languages once you know about mutation between b-p-f and th-t-d-* (the * indicating omission) and it’s almost the same word in most of the IE languages I know except Spanish (which lost it’s frater-derived noun for hermano which comes from the Latin germanus which is the root of the English germane among other words) and Greek ἀδελφός which etymologically means from the same womb.
> (but not English)
Well, English has inherited a lot of such families ultimately from Latin: admit, commit, remit, transmit.
A link to the book - https://archive.org/details/lecturesonlitera0000nabo_z7a4 and on Smellazon https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/0156027763
Also: https://www.ijlll.org/2024/IJLLL-V10N6-557.pdf
I think it may actually be from _Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor_ instead. I spent an hour or so last night after seeing this tweet trying to track down the rest of this essay, and it took me a while to find the exact book it was from and find a copy of it. The funny part to me was that the whole essay was actually included in the tweets (aside from a footnote), it's very sort and pithy.
> You can, and should, speak Russian with a permanent broad smile
Funnily enough, I was told the exact same thing about English when I was learning it as a Russian native.
In contrast, see “Why Russians never smile”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27317859
Unfortunately, the URL referenced in the link does not point to the original article.
Here is what I assume was referenced:
https://chicagomaroon.com/5454/viewpoints/op-ed/why-russians...
Thank you for that, I only dug out the HN discussion, having read the article back when it was on the front page. Weird that the link changed like that!
Not a problem!
It took an embarrassing long time reading through the article, waiting for the pivot to ‘Russian Smiling’, only to realize by almost the very end, that clearly, I had been hoodwinked.
Linking the proper article after this endeavor seemed appropriate to save others the same grief.
On a tangent - I've moved abroad to work in a multinational corporation, and I noticed that similar cultures cluster together. I spend most of my time with other Eastern Europeans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-segregation
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Mass immigration has always happened over the millennia. Sometimes peoples are replaced, sometimes they end up mostly merged after a few generations.
I don't think it's something that can be prevented or encouraged, it's too many people trying to improve their lives to control it. Especially in a time when we're making most of the tropics uninhabitable with climate change.
Forcing people to move to another country en masse sounds like the failures wouldn't be caused by a culture clash so much as more fundamental issues around being forced to move to another country.
I believe part of the endgoal is to create a fairly homogenous global culture. If you listen to radio stations across the world, many play the same rotten manufactured pop songs... Hollywood and Google/Wikipedia complete the Coca Colonisation.
The more peaky the bell curve the more money you can make by targeting your product (or extractive tax policy) at the middle of that curve.
McDonalds, Hollywood, etc, etc. would love nothing more than to have nearly everyone consume one class of products and the bureaucrats and academics who know best would love nothing more than to have simple rules that can apply to nearly everyone.
More or less... I used to have the Radio Garden app where I could listen to stations across the world until bureaucracy intervened.
It was an eyeopener (earopener?) to hear most stations in South America, Asia and Australia playing the same crappy pop songs. Not even very good ones either. Some stations played local music as well which was of far more interest to me than hearing more or less the same pap.
Interesting -- that doesn't match my experience with South America at all! Everywhere you go, the venues mainly play local music, except maybe in Chile.
There is no person with enough agency to have that kind of thing as an end goal. It's effect of a lot of other things, mostly US dominance and globalisation.
There are plenty. Hollywood has massive dominance in the international film industry as does the American music industry. The USA has spent a lot of time and money promoting its culture. It is partly a consequence of the Cold War.
But the endgoal is to produce a homogenised world culture. You can see this being pushed by groups such as FIFA and Global Citizen (the name isn't even subtle) in the last few weeks with the lead up to the World Cup, and the repeated use of platitudes like "we are one" and "unite for our future".
"we are one" is not equal to "we are exactly the same"
Honestly can't believe I'm out here defending FIFA for god's sake, but it's obvious that they mean everyone should be good to eachother even though we are all different. It has nothing to do with cultural colonisation.
There's a lot wrong with FIFA, but trying to get people to hate eachother a little less isn't one of them
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LGBT propaganda... Funny how people who have been gobbling up propaganda about something, always think "the other side" is the one producing the actual propaganda
And yes, i see the irony of this statement
But some dudes kissing in a movie is not propaganda
Isn’t whether or not something is propaganda determined by the intent of those producing or distributing it?
If the intent of someone including two men kissing in a movie is to promote approval of homosexual relationships, OR is to promote the idea that men kissing doesn’t imply homosexuality, then that’s propoganda, but if the intent is just “the movie sells better if there’s a scene pandering to yaoi fangirls”, or “the screenwriter found something that happened with two guys they know to be compelling”, then it isn’t propaganda,
right?
You're probably right, but my main point was that it's funny that people who have been spoon fed propaganda about something always think the opposite of what they now believe is the actual propaganda
Honestly, pretty impressive by the russian government how they are able to do that
Then again, in many cultures (even in more tolerant ones like here in the netherlands) there's always somewhere a latent hatred and/or disgust towards LGBT. So maybe it's nit that hard to bring that back to the surface after all
> But some dudes kissing in a movie is not propaganda
Overrepresentation in mass media is a form of propaganda.
Would you believe that in some countries it never happens at all! Overrepresentation compared to what?
So you believe in quotas in "mass media", so that homosexuals aren't over-represented?
Or you just think it's a conspiracy to turn everyone gay?
Trying to control the free market of ideas seems a bit oppressive.
Systematic overrepresentation in media is already a control. Which also make it oppressive.
OK so you think it's a conspiracy.
But how do you know it's "overrepresentation"? It's media not a strict reflection of population.
Anyway, so you don't like gay people, but tough luck. Just like you can like or dislike whoever you want, people can like and talk about whoever they want. Sorry to break it to you but its not a conspiracy it's just modern society.
Wow. Interesting. I just mentioned overrepresentation, which is a fact that even you can't deny, and you go to such lengths to frame me as a conspiracy theorist and gay hater. I can even read hate in your writing tone.
Why? What makes you so aggressive? What makes you hate someone who points out obvious facts? What is the reason for your denial and hate?
You're doing the old Soviet thing of accusing people of the thing you're doing. Did you use to live in that environment?
Everything you say is unfounded and makes little sense. You seem to be read things that are not there.
I'm just saying that what you think is an acceptable amount of gay "representation" does matter and that it merely reflects your own biases. Your views don't matter in this respect because if you live in a free country the media can "represent" anything it likes and if you don't like it you can turn it off. And complain about it I guess.
That's what it's all about freedom. Preserving freedom. Trying to take away other people's freedom to express themselves is not what its about.
Overrepresentation is when something appears in media way more often than in the real life.
Gay behaviour is overrepresented in the media.
You can frame it with Soviet union, freedom of any kind, human right, democracy, religion, right to consume or not. You can try to make it about me or you and call me whatever.
What you can't do is deny overrepresentation. Because it's the fact, whether you like it or not. And that's the only thing I said, everything else is your projection and false accusation.
You being uncomfortable with people different than you does not mean there's a conspiracy.
You can't notice that in the last 20 years it became obligatory. It is included in almost every movie and every book. It reminds me of Soviet times, when every book, including Sci-Fi about deep space exploration, should've devoted some pages to promoting ideas of communism.
And it wasn't "conspiracy". I doubt there ever was a requirement to do it. Simply, your book had less chance of publishing if you don't do it. I think it is the same in US an EU now: if you don't include 1-2 bits of propaganda or more, your book has less chances to be mentioned in the bestsellers section or something like that.
You don't need a person. It's just a result of the systems we've set up and how they incentives everyone with any agency to act when they do get to use that agency.
Specifically, it's Metcalfe's Law.
While you might have a few global super stars (Lady Gaga, Black Pink, ...) everywhere, the average pop radio station in the USA, Russia, China will be very different from each other.
What does "forced" mean in this context?
Yeah, that's the point - you shouldn't really smile, it's about relaxing your mouth
I learned it on my own... always imagined it as "speaking without letting the heat out"
Are we trying to make psychopaths? That’s sounds very unsettling for conversation.
Americans are regularly ribbed for smiling way too much during conversations with strangers. Apparently we can be rather unsettling lol
Some Americans do grin all the time.
In the context of a foreigner clumsily trying to speak your language, the smile might be interpreted differently.
Very funny and snobbish too, nothing less expected from Nabokov.
Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language. It is not that different from German in this matter.
German inflection is pretty minimalistic. There are just four cases, and it's mostly the article that is being changed with only occasional and predictable changes to the noun itself. Meanwhile in Russian there are six cases and no article, so it's the word itself that has to change. Also there are three different declensions not counting exceptions.
Gender in Russian is much easier than in German though - most of the time you can tell it by the word itself
That's declension of nouns. Then there's the conjugation of the verbs, which is reasonably regular in German and similar to Latin (three persons, two numbers, three basic tenses each with a "perfect", two voices, across four moods).
What's difficult really depends on the languages you already know.
In addition to noun inflection, verb aspect, pronunciation stress, and punctuation trouble many native English speakers. That's in addition to all the simple irregularities, like irregular nouns and verbs.
Stress even troubles native speakers. When I lived there, I saw slideshow "where 's the stress?" quizzes used to fill time on screens in taxi buses, waiting rooms, and the like.
Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement, except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock).
Punctuation is secondary, just put commas, colons and semicolons where you feel they should go, most Russians don't know any better themselves.
Noun and verb inflections you will master with enough practice, yeah.
Maybe overall a more difficult language than English or German, but not in the same league as Chinese or Arabic, in my humble opinion.
As an Arabic speaker I enjoyed learning Russian because we share verbless sentences, and you could just put the words together in any order and you get your idea across and you could be spot on too. So 'what is the time?'(Kotoryy chas) is 2 words as in Arabic for asking the time and other questions in conversation. And some Russian words have lovely music to my ears, as with ice cream and of-course, мороженое и, конечно.
> Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement
The difficulty is that the stress pattern is not fixed and needs to be memorized, and it often changes the inflection of the word. E.g. "домá" means "houses", while "дóма" means "at home". Another tripping point is that the stress placement is almost always different in Russian when compared to English.
I'm volunteering as an English teacher for Ukrainian refugees, and one of my rules of thumb is: "If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable". It works surprisingly well.
Stress pattern in russian is not just different from English, it's also different from Ukrainian half the time.
>If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable
Most of these are Latin and French loanwords where Russian (same as e.g. German) carried the accentuation over from the source language. English is the odd one out as it insists on putting the primary stress on either of the first two syllables, except in some recent loans (and those still get a secondary stress). With nouns the preference is for the first syllable. Russian surnames get similarly butchered, including notably Nabokov, which could have been adopted unchanged.
You may find this interesting: https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages
It seems like an extremely coarse classification. Category 3 contains languages with very different degrees of difficulty, while Bulgarian and Russian are both Slavic they are nothing alike in terms of difficulty since Bulgarian is the most analytic of Slavic languages (has the less inflection). That makes it extremely easy to learn compared to Russian.
What is also interesting is how written Russian was heavily influenced by old Bulgarian. In fact, written russian includes a lot of older written bulgarian vocabulary.
This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.
This happens in other languages too - danish and Norwegian are almost the same written, such that most products just combine the two on the packaging. But spoken it can be very difficult to comprehend
I speak Russian and some Bulgarian as third/forth languages, and while I agree that Russian is more difficult, I wouldn't say Bulgarian is "extremely easy" in comparison. It's maybe ~20% easier at best.
I think Bulgarian is considered the easiest Slavic language in terms of grammar because it has a simplified case system similar to how English dropped its cases over time.
On a superficial level that seems like a roughly correct ranking in my experience. On the other hand, I picked up one of the category 3 languages pretty easily. I think some of these are more "weird" to a native English speaker than "hard" per se.
The aspects that make languages difficult for a native English speaker vary quite a bit with the language. I would expect individual experiences with the languages to have high variance as a consequence.
As others hsve pointed out, it's a very coarse (and rather arbitrary) categorization.
E.g. both Turkish and Russian are in Category 3, but Turkish is trivial compared to Russian.
Turkish grammar is extremely regular, and follows easily defined rules that fit about two pages of easily digestible tables.
In comparison, Russian is a separate class tought in Russian schools for four years to native Russian speakers. And you still get people who can't properly inflect numerals, for example.
Turkish has a completely different vocabulary (loanwords aside) and a completely different grammar.
"I want to swim" in Russian is "ja hoću plavatj", "I" + "want" + "to swim". The only difficulties are the conjugation of "want" and the aspect of "to swim". In Turkish it's "yüzmek istiyorum", where "-mek" is "to" and "-um" is "I". Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.
> Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.
As a native Russian speaker who speaks English and Turkish:
The question isn't about alienness. It's about difficulty. Turkish is trivial compared to Russian. You can learn all the grammar rules you'd ever need in a week or so (though most study materials make it harder than necessary). The rest is just learning vocabulary. Which is just as alien to an English speaker as Russian.
As for the example...
Here's a valid three word sentence in Russian: Ya idu domoj (I'm going home).
Depending on context, mood, feel, etc. any permutation of those words is a valid sentence: ya domoj idu, idu ya domoj, idu domoj ya, domoj ya idu, domoj ya idu.
And that's before we get into inflections, conjugations, gender etc. that neither English nor Turkish have. Or somewhat arbitrary pronunciation rules (korova is pronounced kahrohva) whereas in Turkish every word is pronounced exactly as written (with very few quite regular contractions in regular speech like yapacağım -> yapıcam) etc.
> The question isn't about alienness. It's about difficulty.
The original link is specifically about difficulty to native English speakers, which is certainly linked to its alienness.
Turkish is regular, has well specified rules you can learn in a week, is extremeley easy to read (pronounce as written, there's no floating/jumping/changing stress). Oh, and the alphabet is latin-based.
Russian: extremely complicated grammar using concepts entirely alien to English (declensions, inflections, conjugates, grammatical cases, genders, transgressives, and even plurals are weird), has free-form-not-really sentence structure, jumping stress. Oh, and a completely different alphabet to boot.
"the alphabet is Latin based"
Yes, phonetic spelling but you won't be able to read anything much before WW1.
As if that is a required criteria for learning Turkish, or for assessing its difficulty.
Note: 99.9% of Turks are not able to read much of anything before WW1.
Exactly. Historical amnesia which is partly what Kemal Atatürk was after. Year Zero.
Isn't English also a separate class taught in English schools to native English speakers?
Not always well. One of the problems is that English speakers do not get taught the proper parts of speech. I learnt far more about English from learning other languages than I ever did in English class. We would get told off for bad spelling and grammar, but very little on the actual mechanics.
English classes (at least at my high school) were largely about literature, less the language itself. Though I did take one elective class on grammar.
Yes.
All through middle and high school, so for 7 years from around 10 to 16. It did become one eventually in primary school, so probably the last 2 or 3 years there.
Not for four years, for all eleven years...
Difficulty scale looks about right.
> except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock).
Only because we're in a language thread: i.e. is "that is" (id est) e.g. is "example given" (exempli gratia)
I find Mandarin Chinese a lot easier than Russian.
I have been generally successful at learning Russian as an adult, but tonal languages are something that I just struggle with on a fundamental level. I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.
> I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.
Why would you want to? Pitch also provides connotations / emotions in Mandarin.
> It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue.
That will never happen. Your bad pronunciation can aggravate other problems, but if your sentence is otherwise good, ignoring the tones will still leave it fully intelligible.
(I once asked a student in a Chinese school whether a particular class wasn't occurring, and he responded "poss". After some confusion, he was frustrated that the pronunciation difference between "poss" and "pause" should make such a difference in communicating with an English speaker.
But of course, it doesn't. If "pause" were a valid way to respond to "is chemistry class happening today", I would have had no difficulty understanding "poss". His problem was in bad knowledge of the language, not bad pronunciation.
You appear to be making the same mistake here. If you try to communicate, and fail, that is not evidence that you are qualified to diagnose what the problem was.)
Right but those Mandarin tones are pretty easy for an native english speaker to learn to say, they roll off the mouth easily.
Likewise, learning to speak the tone is just another grammar dimension, memorization.
Listening for tone is the hard part, but once you know enough grammar AND know the context of the sentence, it falls into place.
YMMV, also Cantonese is more difficult here (IMO).
I find Cantonese a lot easier on the ear. Unfortunately, nearly all the Cantonese I know is rude.
I find those Cantonese words ending in -p, -t, -k harsher than mellifluous Mandarin.
I'm not a great fan of the sibilant sounds in Mandarin. Which to be fair is pretty rich coming from an English speaker.
Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.
So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.
Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.
I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.
So Vietnamese is the “Danish” of East Asia it seems
Or the Golang of East Asia.
Personally I find Vietnamese and Chinese to be about the same difficulty overall, just not on the same areas.
Vietnamese is massively harder to pronounce with way less room for mistakes whereas reading is easier.
Fiendish logographic writing system (Chinese) vs fiendish grammar (Russian). I'm not a fan of Pinyin transliteration aesthetically.
Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.
> It is not that different from German in this matter.
I've met several Germans who spoke Russian fluently, none of them has really mastered the instrumental case, not even a friend of mine who worked at the German embassy in Moscow. Although you might say it's a minor grammar difference, this particular grammar case seems hard to grasp for people who are not accustomed to it through their native language.
Also, from my personal experience, quite a few Germans who learnt Russian had a real struggle understanding the concept of perfective/imperfective aspect.
These kinds of grammatical difficulties are typical for people who are learning only their second language after their native language.
After learning 3 or more languages that are not closely related, one is usually exposed to most grammatical features that can be encountered in the majority of the languages, so usually grammar no longer poses any challenges, but only memorizing the unfamiliar words and pronouncing sounds that do not exist in the native language.
I find the concept of perfective/imperfective verbs quite easy to grasp.
Remembering all the verb couples, that's what takes some effort.
>It is not that different from German in this matter.
Russian inflection changes the stress. In German it's fixed. Inflectional forms are much more varied in Russian. Colloquial German is much more analytical (past tense is almost always "ich habe" + participle). German has devolved to basically 3 cases at this point (with genitive dying out), compared to Russian's 6. But conceptually, they're very similar indeed.
If you just want to be understood, Russian is not very hard. I think it's true for any language. To master it, however...
> Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language.
That's saying that getting to the lunar orbit is the only difficult part in landing on the Moon. The whole complexity of inflectional languages is in the inflections. It's also why Slavic (or Turkic) languages form such a large continuum of mutually almost-intelligible languages.
Compared to inflections, everything else in Russian is simple. The word formation using prefixes and suffixes is weird, but it's not like English is a stranger to this (e.g. "make out", what does it mean?). The writing system is phonetic with just a handful of rules for reading (writing is a different matter).
Add baltic languages to the mix as well! Lithuanian is like a slavic language with all the inflection drama but with additional word types that are currently mostly gone from slavic languages.
Well, Lithuanian is also a Proto-Indo-European language. But the one that somehow got sucked into a time warp from the past. And it even has a tonal pitch accent in addition to the stress pattern, just to make it more interesting.
Wow, I had no idea. This sounds extremely interesting. I need to read more about Lithuanian language (at least grammar, sadly I don't have time to learn yet another language)
Maybe because Lithuanian has 3 kinds of stresses...
English phrasal verbs make completely zero sense since there is no logic involved
If English was logical "make out" would mean somethibgg like "throw out". But "to make out" means something else obviously. And you dont throw out your trash. You throw them away...
You can throw stuff out or throw it away. They both mean the same.
The one that gets me as a native speaker is the difference between stand up and stand down. Or write up and write down.
Many phrasal verbs are fairly logical, and so don't require much attention.
Well, yes.
The only difficult part of Russian is writing it. Most native Russian speakers, myself included, can't write properly even after completing 11 years of Russian language in school. Hundreds of rules nobody remembers.
I think as a native speaker it's different to you.
Native English speakers make spelling mistakes quite often. But as a language learner I struggled with everything, except spelling - I always knew how to spell a word, even if I don't know how to pronounce it. It's the opposite of native speaker experience.
English spelling is one of the hardest parts of the language to learn because the spelling represents ~16th century pronunciation. However what we gained is a common orthography for all the different dialects and accents of English. I can barely understand some people from Appalachia or Western England when they speak, but if they write it down it’s no problem.
> English spelling is one of the hardest parts of the language to learn because the spelling represents ~16th century pronunciation.
English spelling doesn't represent any pronunciation. English spelling represented pronunciation before the Normans, and afterwards was turned into something that would allow Norman speakers to do nearly-intelligible imitations of unpronounceable English words. Even worse, 1) French spelling also had drifted far from pronunciation (although not as far as now), and 2) English picked up a ton of that French and further mispronounced it.
Such as how place names that now end in "-shire" pre-conquest ended in "-scr," which is how they're still pronounced.
> However what we gained is a common orthography for all the different dialects and accents of English.
True, but those dialects came after the spelling changes. Vowels in English multiplied out of control and became more of a system of how vowels could relate to each other rather than specific sounds, like in (very regular) Old English when a long or doubled vowel was simply the same vowel sounded longer. Germanic vowels are crazy and got crazier.
To understand somebody's English, you listen to them for a while and figure out what they're doing with their vowels - we know from experience that some vowel sounds move together with each other, so when we hear X we can guess Y, and we then look for exceptions and mergers. Once we've figured out the vowels, the words become clear. A fun example is when you compare the Canadian accent to the US accent, and you see some words rhyme in both British and Canadian English that don't rhyme in US English.
IIRC, English is often described as having between 16 and 22 vowels, depending on who is speaking it. Writing that would be hellish, and as you say, you'd have to change spellings when you crossed rivers. English orthography is more like Chinese orthography than one would think.
I should have said it represents the pronunciation of English in and around London in the 16th century.
English spelling wasn’t normalized until long after the Normans. Norman scribes did their part but it was the printing industry in London that crystallized it.
Some of it is. Some of it is arbitrary. The "h" in "ghost" is said to be partly accidental. The "b" in "debt" due to folk etymology. There will be numerous other examples.
-shire has several pronunciations: sher, sheer and shire (as written). I've heard all three and caught myself using at least two of these.
In his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, John DeFrancis calls the English orthography the worst among the alphabetic ones, and Japanese the worst among the logographic ones.
Re English, maybe among major languages. Faroese orthography is bad in phonetic terms, but Faroese is not a well known language. I'm sure other smaller languages have even worse systems than English.
Among the major languages, French is also pretty awful. Its orthography is much less practical than Spanish or Italian.
Tibetan orthography is notoriously bad, but is neither alphabetic nor logographic. This is a result of Tibetan changing a great deal since it was first transcribed.
Sort of. I am seeing American spellings invading here a lot. "Jail" is well established now, but "color" etc are coming in.
Sure, there are some recent exceptions. But nearly all words that contain vowel pairs like “ea” and “ai”, for example, represent a much older pronunciation regardless of the current one. Words like “hear” and “wear” would have rhymed at one point. Most words ending in “ed” would have had that syllable fully pronounced instead of reduced to a “t” sound.
That vast majority of words among all English dialects are spelled similarly and go back to the 16th century or thereabouts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s...
Where is "here"? They've been a thing for 200 years so I'm curious
"Where is here?"
Not the USA. :)
The verbs in Russian can be complex, especially the verbs of motion and prepositions.
The state of English spelling has deteriorated a lot since the simpler minded started going online.
By the way, I far prefer Russian orthography to Polish which has me baffled a lot of the time.
Your experience as a native speaker is completely different from learning the language from scratch as an adult, to the point that it's almost irrelevant. Writing Russuan is not that difficult, it's just the only part that you had to actually do any work to learn
> Writing Russuan is not that difficult
Never thought the difference mastering writing can be so significant. Just like to add what I understand regarding this. It's rather about not making any mistake writing by hand ca. 1-2 DIN A4 pages while someone reads a text (slow enough). I can't remember exactly but making only one (or two) mistake(s) and it is not anymore excellent (just good). Making 4-7 mistakes and it is not good (just sufficient). Making few more and it is bad which means failed. It's a long text with a very short path to fail.
Ukrainian is less difficult to write. There are claims that standardization/reform of Russian made it more artificial (far from natural people language) with overtaking too many words from Latin languages. When I read / listen to Belorussian I think they have even more luck with matching pronunciation/writing than Ukrainian. Which suggests this language is even closer to the common roots old language. (I'm not a linguist.)
Poles will hate me saying this, but I've always really struggled with their orthography, even though I am used to the Roman alphabet. I can see what is going on in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian, maybe even Czech to some extent. Polish is bizarre. Szcz is one letter in Cyrillic. I'm still baffled by l with the line through it.
"Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz. Chrząszczyrzewoszczyce, powiat Łękołody".
Whenever I, Czech, try to read such stuff, I feel a bit high. As in "what funny mushroom did I just eat"?
Hearing spoken Polish, on the other hand, is quite positively magical. But the orthography is, well, necromancy.
> "Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz. Chrząszczyrzewoszczyce, powiat Łękołody".
> Whenever I, Czech, try to read such stuff, I feel a bit high
well, duh, it's from a comedy film script. It's exaggerated for fun.
I know :)
Define properly. As a native speaker who immigrated to the US decades ago, I don’t find writing proper Russian grammar that difficult.
There is a saying that you should learn the enemy language to understand them. I suppose the time has come again. Why else would you learn it otherwise? It is not like many of us can even visit the place without consequences. The books were translated years ago anyway.
Slavic languages are similar, IMO you just need to bombard your brain with a lot of it to start discerning the patterns (just like any other language I guess). Reading is not necessary, writing likewise. I never had a single lesson but speak fluently in russian and ok polish, can understand ukrainian, can read also.
Given that you need content for your brain it would be hard to find something nice created in russia recently, might be easier to start with polish if you are in the west.
Careful, by learning russian you also become an oppressed russian minority that needs to be "liberated". It's not just your brain that will get bombarded.
You've just associated actions of a certain fascist government with the whole language spoken by hundreds of millions of people who are against the war it waged and which is orders of magnitude older.
That's not very bright of you, to put it mildly.
Mind you, the language argument was just as well employed by the putin's propagandists, as in something along the lines of "just listen how silly Ukrainian sub-language sounds, lol".
Which is an argument every sane human being finds disgusting and stupid beyond all comprehension, of course.
> hundreds of millions of people who are against the war
Lie #1. If they were against the war there would be no war.
> That's not very bright of you, to put it mildly.
Lie #2. He tells facts.
> "just listen how silly Ukrainian sub-language sounds, lol".
Lie #3. This is not what Russian propaganda said. They said Ukraine will not allow to speak Russian and will punish for speaking it.
> Which is an argument every sane human being finds disgusting and stupid beyond all comprehension, of course.
The language itself is not guilty, of course. It's the speakers.
Their propaganda was saying a lot of different things, including both mentioned above.
Ukrainian is magical language that is both the same as russian (so not real language of its own) and difficult to learn, so russian not being an official language is literally genocide.
You should learn what the word "literally" means, apart from the truth about Ukrainian language.
I think they are sardonically stating the russian propaganda position(s) to highlight its ridiculousness, not agreeing with it.
> Ukrainian is … the same as russian (so not real language of its own)
What… the fuck?
Just typical russian people. Imperial mindset, russian white supremacy.
A certain part of speakers - yes. A large part, no doubt, otherwise there'd be no one to fight this war.
But what about the other part?
The part that is guilty fell for the same trick that you're falling for - they perceived the whole nation as one single entity that, as they were told by the propaganda, was all Nazis, from newborns to the elderly.
We both know that was bullshit, but you keep painting all Russians in the same way the zombified part of Russians has been painting Ukrainians.
Same with English. let's ~~bomb other countries~~ spread "democracy".
Learn British English, get an urge for a cup of tea.
Russian is spoken by 250 million people. I hope they are not all your enemies.
Only perhaps 90-100 million of them are Russian citizens. For many others it's a second language too.
So you gonna assign anyone who happen to have Russian passport as an enemy? Plenty of those are in the west and also have US/Canadian/etc passport
What the fuck is wrong with the world?
Wrong in Russia you mean. If they stop assassinating people, threatening nuclear strikes, conventional attacks, and so on, they wouldn't be anyones enemy.
No wrong with the people of the same mindset as yourself
There are some good people among Russian citizens, abroad or not. Some great people even. Unfortunately they are few and far between and are not representative of the mindset, aspirations and values of their home nation. So saying "the Russians are the enemy" is entirely fair. It is an actively hostile society much like Nazi Germany was during the WW2 and this nitpicking over good individuals is not making the blanket evaluation unfair in any way.
>"There are some good people among Russian citizens, abroad or not. Some great people even. Unfortunately they are few and far between and are not representative of the mindset, aspirations and values of their home nation."
You lost me here. You sound exactly as the people you are trying to put a blame on.
Well I for one didn't start, participate in or have supported the ongoing war of extermination and conquest. And I am not trying to win any Russian hearts and minds; that's one thing about being enemies.
>"And I am not trying to win any Russian hearts and minds; that's one thing about being enemies."
Never mind Russian hearts. Think view might have a problems well beyond Russia.
I think you miss the point. I am talking about the incentive to learn somebody’s native tongue. I doubt people want to know it to meet an emigrant in Germany and have a conversation in russian. Equally I do mot learn spanish to talk to my neighbours but to have a conversation with a local in spain.
But by your own reasoning, you're also saying it's reasonable to learn Russian as a way to better understand Russia because your country happens to be opposed to them.
If you accept that this relatively obscure reason is a valid motivation (which I agree it can be) then you must also accept that there are all sorts of other motivations that are equally valid including "so I can speak to emigrants" or even just "because I find it fun".
It's not an obscure reason, many people engage with the enemy professionally. That's one of the most frequent motives to learn a language probably. Either you want to immigrate to a country or you want to conduct business with it or it's your enemy and you need to undersrand it. First two options are out for the Western world at the moment
>"First two options are out for the Western world at the moment"
The West still trades with Russia. Obviously at reduced rate and sometimes under the table.
There is a large, growing Russian diaspora and many writers/artists create works in exile. The language helps if you want to understand the millions who left their homes out of principle, but they are not the "enemy".
> There is a saying that you should learn the enemy language to understand them.
Мы не враги, друг мой..
You seem to be still stuck in an "end of history" mindset, unfortunately.
Had to look that up:
"The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government."
So are you implying that I should start treating every foreigner as an enemy just because we as a humanity didn't, and maybe will never come up with a political system that will bring peace on Earth once and for all?
Allright then, I'll still regard most of you at least as non-enemies, if you so object being friends with me;
but you are free to continue considering me your enemy if your current political fartwinds turn your wind vane that way.
Every foreigner? Hell no. There's more to the world than Europe, you know. We're not in active conflict with Laos or Chile.
The nations who quite officially see me as not really human, with widespread popular support? As much as I want it to be different, yes.
I mean, conflict is an inherent part of life. It's possible to hate the fact it happens, yet not ignore its existence.
v kremle s taboj nisoglasny
А в белом доме или в парламенте евросоюза с тобой согласны по всем вопросам?
[flagged]
All that energy, wasted away from the front lines.
Dude, speaking in stereotypes doesn't do you any favor.
Polish person here. Don't try to learn Polish. It's insanely difficult, the "rules" make no sense whatsoever, and almost anybody that you'll want to talk to will be able to communicate with you in English.
As for Russian, I also don't see any point in learning it. I was forcefully taught Russian in primary school back when Poland was under Russian yoke. The general idea here is that we'd like not to be in that situation ever again. Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
Polish is great because there is a lot of content to learn from. And it is a gateway to other western slavic languages in the region. I basically forced myself to learn it because Manga was all in polish at the time. Their movie industry is great as well.
Being able to read Stanisław Lem in original I'd consider possibly the biggest perk.
As someone studying Polish, and making excellent progress, I mostly agree with your take. If you want to explore other languages, something like Spanish will get you much more mileage. Polish is difficult and the community of speakers isn't exactly warm to foreigners or people acquiring the language. On the other hand, if you truly enjoy languages and are passionate about them, I have found Polish to be really interesting and beautiful in its own way. Definitely not recommended, but still enjoyable to read/write/speak.
> Learning the language of a nation
A nation doesn't own the language.
> Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
So, when do you plan to unlearn English?
Do you believe that a significant proportion of native English speakers support the idea of imperialistic invasion and occupation, and the rape and torture of women and children?
Yes. This has been incredibly consistent throughout the existence of the US and UK in particular.
That seems like a pretty wild thing to say. What is your source for this?
Which war? The Iraq War started with around 62% support. When the US started its involvement in the Korean War (one of the biggest mass atrocities we'd carried out since, well, about 5 years earlier when we atom bombed Japan...), around 78% supported it. Around 71% of Americans supported a large scale troop invasion of Afghanistan when it started.
Honestly, even for the wars with bad public perception, like Vietnam, it was mostly because Americans were tired of our guys being drafted just to be turned into dogfood on the other side of the world, not because we were occupying and brutalizing them.
Let's just pick one, so as to not get distracted.
> The Iraq War started with around 62% support.
I think the essence of my question is what did "support" look like here?
I can empathise with the position that the invasion of Iraq was warranted (which is not to say that I agree with it), in the context of the September 11 attacks. What I haven't seen is any popular support for the slaughter of civilians or the annexation of territory — there is no grand narrative that the USA is actually liberating its historical lands in Iraq. I think the support was conditional, and based on claims that later collapsed. The end goal was withdrawal after regime change.
What I haven't seen is any analogue to egregious instances like this[0], of which there are many in russia's war against Ukraine.
[0]: https://iwpr.net/global-voices/go-ahead-and-rape-ukrainian-w...
You're ignoring the mass atrocities committed by both sides in the Donbas throughout much of the 2010s that provided easy propaganda to achieve the same outcomes as the Iraq War propaganda.
I have another example of a "war" carried out recently with overwhelming support in its nation and in the US (initially) due to rapid propaganda around an attack that was likely intentionally intensified in effect by things like moving civilian events next to a military target the day before. But I won't post that one lol
> You're ignoring the mass atrocities committed by both sides in the Donbas throughout much of the 2010s
This is grossly misleading. It implies a scale and symmetry that reputable monitors do not support.
The question now is what caused you to write this. Was it ignorance? Or malicious dishonesty?
> it's different when we do it
You're not helping here.
Who are you quoting?
Is this what HN has become? Just blatant strawmanning?
Ah, the usual whataboutism that derails rational discussion. While the world isn't black and white, there are rare situations where things actually are totally black and white, and we are witnessing one of them right now.
Why is every time you see a Polish person they have an inferiority syndrome and and shit on their own country?
I… don't think that's what I did?
> Learning the language of a nation where a significant percentage of population supports war and killing is not something I'd consider.
Are you a european/white supremacist who doesn't consider the victims of the anglosphere to be human, or are you historically illiterate, even of extremely recent history?
I don't see a third option here since you learned english also, would appreciate an explanation for this special pleading rather than furious downvoting when identifying basic empirical discrepancies in the face of what looks to be materially false claims.
trolling is really an art ^^^^
the references were about russian federation waging an imperialistic type of a war to conquer land when they have the most land already
You're really deep into painting everyone with the same brush, aren't you?
Define russian federation first. Am I it? Is it land? Is it government? Is it those zombie mercenaries who execute criminal orders? Is it those who got jailed after protests against war? Is it those who got conscripted? Those who fled the country to avoid that? Those who struggle to meet ends? Those cruising aboard 150 meter yachts?
Who is this elusive mrs. russian federation?
It's pretty simple, actually. Do you hold a Russian passport? You're Russian.
If you "don't support" the invasion and killing, either start changing the system, or get rid of the passport. Yes, it's inconvenient. So are the missiles and bombs falling on the heads of people in Ukraine for them.
> start changing the system, or get rid of the passport
Right after you, my friend, as soon as you singlehandedly stop the US special military operation in Venezuela and extrajudicial killing of people off its coasts, or jail the commanders and mercenaries of EU forces in Syria, Afghan and Libyian war, depending on your passport. Or get rid of it.
And before you deploy your strawman about "terrorists" - that's exactly the same term that has been used by the kremlin to excuse the invasion into Ukraine.
Your illusion of possibility to change the system shall pass soon, rest assured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Invasions_by_Great_Br...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
This kind of historical blindness and hysterical hypocrisy has never ended well.
Is HN becoming a place where we should expect people to lie to us and promote trivially disprovably rationales in order to foment cultural and racial hatreds based on current political conveniences?
"Never believe they are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. By giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert."
When the russian military fired missiles and drones at my house, I should just accept it because some of my distant ancestors persecuted brown people. Is that your take?
Also, russia’s war against Ukraine enjoys popular support in russia today. Is your argument that the majority of UK and/or US citizens are eager for their respective countries to engage in war against former colonies today?
Fucking wild.
I think that if you clicked on the links and reviewed the original claim, you'd see that you removed every single word and concept and overwhelmingly mutually agreed upon fact and then replaced it with nonsense.
Russian and English are both languages of empires that have engaged in countless acts of violence and aggression. They are not equivalent, but to deny this or heavily qualify it (like dismissing acts of war and violence that happened literally yesterday as "distant") in either direction is inherently hypocritical and dehumanizing.
Honestly, I am starting to suspect you are a Kremlin agent designed to make europeans opposed to their war look so crazy that global opinion shifts against the Ukrainians by tying them to denial of and advocacy for the worst acts of europeans.
…Wow.
> Honestly, I am starting to suspect you are a Kremlin agent
Ok, I'll clarify my position, for the avoidance of doubt.
The terrorist state of russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and ongoing genocide is the darkest chapter in European history since the Holocaust. The putin regime has no regard for human life, and russian soldiers brag about raping women, and murdering children, sometimes by shooting them in the head at point-blank range. Many of these rapes and murders are even encouraged by the wives of russian soldiers — thousands of kilometres away from the front lines. We have it all on tape.
While I am not a soldier, I have two medals from the Ukrainian military for volunteering, and I will continue to help Ukrainian soldiers protect civilians in Ukraine, and to put russian invaders in the ground where they belong.
Does that clear things up for you?
Unfortunately that just leads to more questions, since you did not answer the previous ones at all, and personally volunteering is what most double agents and saboteurs do in order to be in a position to cause more harm by first gaining trust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmudiyah_rape_and_killings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0kpd97qqko
Numerically, the numbers of civilians killed are far greater and we have substantive evidence of rape as military policy along with the murder of children.
In order to clear things up, you need to explain if you believe that either:
A) Those lives less valuable by some measure? Ie, did they deserve it, is it all a hoax and no one died, or is there something about them that makes those lives inherently worth far less than yours?
B) You have reason to believe the Ukrainian government is lying about the casualty figures and that over 600,000 Ukrainian soldiers and over 200,000-500,000 Ukrainian civilians including ~50,000 Ukrainian children have already been killed.
Is it A or is it B?
If you can tell me if you agree with statements like this made by Ukrainian officials about Indians and Chinese being inferior races of lesser intelligence, I think that would clear things up also: https://www.livemint.com/news/world/ukrainian-official-says-...
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> Those lives less valuable by some measurement you need to explain
I do not believe the lives of different races/ethnicities of humans are of different intrinsic value.
What an incredibly fucked up, sick question.
> Numerically, the numbers of civilians killed are far greater and we have substantive evidence of rape as military policy along with the murder of children.
Comparing death rates numerically like this is also incredibly fucked up, and you should be ashamed of yourself. I am disgusted by this.
> You have reason to believe the Ukrainian government is lying about the casualty figures
Where are you getting your figures? I have strong reason to believe that it's near enough impossible to determine accurate figures since so many civilians were slaughtered by russian soldiers and then buried in mass graves on territory that russian soldiers are still occupying. That, and the Ukrainian government explicitly does not divulge how many military casualties they've taken.
> If you can tell me if you agree with statements like this made by Ukrainian officials about Indians and Chinese being inferior races of lesser intelligence, I think that would clear things up also
I do not agree with this racist statement by one Ukrainian politician.
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Nobody should take your geopolitical analysis seriously, since you cite kremlin apologists like Mearsheimer and Sachs. You just don't know what you're talking about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43275551
My claim is that we see the same terrible violence and wars of aggression with subsequent public support (for a time) in both the Russia and the West. Ie, there is a fundamental hypocrisy to either set of alliances to condemn wars of aggression and the mass murder of children. It's quite clear that both sets of elites consider either one to be a policy option if they think it will get them results they want.
And your response is that things should "not be counted numerically" and that it is "incredibly fucked up" to consider human lives to be of equal value.
Altogether, it seems like you can only see things in terms of one ethnically european empire or another as morally righteous, with no other options. You cannot understand or imagine the perspective of someone who considers neither empire to be moral agents who deserve to have their crimes ignored or downplayed.
You have made no argument and your emotional appeal looks identical to eurocentric white supremacy which denies its nature but can only use emotional blackmail and threats when people point out the discrepancies.
It is not disgusting to ask why some raped and murdered civilians are "the worst thing since the holocaust" while others which preceded it that are of a larger scale are not merely forgotten but denied.
All of the current western leaders who forced Ukrainian denuclearization and talk openly about using Ukrainian lives as a "cheap" way to harm Russia are your true friends...
Meanwhile, people like Mearsheimer who said Ukraine should keep its nuclear weapons (https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Mears...) and Sachs who helped Poland successfully transition to a market economy (https://www.earth.columbia.edu/sitefiles/file/Sachs%20Writin...) are "Kremlin apologists."
Why did one "Kremlin apologist" argue persuasively that Ukraine must keep its nuclear weapons to prevent a situation exactly like this war, and why did the other do everything he could to make Poland a stronger country? You have left reality behind.
Your "support" is so irrational that when Putin and Lavrov dishonestly argue there is no one credible to negotiate with on the other side, people around the world who want a lasting peace will reluctantly conclude that while they often lie, this time they are telling the truth.
I continue to think you are being paid by Russia or Russian proxies or that you are functionally equivalent to someone who is. Your rhetorical tactics and emotive language are so similar to RT and other Kremlin propaganda outlets that collusion seems more likely than linguistic convergence at this point.
All that said, Russia was in the wrong to invade and as someone with many Ukrainian friends who are now refugees, I hope you can understand why I hope the Ukrainian authorities are able to identify you and access your personal devices and documents.
An investigation seems warranted to find out if you're really this mentally ill or if you're being paid to make it seem like most Ukraine supporters are, especially since you're a decorated volunteer in a military conflict.
This is the most unhinged load of drivel I have ever read on this website. Ever.
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> And your response is that things should "not be counted numerically" and that it is "incredibly fucked up" to consider human lives to be of equal value.
You have very clearly twisted my words.
I do not think it is moral to turn human suffering into a pissing contest.
I very clearly stated that it is incredibly fucked up to compare human suffering in the way that you're doing. In fact, my first sentence was "I do not believe the lives of different races/ethnicities of humans are of different intrinsic value". You are framing your attack as though I said the complete opposite of what I actually said. What you are doing here is dishonest, and frankly, disgusting.
> Meanwhile, people like Mearsheimer … and Sachs … are "Kremlin apologists."
Yes, they are.
- https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2023/10/john-mears...
- https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/whats-missing-mearshe...
- https://cepa.org/article/sympathy-with-the-devil-the-lie-of-...
> An investigation seems warranted
I'll cross the border into Ukraine again on January 16th.
Happy to provide my personal identification and details of my medals here. Are you happy to provide yours?
Would you like to contact the authorities? Or shall I?
I am not a party to the conflict and I now restrict my efforts to assisting refugees and deserters on both sides. I supported Ukraine's July offensive because it was still capable of changing the strategic balance, and I hoped for a peace with significant russian concessions to be made at the high-water mark.
Now, because of people like you who are bloody-minded and impossibly idealistic when it's not your blood and you can always walk away, it's far too late.
I regard both sides maximal war aims to be impossible in the short and medium term and that all further loss of life is for nothing other than to accelerate the demographic collapse of both Russia and Ukraine in exchange for a few hundred kilometers of nearly worthless and already-depopulated land.
I think you should contact the Ukrainian authorities and ask them if they believe your advocacy is contributing to their goals. Furthermore, you should consider how things will change if there is a peace deal, at which point it seems like you will be someone who will, from a safe location, be working to undermine the Ukrainian government and to restart a losing conflict.
You are part of a larger conflict and you do not set policy, and when it changes, if you don't change with it, you become an enemy of Ukrainian government and the majority of Ukrainians. This majority and the Ukrainian government have stated they would like to have a democratic election without martial law and press censorship in order to decide their future.
Are you against democratic elections? Would you support a coup against a civilian government in order to continue the war?
You said the invasion of Ukraine was worse than the invasion of Iraq, but you reject all quantitative measures. You also have fatal anomalies in your argument you have not refuted by citing opinion pieces that also ignore this information.
Why did John Mearsheimer say Ukraine should keep its independent nuclear deterrent? Because he regarded a war like this as inevitable and that regardless of the outcome, both sides would lose and a large number of people would die, in addition to strengthening China significantly. And so it is.
I care about the average person who is stuck in this geopolitical clash between military blocs that have no regard for russian or ukrainian lives. You seem to care about achieving a military solution with little or no diplomatic consideration.
You are unwilling or unable to comprehend that people in Venezuela and the Middle East are not in fact, members of a lesser race of humans to whom acts of war and the mass murder of civilians "don't count" and don't fundamentally change the way that 90% of people on earth see western claims of moral principle.
I think you should contact the Ukrainian authorities and prove your commitment to your beliefs by volunteering to serve on the front lines: men willing to kill and die for a field are what is most needed now. Being a propagandist trying to get other people to give their lives while refusing to risk your own shows exactly how you feel about things: your life is more valuable than anyone else's and other people's sons, brothers, husbands, should die for your beliefs.
Putin doesn't care how many Russians from rustbelt towns in central asia and small towns get killed and the strategic military balance is in his favor. It is in his interests that diplomacy be seen to fail but not be his fault, because he does care about the willingness of other countries trying to make sense of the current situation to disregard and circumvent western sanctions. So yes, every word you speak and your point of view aligns perfectly with Russian strategy.
Maybe you're simply a dupe and part of an FSB influence operation, but you could make up for it by serving on the front. Anything else is chickenhawk cowardice or a false friend with murky motives.
Age is no restriction, Ukrainian men in their 50s and 60s are on the front lines. Will you fight for the cause you believe is both realistic and a moral necessity? Or perhaps... their lives are worth less than yours?
Why is it appropriate for a Ukrainian man in his late 50s to be drafted (in a way which resembles kidnapping) to kill and die for what you say you believe in but aren't willing to risk your own life for?
If you're working for the FSB you should be ashamed, and if you're not, you should be even more ashamed!
As for myself, I am an enemy of pointless, unwinnable wars, dictatorship, and coercion, so I am an enemy of both governments and a friend of the common person who had no say in this and is trapped between two corrupt cliques that get other people's families killed while vacationing safely in luxury: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/11648
I hope you provide your personal information to a Ukrainian recruiter and put your own skin in the game, because without that, you are functionally identical to an FSB functionary.
[dead]
>Honestly, I am starting to suspect you are a Kremlin agent
Posting that kind of paranoid delusion should be a wake up call that you are propagandized.
People who alienate the 90-92% of the non-white/european global population against Ukraine by repeatedly asserting that only white european lives should have any kind of moral impact or even be remembered at all are feeding into Putin's international propaganda operation. Could it be by accident? Perhaps, but it fits so perfectly with the Kremlin's diplomatic strategy to win over the rest of the world...
Occam's Razor is that they just have a different worldview than you.
Perhaps you're right and I just don't want to believe that the goons in the Kremlin are telling the truth about how ignorant and mendacious the worldview of many of their (very real victims) are.
> The books were translated years ago anyway.
Translated books lack the nuance or tone of the originals, which you would be missing out of, and most of the time you don't even realise.
wow, so nobody should have visited Murica after they nuked Japan and firebombed Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq etc.
Oh but that's fine because they're the Good Guys™
> It is not like many of us can even visit the place without consequences.
There are traveloggers on YouTube visiting Russia in recent months and they seem to be fine.
> Given that you need content for your brain it would be hard to find something nice created in Russia recently
Oh boy.. wow.. really
This is poorly informed, it’s quite easy to get a visa to Russia. Easier than many other countries, actually. Just follow the laws and use common sense (same rule applies when you are traveler anywhere) and you will be fine. Don't believe me just check YouTube, plenty of bloggers go there - “Sly’s Life” channel, Russia videos. He also goes to Ukraine after before you start calling me or him a shill for Putin or whatever.
As a native speaker, one thing I see people struggle with surprisingly often is that a) every noun has a gender, and b) every word grammatically related to a noun must always match its gender, case, and plurality. The second thing is the inflections themselves, yes.
But I suppose it also depends a lot on that person's native language — the people I most commonly hear speak Russian as a foreign language are migrant workers, whose native languages are usually Turkic. Those don't have grammatical genders. It feels like learning Russian would be easier for someone who is native in, for example, a Roman language (Spanish/French/Portuguese/Italian) or German.
The gender of a noun in the native language is sometimes the opposite in the other language, so it can be difficult in its own way as well. At least this was my experience when briefly learning german as a portuguese speaker. In this sense learning english was easier, although it happened kinda passively by just being on the internet too much.
I think it depends on how you approach learning genders. As a native English speaker, when learning Romance languages I don't think of words as being feminine or masculine. I think of "il pane" as being a single unit, and "la bottiglia" as being another single unit. I've then never struggled when looking at a new Romance language because I'm not thinking "this word used to be feminine and now it's masculine" - I'm just learning new units, as if the articles are part of the word itself.
This extends to other words that must agree. Instead of thinking "the noun is masculine so the adjective must be masculine as well", think "the article is 'il' therefore the adjective is 'buono' instead of 'buona'".
That works, but Russian doesn't have articles. You can, however, mostly get away by assuming that feminine nouns end with -а, -ь, and -я, neutral ones with -о, and all others are masculine.
That helps less than I'd like with the spoken language given that a trailing о or а are pronounced like а because it won't be stressed.
For non-Russian speakers, the two letters get the sound that you expect if stressed, and otherwise sound like а. This rule also applies to borrow words that were transliterated into Cyrillic. So the English computer becomes компью́тер, and the stress goes on ...пью́т... (the English ...put... bit of the word). As a result that first о became an а sound.
My wife's reassurances that Cyrillic is phonetic likewise didn't work out for me. You can't pronounce the written word correctly without knowing where the stress is. You can't write down the spoken word correctly without knowing which unstressed а sounds are written as о.
Of course this is far better than English spelling...
As a native English speaker who learned Russian years ago, the o/a thing never felt confusing to me, perhaps because it felt very similar to what English does. Syllables that aren't stressed tend to be pronounced faster with less of a hard sound, and that's just what the o -> a rule feels like to me.
I always felt like Russian was a pretty easy language to learn because it was so regular. Yes there are a lot of cases and declensions, but once you learn the rules, you can get like 95% of the way there, and then even the last 5% of exceptions are quite "regular exceptions", e.g. the "ogo" written -> "ova" pronounced rule.
That а/о thing is taught extensively in schools. There are formal rules for everything, but of course I don't remember any. What I do remember is these are called "безударные гласные" (unstressed vowels), and "проверочные слова" (test words?) are used to figure out whether it's о or а. The idea is iirc that you find a word with the same root in a different form where that syllable is stressed. Except sometimes there isn't one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
does russian gender anything like prepositions or demonstrative? anything would help I think.
Prepositions don't change based on gender but make the word itself change case (обсуждение -> в обсуждении). The pronouns though, those are gender-specific (он/она/оно, этот/эта/это), regardless of whether they refer to people or not.
I am starting to do this for Anglo-Saxon, instead of "Hūs", learn "þæt Hūs", instead of "Wer" learn "sē Wer", etc.
It didn't work for me in Mandarin though, where I can recall the sounds of words but not the tone.
In Mandarin you're also well advised to learn the measure word for any noun along with it.
Well, you can. But if you're just learning the language, you're going to struggle to find words that don't use a predictable one. And if you do stumble across one of those, and you use 个 instead, people may not even notice.
No one is out there watching to make fun of you if you count horses in 只 instead of 匹.
I find eliminating doubt/confusing when speaking really helps.
I used to have this mindset about german, oh who cares about grammar. it really limited me at upper intermediate level.
That is not something that will happen with measure words. Ignoring some grammar will limit you. This is not such a case. Ignoring semantics-free measure words will make you sound like a native speaker.
Chinese measure words are not something that happens on a noun-by-noun basis. Memorizing them as part of a noun is not a well-chosen approach. Most often this will saddle you with the burden of separately memorizing "pass" and "passed" as independent forms of the verb, while providing comparable benefits.
You might have noticed that my comment above suggested that
(a) the default measure word is 个;
(b) the default measure word for a horse is not 个.
Do you know why?
ohh that is a good idea!!
> As a native speaker, one thing I see people struggle with surprisingly often is that a) every noun has a gender, and b) every word grammatically related to a noun must always match its gender, case, and plurality. The second thing is the inflections themselves, yes.
My experience differs:
In terms of vocabulary: the vocabulary in Russian often has little relationship to words in German, English or French, so you really have to learn very "foreign" words.
In terms of pronounciation, learning is made more difficult since many vowels are pronounced differently depending on whether the syllable is emphasized or not, and where the vowel is in the word. Additionally, some consonant clusters are pronounced differently from what you'd expect (simple example: the "в" in Здравствуйте is silent). Additionally, some consonant cluster don't exist in German or English, so you have to get used to them.
In terms of grammar, a difficulty with Russian as a beginner is rather that there exist lots of cases (6-7, depending on whether you consider locative case as a separate case from prepositional case or not), and you of course have to learn which preposition demands which case, and then you obviously have to use the properly declinated noun/adjective.
So, there is simply an insane amount of tables to cram.
I wouldn't claim that the latter is inherently difficult per se, but rather it's a huge amount of material that you have to get very certain in that slows your learning down.
EDIT: Another difficulty is the irregularity of emphasis in verb conjugation:
приходи́ть: e.g. мы прихо́дим
говори́ть: e.g. мы говори́м
i.e. a very different syllable is emphasized in the verb conjugation.
Even native Russian speakers couldn't explain why this is the case, and told me to simply cram the verb conjugation.
I don't see Russian as completely alien to English. There are a lot of loanwords from English, French, German, Greek and Latin which are identifiable. Some of the native words are similar to western ones — voda is obviously similar to water, brat to brother, tri is similar to three etc. Much easier than Hungarian vocabulary which has remarkably little to latch onto.
This is true with most slavic languages.
With some rarer ones (eg. slovene), you even have a special dual form (singular, dual, plural).
And then there are different declinations when eg counting:
eno pivo (1 beer)
dve pivi (2 beers, dual)
tri piva (3 beers, plural)
štiri piva (4 beers, plural)
pet piv (5 beers, plural, but now in genitive case for some reason, same for higher numbers, eg sto (100) piv)
On the other hand, knowing slovene and being able to read (usually the serbian form of) cyrillic makes you understand 2/3 of the russian texts out there, which is especially useful for dodgy forums with semi-legal knowledge not available anywhere else and which google can't/won't fully translate (unless you copy-paste the text into a translation window).
I like to imagine Slavic languages as a sort of scale, where Russian is at one end, Polish and Serbian are at the opposite end, and Ukrainian and Belarusian are somewhere in the middle.
The scale is two-dimensional and has three poles, like RGB color charts. Polish and Czech in the west, Russian in the east, and Southern Slavic (represented by Serbian) in the south. Hungarian and Romanian split them apart, while in turn having absorbed a huge amount of Slavic words in turn.
Hungarian is not Slavic and genrerally it feels like a completely alien language, since everything is so different.
No idea about the Hungarian grammar. I heard that Finnish has a lot of cases
Finnish and Hungarian, despite being spread well apart from each other, are from the same Uralian language family.
Both (and other languages in the family) share one distinctive feature – an excessively large number of noun cases (by Indo-European language family standards).
However, these languages do not have prepositions, i.e. the 16-20 odd noun cases replace them, so it makes it somewhat easier for a new learner.
The noun cases can also be thought of as postpositions despite obviously not being them, but it is a good and simple mental model.
The real outlier is Icelandic, which has a notoriously irregular grammar, multiple noun declension and verb conjugation groups, prepositions and postpositions despite a small number of noun cases.
I used the word "split apart" to express that Hungarian is not a Slavic language. If it was a Slavic Language then there would be no split between its neighboring Slavic languages, but a dialect continuum instead.
And then there's Bulgarian, with no cases and definite articles, to throw that scale off...
It’s one of the reasons why most Russian (Eastern European) speakers pick up German easier than English speakers or some other languages.
The other reason being that Russian (and other non-English) speakers are usually picking up their third or fourth language, while for English speakers it's almost universally number two, and half-hearted at that... (I say that as a native English speaker whose Spanish is muy mal).
Russians don't actually speak foreign much, a Russian person who speaks four languages is considered very smart / having too much free time for their own good / both. Definitely not West Europe levels of language prowess.
Technically at least one foreign language is required as part of basic school education in Russia. For most people my age and younger it's English. Now the problem is, the quality and methods of this leave a lot to be desired. I myself learned English mostly by spending too much time on the internet and playing games that weren't translated. Other people are much more lazy.
Two years of a foreign language were required in my K-12 schooling; I took Spanish; estudio dos años, pero requerdo poco o nada. mi español es muy mal :-(
Eastern europeans speak multiple languages where russian was a second language due to everyone being in the union (occupation). Languages are different and span multiple language groups. IMO there is no strong correlation here not to mention the fact that english is more popular. German language and its presence in the curriculum has other reasons, like the fact that german economy is closer rather than say english or american, there was more incentive to learn german due to economical necessity. But nowadays everyone chooses english as it is a simpler, and considered the real business language.
AFAIK there is no evidence to suggest that the uptake of german is easier for people living in the eastern parts of europe
I think it is generational. A hundred years ago, most Eastern Europeans would have learnt German, fifty years ago they would have learnt Russian and nowadays they all want to pick up American English.
If only they had a choice under russian occupation to not learn russian language.
I didn't have a choice about French and we are not under French occupation.
German native speakers might better understand how cases work, but it's as laborious to learn them as for anybody else.
> German native speakers might better understand how cases work
As a native German speaker: cases mostly work like the type system of a programming language - they help you to immediately detect when there is something off. The "type" that the clause has in a sentence has to match the type that the predicate expects - otherwise the type checker will "reject" the sentence.
Yes, I would say that my thinking about the German language deeply influences my thinking about programming. I asked Russian native speakers who work as programmers whether this also holds for them for the Russian language, but they said the Russian language does not have a similar influence on their thinking about programming as I claim and explained about the German language for me.
The cases contain actual information that give the speaker more flexibility in structuring their sentences: a German phrase remains syntactically valid as long as you don't move the conjunctions or the verb, while the emphasis of the sentence shifts.
Of course, the German case system has been reduced so far that only the genitive (which is also on its way out) still modifies the noun. Articles have taken up the task of carrying the endings, with only pronouns still being fully declined.
Languages without case systems have other means to achieve this of course.
I’m learning Croatian as a native Portuguese speaker, and I find out while the grammar itself is easier to think coming from Portuguese, I prefer to deal with sentence construction as if thinking about it from English.
I would really rather read his guide to learning English.
Be born into a noble family with english speaking governesses.
He was exposed to English from the very young age, it's basically his native language
Sort of. When I hear Nabokov speaking, he sounds like he has an unplaceable regional accent, as opposed to a "foreign" one. His writing in English is fluent, but can have a few tics in it — he repeats certain fancy words, and he tends to avoid slang.
By the way, the last tsar's daughters reportedly picked up a slight Irish accent from one of their tutors. He was sacked and replaced by someone more pukka.
Everything he says here also applies to german. For example, to actually say "ich" properly you need to have a wide kind of smile that feels incredibly strange to an english native speaker.
Why? The "ch" in "inc" is exactly the same sound as that represented by "h" in words like "human" and "huge" in English. It's a voiceless palatal fricative. It doesn't require a "wide kind of smile" unless you somehow need to also do that when saying the vowel in "team" too.
Not an expert, but some "to IPA" websites I checked transcribes "the huge human" as "ðə hjuːʤ ˈhjuːmən", but "ich" (voiceless palatal fricative) as "iç" (and "ach" (voiceless velar fricative) as "ax")).
ç != hj
ETA: Wikipedia notes:
> The sound at the beginning of huge in most British accents is a voiceless palatal fricative [ç], but this is analysed phonemically as the consonant cluster /hj/ so that huge is transcribed /hjuːdʒ/. As with /hw/, this does not mean that speakers pronounce [h] followed by [j]; the phonemic transcription /hj/ is simply a convenient way of representing the single sound [ç].
So maybe ç == hj.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#cite_note-18
[ç] is an allophone of [h], and it's very hard for English speakers to notice that they're not just saying [h]. I've had the same problem with [e] versus [ɛ].
The "ich-laut" does not exist in english. It's not like just saying "ish."
Example: https://youtu.be/oSIPAMoCzhA?t=195
The parent comment is correct—the ich-laut isn't its own phoneme in English, but (at least in many dialects) it does exist as an allophone of /h/.
It very much does exist, and I chose those words on purpose as they're places where the realisation of /h/ is a voiceless palatal fricative (i.e., the German ich-laut) and not a voiceless glottal fricative. "ish" would be a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative.
I recommend you read up on English phonology, as a video for German learners really isn't a good source.
My point was that what Nabokov said about Russian "When you speak Russian your mouth ought to distend laterally at the corners" also applied to German, and that saying "ich" properly in German was an example of this.
Yes, one does not NEED to have the mouth open wide to express the "voiceless palatal fricative" but if you do not do it with a "slight smile" as described in that video it will not sound right.
I truly hope you know something about German pronunciation, otherwise I don't know what would compel you to even comment on the thread.
Nabokov writes so beautifully in English.
Not mentioned is that Russian is well populated with loan words from other European languages (especially technology terms) , but about the only Slavic loan word in European languages I know of is "robot" (work) - samizdat being a more recent arrival.
I always found Russian to be the nasties sounding slavic language. It's just unpleasant to the ears. Probably because it makes you either sound aggressive or like you're asking or begging for another bowl of porridge. I guess watching Soviet world war II movies when I was a child had an impact.
Russian is the German of Slavic languages
I find Russian depending a lot on the speaker. Some Russians can speak it beautifully, some not so much.
It’s a bit weird to see the English transliteration of Russian words for example, govoritz instead of говорить.
For anyone looking to study Russian, I highly recommend spending a few days familiarizing yourself with Cyrillic first. Toss it into an Anki deck (or download one) and use FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler).
It’s phonetic and consists of only 33 letters, I memorized it on a ~12-hour flight to Moscow many years ago.
Same thing with learning Japanese. Just memorize the symbols. It's phonetic. Of course there are complex meanings and subtleties but that's just how we all play with language. As a foreigner your pronunciation can be good once you get the basics. But you have to match the sounds with the letters. We all did it once. We can do it again.
Related, I spent several formative years in Taiwan. Back then, my Taiwanese phone (way before smartphones) used bopomofo as the primary input method for typing Chinese, so I had to learn it.
Unfortunately, some of the 注音 symbols are remarkably similar to Japanese kana, and I found that my familiarity with hiragana and katakana actually caused me constant grief, as I kept mixing up the pronunciations.
Almost nothing aside from children’s books is written exclusively in hiragana or katakana. You have to also memorize the variable readings of about 2000 kanji and many texts are nearly unintelligible without them. Pretty much everyone can memorize the former, but must struggle with the latter.
Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).
When I was in Japan all the street signs and train stations had a little transliteration in hiragana of the kanji name. Super useful to be able to read it
"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.
What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard? Japanese is partially kanji, while Mandarin is 100% HanZi (kanji).
But yes, grammar-wise Mandarin is definitely easier than both Japanese and Korean.
Hanzi as used in Chinese usually have exactly one reading. On the other hand, virtually all kanji in Japanese have several different pronunciations depending on context.
> What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard?
Just to add context to a sibling comment, Japan's first "writing system" was literally just Chinese.
I don't mean Chinese characters, I mean that if you wanted to write something down, you had to communicate in written Chinese. Over time this written Chinese accumulated more and more transformations bringing it in alignment with spoken Japanese until we get what we see today. However, this means that, to a first approximation, modern Japanese is some amalgamation of Old Chinese and Middle Japanese.
Actually, use of Chinese co-existed alongside the whole transformation process, so we actually see this funky mix of Early and Middle Japanese with Wu, Han, and Song Chinese. Character readings varied by region and time period, and so the the reading of a compound kanji term in Japanese mostly reflects the time period when that word was imported. This is why a single kanji ends up having multiple readings. Later, people began backporting individual characters onto native Japanese words, giving yet another reading.
The character 行 is a particularly illustrative example: 行脚 (an-gya), 行動 (kou-dou), 行事 (gyo-ji). The first reading "an" comes from 7th century Chinsese or so, "kou" comes a bit later from the Han dynasty, and "gyo" even later from Song. Then we have the backports: 行く末 (yu-ku-sue), 行く (i-ku), 行う (okona-u). The first "yu" reading is from Middle Japanese, "i" from Modern Japanese, and "okona" from I have no clue when. That's six different readings for 行 alone!
Oh, and then there are "poetic" readings that are specific to usage in people's names: 弘行 (hiro-yuki) etc. Granted, these are often quite evocative of the above readings or that of synonym characters.
The historical introduction process also explains why older readings tend to be more obscure, 1) they had less time to accumulate usage, and 2) they tend to be specific to Buddhist and administrative themes.
Note: The above is just what I've pieced together osmotically over the years, so I'm sure there are errors.
> Same thing with learning Japanese
Korean, too.
Admittedly I only know (a little) Japanese and no Korean, but I get the superficial impression that kana are generally much more phonetically faithful than Hangul (namely, because of the post-WWII spelling reform that updated all the kana spellings). Like, the fact that Wiktionary gives "phonetic Hangul" for each Korean entry, to more accurately represent the actual pronunciation, makes me really suspicious of the common internet claim that Hangul is the easiest script to learn.
However, Japanese also has allophony (the moraic nasal and devoicing both come to mind) and kana aren't entirely phonetic (e.g. ha/wa, he/e, ou/ō, ei/ē). I don't know enough about Korean to know if the "irregularities" are also this minor or not—can any Korean speakers/readers enlighten me?
Hangeul is at least an alphabet, in spite of appearances, and has hints as to the pronunciation built into the glyph shapes.
Except there are many, many more symbols?
Learn Cyrillic the fun way: go in vacation in Bulgaria, they have road signs in both Latin and Cyrillic. This is how I learned Cyrillic 20 years ago, driving a lot for business all over around Balkans. It was an easy curve, a few characters at a time, with a lot of repetitions and the scenery is nice.
Yes, a cursory glance at written Polish should be enough for anyone to understand why Latin alphabet is a poor match for Slavic languages.
Polish is a rather extreme case, however. Czech orthography is a bit more straightforward. In spite of that, Polish orthography still does a rather good job.
Generally speaking, if you've a language with heavy use of palatalisation in its phonology and grammar, the Latin alphabet is going to struggle without hacks. Irish and Scottish Gaelic similarly struggle with the inherent limitations of the Latin alphabet, but chose a different set of hacks (necessarily, given the Irish has the second oldest written vernacular language in Europe after Greek).
Similarly, the Latin alphabet is poorly suited to the Germanic languages, Danish and English in particular, because of their large vowel inventory.
I found Croatian significantly easier than Czech, perhaps because of centuries (millenia?) of trans-Adriatic Italian influence?
It doesn't have a hard/soft contrast though, unlike the West and East Slavic languages. Palatalisation isn't a feature of the western South Slavic languages anymore.
Oh yes, Polish, the difficulty is shown in this 1:19 slice from a movie: "Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz " -- https://youtu.be/AfKZclMWS1U
Also compare the Polish 'chrząszcz' with its Cyrillic equivalent 'хрущ' (but take into account a difference in pronunciation).
Because Polish has avoided to use diacritics in many cases, many Polish words are much longer not only than their Cyrillic equivalent, but also than their Czech equivalent, where the Polish double letters are replaced by letters with diacritics.
The Latin alphabet is also a poor match for English. We make do.
Your are getting downvoted, but polish writing system really is not great. There are both non-english characters (ą, ę, ś, ć, ź, ż) and digraphs (rz, sz, cz, dz, dż, dź, ch). Also there is done overlap here and some sounds can be written in more than one way (h ~= ch, ż ~= rz, ć == ci, ś == si, etc).
At least you can pretty much always tell how to read a word looking only at its spelling.
At least some of that is the inevitable consequence of pronunciation changing over time ("rz" being the standout, which used to sound like the Czech soft-r, but lost its r-colouring) and others attempt to show an etymological relationship, which makes spelling a bit more difficult in some ways and easier in others.
Remember that English also suffers from digraphs.
e.g. ch, th, sh, wr, oo; etc
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English
That page lists 15 such over and above the doubled letters.
Truly everyone assumes “learning another alphabet” is hard but it really isn’t. 1-2 weeks of 30-45min a day drills and you’ll have it down. Cyrillic is very easy to memorize.
Learned Greek alphabet on Duolingo in a month or two
I have witnessed a child having learned it in one day.
I found after learning Greek I could instantly read Cyrillic too
Odd. According to this venn diagram, that would only give you 3 additional characters of Greek from what you would already know coming form English.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venn_diagram_showing...
That diagram is rather bad at what it tries to do. Those are also historically and phonetically the same: Λ Л Δ Д Κ К The first Cyrillic alphabet was using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script , curiously created by Saint Cyril, but then people found it was too difficult, so someone in the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire mashed up Glagolitic, Greek and Latin to create the new Cyrillic (probably naming it as a sorry to Cyril for butchering his nice unique alphabet).
Also some letters are way more frequent and also when you can figure out one of the last few common letters from context you can read the rest
The diagram says that (Cyrillic ∩ Greek) - (Cyrillic ∩ Latin) is 3 letters, П Ф Г but as the sibling comment says, Λ/Л, Δ/Д and Κ/К are similar enough. That only leaves you with Θ/theta (th as in thin), Σ/sigma (s as in soft), Ξ/xi (x as in fox), Ψ/psi (ps as in lapse), and Ω/omega (o as in ore.) A lot of those are close enough that you can sort of guess, if you know the English names for the letters!
Many Cyrillic letters are Latin-looking, but actually have direct Greek analogues due to the history of the writing system. If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound. If you do, it's a natural guess.
> If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound.
If you grew up in Christian family, you know the Greek letters Χ (chi), Ρ (rho):
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_Rho
P.S. I am aware that "Windows XP" jokes that arise from this Chi Rho symbol are very easy to write ...
With the exception of some "ligatures" like Ю (I + O) and special characters like Ъ, Cyrillic is largely based on Greek and some Aramaic (e.g. Ш). In the past it included pretty much the entire Greek alphabet.
And I found that after going through some math in the uni I could instantly read Greek !
The only letter that never saw any use in proofs was ι (iota).
Duolingo Russian isn't very good overall (lack of content / grammar explanations), but it does have a page for learning the alphabet that is pretty helpful.
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Can you just tell us your biases instead of making us guess?
Why doesn't Russian have culture, why is it not useful?
Regarding culture I was unfortunate I had to briefly learn some russian history.
And why not useful?
Kinda obvious if you studied russia even basic via wikipedia. Russia has absolutely nothing to offer - neither to individuals nor to the world in general. The only thing they ever did are wars. And all inventions etc they copy/steal or those very few are result of research into weapons.
And the people is another story. Go to russia and see for yourslft.
Why would one learn language of this country if you can learn spanish/portuguese etc and get actual value from it or at least be able to communicate with nice people with come culture
You're honestly saying that Russia of all places has no history or culture?
She's saying that Ruzzian history and culture doesn't deserve neither recognition nor effort to learn them, at this period of time. It's fine if a person is already partially or fully embedded in those, you can't "unlearn" stuff. But I'm personally baffled at the people on reddit book subs who are clearly westerners and writing that they are actively trying to learn Ruzzian to read some Tolstoevsky. Yeah, I'm impressed, twice, both at the spectacularly low reward/effort ratio and the sheer tone deafness of it all. In 2025. Or 2024. Or 2023. Etc.
So because of a war they shouldn't learn Russian, and why do you type it as "Ruzzian"?
The effort people put into criticizing how others spend their time is baffling, especially on HN.
russians (this time spelt with a lowercase 'r') have forfeited their right to exist as a nation.
Consistently throughout history, they have invaded, colonized, and genocided their neighbors.
They are doing it now, while the whole world watches. If anything, their brazenness is increasing - because they know there will never be any punishment.
When people wonder how Germans allowed their country to tip over into Nazism, modern russia is a perfect reenactment of that: we can see it happening, in real time.
And it's a blazing indictment that the rest of our "civilized" world is doing the absolute minimum to prevent history from repeating itself. Utterly SHAMEFUL.
> russians (this time spelt with a lowercase 'r') have forfeited their right to exist as a nation. Consistently throughout history, they have invaded, colonized, and genocided their neighbors.
Just to make sure we're on the right track here, has the UK (or maybe just England?) also earned that forfeit, or does it get a pass because it did all those things further away from home? (Except for that Ireland thing, which has produced some really 'funny' jokes about potatoes...)
England was duly humiliated for its many misdemeanors (but not all, for sure), and has entered a period of "political correctness", where its sins must be acknowledged and atoned for.
Nothing like this has ever been forced onto russia.
And russian crimes are on an unimaginably vast scale. Remember, it was Stalin who said: "Quantity has a quality of its own."
> Nothing like this has ever been forced onto russia.
All empires collapse sooner or later. Give it a few hundred (or dozen, or just a few) years. It's turn will come, just like it will for the US hegemony.
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I'm teaching my son Russian and English now as well as the rich culture. I can also teach him to think critically and NOT support war.
I'm sorry your experience has been so one sided, we all have different persepctives.
From all languages in the world that could benefit an individual and help them with future networking/career/etc - like German, Spanish, French, etc - you picked russian?
Please explain why, this is honestly a very confusing choice.
Your comment was flagged but I just vouched for it because this kind of shameless xenophobia deserves to be seen.
russian is also natively spoken in Belarus, Ukraine & many ethnics minorities inside russian federation.
Ukraine switched off from russian so you can cross it out,
Russian in Belarus, Kazahstan etc is known only because soviet union forced it in schools. And now all those countries reduce its usage on every level.
For obvious reason - it does not bring not a little tiny thing to the table. English does, German, mostly any language. Except russian.
it is delightfully damning that you people say such things out loud :)
I used to love learning russian. My russian speaking, moscow educated ukrainian friend used to teach me, but she doesn't want to do that anymore. Hopefully sometime in the future I can pick it up again.
Why not to learn Ukrainian instead? It quite similar but sounds much better.
Barely anyone speaks it, even those who do typically speak Russian just as good if not better.
Millions of Ukrainians who use the language is not "barely anyone".
However that is true that many of Ukrainians are bilingual, due to decades of russian occupation and ethnic cleansing.
How do russians differentiate between "Z3" and "33"? Font? Avoidance od names like "zone Z3" that could be read as "zone 33"?
In much the same way as you differentiate between "O0" and "00", or between "I1" and "11". (For example, to avoid ambiguity, a standard may prohibit the use of З in a position where 3 is allowed.)
I could do the speaking but the letters are crazy. I was trying to learn it in college to impress this Russian chick. All I got was kak dela privjet.
I think it's crazy so many other countries learn English, I mean lucky us who are ignorant here in the states and don't even speak a second language.
Hm but a set of letters takes how long to learn? A weekend?
You're saying the Russian cyrllic letters takes a weekend to learn? Maybe, that would be impressive, not for me. I think it would take me longer.
I know the Greek alphabet but only because I learned it in a frat from a YT song.
I started learning them for fun and didn't find it to be very difficult. I agree that a weekend might be a bit fast, I'd probably say a week to a month is enough time.
To practice I like going on r/EnglishCyrillic and trying to read some of the posts
I envy those who doesn't need a second keyboard layout on their computers haha
ditto. I believe it is impossible to be proficient and eloquent in more than one language at a time.
Is that a joke? I’m eloquent in 3 languages and I don’t even consider myself to be particularly good at languages. Or maybe you have a really high standard for eloquence.
by eloquence I mean, well, being well-spoken. I only speak two languages, and I feel that my ability to express myself in my native Russian degrades severely after periods of time away from home - for example, I often forget words, or fail to come up with a well-put way to describe a complex thing. and even when I'm home, I'm still consuming >= 95% of information and entertainment in English, and only my interactions with friends and family are conducted in Russian, so the opportunities for me to improve my Russian are very limited. the last time I've read a book in Russian was over a decade ago.
I do English/Spanish but when a fluent Spanish speaker starts speaking quickly I can't keep up. So maybe I don't know Spanish even though I studied it in school for 3 years. I watch anime/think I could learn Japanese but gotta actually immerse myself in that culture and learn it. At the very least I can discern the difference between Japanese/Korean/Chinese both written and spoken. Although I still have to sometimes check between written Japanese/Chinese.
I feel the same way as you do, regarding language degrading. I moved when I was 10, and while I can speak conversationally, unless I do it regularly I forget words.
And even without that, my vocabulary has huge gaps. Why would a ten year old need to know the word for "rent"? I didn't learn it until several years ago, in my 40s.
But I disagree about eloquence. We're just out of practice. If we spent six months of the year in Moscow and six in New York, we'd both be perfectly fluent in both.
>lucky us who are ignorant here in the states and don't even speak a second language.
I feel as lucky as can be, I speak zero languages fluently :)
That's the easiest part.
After russian, other languages - georgian, hebrew, english seem reasonable. Especially hebrew.
Saying this as a native Russian speaker
Georgian is really interesting. Very few cognates for non-modern words. Colors in Georgian are fun: you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color" (ყავისფერი / ყავის ფერი); you don't have "light blue", you have "sky-color" (ცისფერი / ცის ფერი).
> you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color"
It's coffee-colour (kahverengi) in Turkish as well, but I don't find it interesting. The English word "orange" is after a fruit as well (which is also the same in Turkish: "portakal rengi", or "turuncu").
> "coffee-color"
The Russian word for "brown" is literally "cinnamon-colored" ("коричневый"). And the Chinese language just uses the literal "coffee-colored" phrase (咖啡色).
Actually brown in russian it's "bark-colored". bark = кора. Корица (cinnamon) is diminutive
You can also use "кофейный" (coffee-coloured) as synonym for "brown".
That wouldn't be natural though. You would never describe, say, pants, as "coffee-coloured" in Russian.
Брюки цвета кофе is natural in Russian. Pretentious, but still natural.
"Брюки цвета кофе" ("pants of coffee color") is natural, "коричневые брюки" ("brown pants") is natural, but "кофейные брюки" is not. In fact the latter would likely be interpreted as "coffee pants" or "pants made out of coffee."
"кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
> "кофейные брюки" is totally ok. everybody will understand it.
If the context is clothes, people would likely be able to guess, sure. But consider another example "кофейная чашка" ("a coffee mug"). In this context, it would most certainly be interpreted as "a mug for coffee" and not as "a coffee-coloured mug." In other words, you must include the word "цвет" ("color") for it to be correct and unambiguous.
> it's just the way the russian language is. you can abuse it, you can come up with words that do not really exist in language and make no sense, yet, everybody will understand what you meant to say
I don't think this is unique to Russian. I'm sure you can do the same in English and Japanese at least.
"кофейная чашка" meaning will be resolved according to context where it's used
Don't know japanese, but english been main language that i consume in past 25 years or so. i never saw it abused to same degree as russian gets abused
It’s fine as an occasional stylistic choice, but using it repeatedly as a regular synonym for brown is a pragmatic and collocational error. The meaning is clear, but the wording is marked, and overuse makes the speech sound odd in everyday contexts.
coffee color won't be synonym for brown. it will be distinct color, just like strawberry, raspberry, straw, ruby, etc colors.
"кофейного цвета брюки" is acceptable too.
I admit that. I also realize that tguvot is actually arguing in my favor, as he said that coffee color is distinct from brown, and therefore the inference is that they aren't synonymous. I would summarize that they are conceptually different, as "brown" is a real color, whereas "coffee color" is a marketing color.
It would make your Russian more posh, eccentric or sophisticated, depending on the context, but not necessary unnatural.
actually you will. "coffee color" it's distinct from brown. And then there is also "coffee with milk" color.
Won't be surprised if there is "pumpkin latte" color nowdays.
Uh huh. Don't forget "aliceblue" and "rebeccapurple." But seriously, those are just arbitrary marketing aliases, aren't they. I remember e-shopping for sneakers, and every brand's "off-white" was a different color.
Sky-colour makes sense, but coffee drinking only goes back to the 15th century or so. Did Georgians not have a word for this colour before then?!
Take for example Russian коричневый (brown).
It stems from корица (cinnamon), which was first introduced to Russia in 16th century, and literally means "the color of cinnamon".
But before that they used бурый, from turkic bor/bur, meaning bay, as in horse color.
I guess there must be an older synonym for "color of coffee" in Georgian too.
No idea about Georgian but that's not unusual - for example English didn't have color for orange for a long time. That's why you say "red hair" even though the color is orange.
While English did not have a dedicated word for "orange" there are many examples in older English texts where there was written "red-yellow" or "yellow-red" in the places where modern English would use "orange".
So the color was recognized, even if it did not have a special name.
English didn't have the word "orange" until relatively recently (1500s) either. That's despite the word brown (which is the same colour in a different context) going back millenia.
Names change as language changes. It's hard to imagine Georgian didn't have a word for brown, but that would've been a completely different word that got displaced over time, like yellow-red was displaced by orange.
Given that this pattern appears in several Georgian colors (the color purple is also just "lilac-color": იასამნისფერი / იასამნის ფერი), I'm sure they just used a different brown thing before coffee was common.
There have been many authors who have claimed about various old languages that they lacked words for some colors, and "brown" is one of the most frequent colors about which such claims have been made.
I believe that most such claims, if not all, were wrong. The problem is that when reading an ancient text in which colors are mentioned it is very difficult to guess which is the color that is meant by some word and it frequently is difficult to even be sure that the word refers to a color and not to some other kind of property of an object.
There are very rare cases when the text says something like "this object is X like blood", so you can infer that X = "red", or "this object is Y like the sky", so you can infer that Y = "blue".
Brown is a color for which it is even rarer to find suitable comparisons in a text, from which the color can be inferred, than for colors like red, green or blue, which are typically compared to blood, grass and sky.
So when various authors have claimed that there was no word for "brown" in some old language, the truth was that they just were unable to find any word whose meaning could be determined with certainty to be "brown", in the preserved texts, even if there were plenty of words that most likely meant "brown".
Moreover, in nature there are many shades of brown, lighter or darker, more reddish or more yellowish, which is why in many languages there are multiple words for brown, which are derived from various things that have that particular shade of brown, e.g. words that mean coffee-brown, chestnut-brown, dry-earth brown, brown like the fur of certain animals, etc. Such words that identify a particular shade with reference to a familiar object have been renewed from time to time, in function of which objects have become more familiar or less familiar. After coffee became a very popular beverage, in many languages it has replaced whatever reference object was previously used for a dark brown.
As an example, many have claimed that Ancient Greek had no word for "brown". However, when reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, i.e. the oldest Greek texts except for the Mycenaean tablets, there already are a lot of places where there is no doubt that "brown" was meant by the word "aithono-". This is an adjective derived from the verb "to burn", and most dictionaries say that it means "burning". However, in the actual texts there are plenty of places where it does not mean "burning", but it means "burnt", more precisely "having the color of burnt wood", i.e. brown. This is not surprising. Another word used in the same way is "anthrakos", which can be used either for an object red like a burning ember (e.g. for red garnets or rubies) or for an object black like an extinguished ember (e.g. for charcoal or coal).
There are several Hindi words for brown, my favourite is "Badami" - almond-like.
My grandfather used "laal" which is usually used for red. I used to wonder if he was colour blind.
He might have been unusually color aware, as brown is a type of red.
Colours are fun in many languages.
For instance, Japanese and Vietnamese do not differentiate between blue and green and require context specific clarification, e.g «traffic light blue-green».
Japanese has a word for green now 緑 (midori). Traffic lights use the word for blue for historical reasons
Celtic languages, and I believe Mayan, had a similar thing going on with blue and green. A lot of languages never distinguished orange from yellow really either.
I believe polish is similar. They have “sky color” which is pretty cool!
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Your command and understanding of the grammar of your native language puts a hard limit to how well you can learn other languages. This has not been stressed enough and schools have all but given up trying to teach children grammar because as natives they more or less get along without it.
On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language. I mean, I used standard English intuitively, but couldn't have told you any of the technical terms. I agree with modern educators that explicit grammar instruction beyond a very, very basic level should not be a high priority. Exposure to and guided close reading of complex texts sharpens grammatical intuition, right alongside all of the other benefits of an advanced reading level. Knowing deep grammar does not so automatically improve textual interpretation.
This is speculation, but I wonder if the period of emphasizing explicit grammatical instruction wasn't an accidental interregnum. That is to say, back in the days when Latin and/or Greek were part of the ordinary curriculum students learned grammar much as I did, as a "natural" excelerant to interpreting a foreign tongue. Once those languages were dropped educators noticed students couldn't do grammar analysis anymore, and so tried teaching it directly, without fully considering when and why it might be useful. I don't know how well the dates line up, but it would be interesting to look into.
> On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language.
This is one of the reasons why Latin is tought. You learn transferring a gramatically hard language into your own, having to learn the ins and out of your own language's grammar. No grammatically complex situation in your own language can fluster you afterwards.
Agree. That's how / why students best learn grammar: for / through a practical purpose. (Deciding the practicality of Latin must remain an exercise for the reader.)
I learned (an academic expression of) German grammar at university, in computational linguistics. There was a class „Syntax I“, and it had us break down phrases and sentences in a graphs, a (constituent) C structure and a (functional) F structure.
Best class I ever had!
Yeah, I loved my university-level grammar class, which I took as a requirement for a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certification. But I was able to speak and read and write at an extremely advanced level long before that. In fact - though I got a private kick out of breaking down sentences, and it certainly was a help teaching second-language speakers - I don't think it helped my own ability to express myself in English in any way. Grammar's fun for nerds, and useful for adult language acquisition, but not worth the time it takes to teach to the general population.
I too enjoy mentally putting parentheses around parts of speech.
You'd probably like the way Thomas Mann uses language then (not parentheses but subordinate clauses, or nebensatz).
This. When I first started learning Russian, we immediately jumped into basic grammar rules. After two weeks of incredible frustration, I realized I did not have sufficient mastery of English grammar to be able to establish a framework for understanding Russian grammar. I often say that my first two months of learning Russian were spent learning English and it is not a joke.
Interesting. We had a lot of grammar parsing of Russian since the 2nd grade of school. Especially we analyzed parts of speech and constituents. For the latter, we'd underline words in sentences in different ways.
It's so widespread that today if you want to play word guessing with gestures, and you have several words, you just imitate that underline style, and everybody understands it. (Just remembered, we also did a lot of word analysis, marking up prefix, root, suffixes and ending, and everyone knows this markup too.)
in all countries where i lived, schools where I studied, there was heavy investment in grammar. (no, i didn't study in usa).
I won't really agree that mastering grammar of native language limits on how well you can learn other languages. Maybe it matters in the way how it taught in college, when you are older and approach to learning language is "more structured". But when I learned Georgian at age of 6 and Hebrew at 12 (through very deep immersion. Teachers spoke only Hebrew), English at 14 (I had 5 months of private lessons following by dial-up connection to mostly english internet), it didn't matter. At least not for me.
There was also this interesting phenomena, that immigrant when they went to local school, their scores in hebrew grammar classes were usually higher than those of native speakers.
I've been told that western European languages are easy for Russian speakers because you can learn them by removing parts of the Russian grammar. "Oh, they don't have A, and B and C are the same thing for them, and they don't have D too!" Is that correct?
It's a little bit like moving from Italian/French/Spanish to English, except that English has some tenses with no direct equivalent in those languages and a ton of phrasal verbs to learn, but that's vocabulary and not grammar.
Yes. Although, Romance languages have more verb tenses, generally they're easier. BTW, I only learned that Russan's past tense is the same compound past, by learning Italian. Also, Old Russian dropped participles, but re-borrowed them from Church Slavonic (southern Slavic), so we know these things, and learn them at school. (Ukrainian has participle 2, but not 1, as far as I understand.)
Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object. Some people can't wrap their head around that it can be the other way around, e.g. Italian "sua madre/suo padre" can mean both his and her mother/father. In German, they must concord with both, sein Vater, seine Mutter, ihrer Vater, ihre Mutter. But Russian regional dialects do have the same feature, and if your teacher isn't a mad purist, they can easily give examples: евойная, еёйный.
Otherwise, indeed, there are less features. And in Indo-European, they're all the same: compound past tense, participles, compound past and future.
To give an example of another system: Turkic languages. 4 modal verbs (to run, to walk, to stand, to lay down), that must be applied to everything except the verb "to be", they indicate how much hurry you have doing what you're doing. It's a bit similar to Russian aspect (complete/incomplete), but way more complex. Plus you have noun cases, and everything is a suffix, and the verb is always the last. So, "I don't do X" will be something like "I <verb+ing> <stand>+me+not" (like those German prefixes that fall down in the end of the sentence.) My colleague, a Kazakh born in Russia, learns it as a foreign language, and he says it's hard.
>Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object.
This is only true in third person singular. For example, in first person singular: 'моя чашка' (my cup, 'cup' is feminine) vs. 'мой ключ' (my key, 'key' is masculine). Third person plural: 'ихнее дело' (their business, neuter) vs. 'ихняя забота' (their concern, feminine) although most educated Russian speakers would object to these pronouns as a bit too colloquial (although not as colloquial as 'евойная'). Same in second person singular: 'твой друг' (your friend, masculine) vs. 'твоя подруга' (your friend, feminine). In all of the examples above, the gender of the speaker/owner cannot even be determined (grammatically speaking).
Not really. At least not for me. The vast assortment of tenses was somewhat surprising.
About English there is a Russian saying: "in english you write Manchester but you read Liverpool"
No need to throw daggers at Wayne Rooney just like that!
Definiteness has no obvious equivalent in Russian.
Well, just as Nabokov said: Russians have an impression that foreign languages are simpler than Russian.
It's ironic, seeing tons of exclusively russian-speaking immigrants not being able to learn the native language after decades living in the country.
But it's not about complexity really. I think it's more caused by the deeply ingrained superiority complex in most russians. And just in case, most russians != every russian.
I was surprised as well living in Hong Kong that many kids grow up never learning Cantonese being born there (Non Chinese heritage). Their parents spoke their native language, and they learned English in a private school.
You could live there until very late in life never needing to know more than a few sentences.
I don't think I've ever seen this in my life from a Russian. I do see a lot of Spanish and Chinese speaking immigrants with no interest in learning English though.
it's a thing. there are russians that think that they have superior culture and learning some other barbaric language is beneath them.
so they either don't learn native language of the country where they live or learn it to bare minimum
I realized, I don't know many cases of Spanish or Chinese people not learning the language.
My hypothesis: I understand russian and register cases like this easily. Otoh, I don't understand Chinese, so the ones with whom I have ever had any communication, are the ones who learned any of the languages I understand. Similar story with Spanish, my level is ~A2, so there's bias here too, although slightly less prominent.
Do you understand russian?
I have my own sample set as I presented.
Russian is seriously messed up language. Especially after learning Hebrew (which is simple and algorithmic) , I was able to look back in Russian and realize what a horrible mess of a language it is.
Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. Language designers really did great work on taking a core of a dead language and proposing a cleaner, more modern version of it.
Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences.
A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.
Hebrew wasn’t “literally synthesised” and wasn’t dead. Jews have continuously been writing and publishing works in Hebrew for the past 2,000 years.
It has evolved naturally to some extent over that time, but much less than other languages - a modern Hebrew speaker can more easily understand medieval Hebrew than an English speaker Medieval English.
What has been synthesised a century ago is additional vocabulary for modern concepts, and this is ongoing for Hebrew as it is for every other language.
Yeah, the story is quite a bit more involved than that.
I don't know much beyond the story of Perelman consolidating Hebrew grammar and dictionary, and having problems with popularizing the old-new language initially.
The point was that other modern languages never had a chance to get this kind of clean up.
>Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago.
I had heard somewhere that much of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew consists of loanwords from Arabic. Is this correct and if so, would it mean that the "cleanliness" of the language is more a reflection of Modern Standard Arabic?
Apologies in advance if this is seen as some falsehood or if it's a sensitive topic.
I couldn't find a source for how many Hebrew words have each origin, so I sampled 25 random words from the Hebrew Wiktionary and counted their sources. Where there wasn't a clear source (or a clear "way" to a source) or the word itself was spelled in English for some reason I just randomized another word.
The number one source was unsurprisingly Hebrew with 11 words. This includes biblical sources as well as medieval and more modern sources, typically Jewish scholars writing in Hebrew in exile.
The second most common source was Greek with 5 words and relatedly Latin had 1 word. A lot of them you'd probably recognize in many languages e.g. whatever way you say Democracy probably has the same origin (sounds like Demokratia in Hebrew).
The third most common source was ancient Hebrew-adjacent languages, 2 for Aramaic, 1 for Ugaritic, 1 for Akkadian. You could include the 2 for Arabic here as well.
The fourth would be modern loanwords with 1 for English and 1 for Italian ("Pizzeria").
It is also worth noting that some words with a foreign origin still have a Hebrew counterpart. For example דיאלוג==Dialog==Dialogue is not from Hebrew, but you can say דו-שיח instead.
Additionally, Wiktionary does slightly bias towards the words you'd want to look up and is not as comprehensive as a real dictionary, so not a perfect sampling.
My personal guess is that this isn't too far off of reality. A more comprehensive sampling will probably diversify the various European languages rather than just being Greek (i.e. probably a bit more German via Yiddish, a bit of French etc.) and maybe make Aramaic a bit more prominent, but overall it doesn't feel insanely off base.
No, that isn't true. Hebrew has taken a lot of Arabic words but not the majority. It has also taken a lot from Yiddish (as you'd expect) and certain modern words which are common across Europe.
No idea. But vocabulary and grammar are mostly orthogonal.
>Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment.
Then 1918th spelling reform was a thing. It's of course always easier to reform other languages to make it closer to yours than change yourself. Those silly natives can't ever figure out the spelling and dictionary themselves without a bit of a genocide.
> Russian is seriously messed up language.
Some (most?) national languages, which developed chaotically, are very illogical, with weird constructions and some inexplicable features (Russian and English are examples of this). Artificial/planned languages such as Esperanto are a different matter -- they are very easy to learn and very pleasant to the ear.
I have just watched a video about Hebrew spelling which suggests it is a lot more complicated than people realise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_h541RkCTI
overblown. there is no need in vowels beyond first couple of classes of elementary school and first couple of months when you learn hebrew as Nth language.
the rest of complaints can be equally applied to any given language i guess.
A considerable number of Israeli citizens arrive in adulthood, maybe with bar mitzvah level Hebrew and sometimes not even that.
i know. its applicable to them as well.
hebrew is learned in ulpans with teachers that speak only hebrew. vowels (nikud) will be used only for first month or two when people figure out basics of the language.
given the way that hebrew structured, it's trivial to figure out words even if you don't know them.
the really hard problem is borrowed words that are written without nikud. for example something like: _nvrst .
For what it's worth, I do think English is horrific when it comes to spelling too, but what is effectively happening with both English and Hebrew words is that people are often memorising the whole word as a symbol rather than as a set of units.
Because Hebrew has been revived artificially.
it doesn't really diminishes my point
Well, it does a bit. Imagine me saying: “I think Russian is messed up because I’ve learned Esperanto and it’s so much simpler!”
this is how comparations work. or reference points.
i'll give you another example: "after wearing flip-flops i realized how heavy my rubber boots"
Don't we all?
I am sorry, due to the war, I cannot see this in good faith. I am Dutch, so that’s that.
I am sorry I can’t see this in good faith, but I would need to see an attempt at how this is meant for curiosity’s sake and not propaganda.
I am on here a lot, I am a person. And this is what I think when I see the title. I am sorry for the bad vibes but I say no to Russia and learning Russian (for now).
I am okay with potential downvotes. I still think this needs to be said. I wish I could be above this but I can’t.
Your comment is troubling. I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion). This is disturbing to me because i believe this is the kind of mental confusion that actually makes this kind of political violence possible.
For the record, I had the exact opposite feeling when i saw that title: I was glad the poster was not feeling obliged to not mention a culture because of a war.
I'm glad you expressed your own view so candidly though, as I did myself, and would not want to discourage that. But you understand you are playing "their" game by helping erecting those fences, right?
> I am really struggling to understand how so many human brains routinely confuse such different things as a cultural artifact (like a language) with a violent act (a military invasion).
The human brain is a hyperactive pattern recognition machine and it is actually usual for it to make associations that don't hold up to intellectual scrutiny. Otherwise it'd be quite difficult to believe things that aren't true. It is expected that people will do this. The real miracle is something like the legal system where a many people have been convinced to follow an evidence- and precedent- based process rather than making decisions based on what they think it true in the moment flowing from their thoughts and feelings.
Not to excuse the behaviour, it is terrifying and generally generally harmful. But it is at least easy to understand - for any random pairing of things there is going to be a large chunk of the population who associates them without any underlying causal reason beyond that they've been spotted together once. Like the Russian language and war. Then political choices flow on from that reality.
That's why we all say it is very important to think critically and think for yourself. Always test your ideas and be open to change.
It's not "mental confusion" its a lived experience for millions of people.
Russia and Russians have a long history of exterminating local languages and culture in territories they control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
Oh come on!
Every state has a long history of opressing others, I'm sure Russia did it too, but to be honest being from western Europe I have my own colonial history to come to terms with before looking at others'. What I know about XXth century Russia, though, is that at some point and in some places at least they went as far as inventing writing systems for local languages that had none so that teaching could be done in that language; so that exemple alone is enough to tell me that your viewpoint lacks nuance, to put it very mildly.
History of civilizations is certainly interresting but this is not even the point; the point was: why should the interrest of a text from Nabokov about the Russian language be seen through the lense of some modern episode of political violence? This is obvious nonsense, yet it appears to come up frequently, sometimes, with some people. Why? And what can be done to stop the contagion before mankind revert back to clan warfare? (because if we want to look for reasons to hate each others in past or modern politics, sure enough we will get there!)
This is false.
Colonization of eastern parts of russia involved forced conversion to christianity, violence, rape, mass murder, but not language extermination
Even culture extermination is an exaggeration, sure some areas got forcibly "converted" to christianity (if they were unlucky to be invaded before USSR) but you will see mosques/buddha statues/whatever is applicable and all the local traditions and beliefs mostly going like before
Actually in areas where local languages exist they kept schools teaching local languages and official signs are duplicated in both local and Russian all the way from USSR. I know this first hand;) but even the article you linked will tell you that.
So it was maybe not as good as support for indigenous languages in Canada but not extermination
Only since 2018 it is optional to teach local language in schools, previously there were at least some schools that teach it in every area like that. thank Putler for that too.
This is false.
Entire history of Ukraine since russia became a thing is a constant struggle for preserving its own language.
Look at what happens now: 1. russia demands russian language to be declared official in Ukraine. 2. russia targets Ukrainian cultural institutions in its airstrikes, trying to destroy anything Ukrainian 3. first things russians do after occupying a territory is "reeducation" of Ukrainian-speaking representatives of the population and burning Ukrainian books
I can continue this list.
Seeing original post at times like this is genuinely confusing. But OTOH, many still choose to be wrong understanding russia's warv against Ukraine. pUtin explicitly said he intends to solve "Ukrainian question" once and for all.
My reply is about what happened within borders of Russia to indigenous languages and cultures. if you think I'm commenting about war against another country you are very wrong
> but not language extermination
as Lithuania - this is absolutely not true. Even before Soviet union the Russian empire was exterminating language to the point where there's an entire Lithuanian history chapter on Lithuanian book smugglers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_book_smugglers
Soviet empire wasn't better either. My great grandmother who was a Lithuanian language teacher was sent to Siberian gulags _for_ teaching Lithuanian. Luckily she survived and lived to a 100 just to prove these disgusting people wrong.
Sorry, my perspective is based on what happened within borders of Russia, I guess USSR was worse to white people who look more like russians
i have tatarian friends. they would like a word with you on this topic.
when they are over my place for more than a couple of hours, there is always conversation about russia trying to suppress anything tatarian: both culture and language.
this is their first hand expirience. from few past decades
tell me more... I don't hear that sort of thing from my non white friends in russia
I heard about discrimination and other shit especially if they go to white western areas of russia, but never about language suppression at home
well... it's not something that they will discuss. especially given that many try to assimilate or already lost their native culture or don't even care about it.
don't like posts of type "ai told me so", but google nicely summarized things in this case
Language Suppression: The most significant recent development was the 2017 law that ended the mandatory study of the Tatar language in schools, making it an optional subject. This has led to a decline in new generations of Tatar speakers and marginalized the language in administration and higher education. Efforts by Tatarstan to revert their script to the Latin alphabet were also blocked by Moscow.
Political and Civic Crackdowns: The Russian government has systematically eroded the political autonomy that Tatarstan gained in the 1990s. Tatar national organizations, such as the All-Tatar Public Center, have been labeled "extremist" and banned, with activists facing fines, detention, and imprisonment for speaking out against the policies.
Historical Revisionism: Moscow promotes a single, "imperial doctrine" of history, suppressing narratives that contradict it. This includes the erasure of Tatar national heroes and the promotion of figures who align with the Kremlin's narrative. Public memorial events related to historical injustices, such as the 1944 deportation of Crimean Tatars, are restricted or prohibited in Russian-occupied territories like Crimea.
Control over Identity: The official state policy focuses on a conventional, apolitical interpretation of Tatar culture, ignoring the community's desire for genuine self-determination. The goal appears to be the destruction of distinct national identities and the creation of a unified, unitary Russian state.
also watch this with subtitles/translation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwLTayPMrKE
I asked what friends tell you, not interested in slop. thanks
> The most significant recent development was the 2017 law that ended the mandatory study of the
dude I just mentioned that law in my comment
this is essentially what they told me (this is why copy/pasted slop as it's easier than typing half a page), +him been dragged to FSB for "conversation" due to "extremism"
if typing is too much to make an argument then maybe it's not worth it.
extremism laws are no joke, talking about gay things is "extremism", talking about secession also "extremism". But that is true for anyone even if you're white
Exterminating languages is one way to put it, progress is another.
Languages have died throughout time, as long as the language is preserved in a book for scholarly reasons I see no issues.
It also depends on how it's done, politically or through violence.
You're struggling to see how glorifying language, culture and ignoring context triggers people?
> But you understand you are playing "their"
Who's "their"? West tried to play nice for years, welcoming Russians despite active aggression and it yielded nothing.
> You're struggling to see how glorifying language, culture and ignoring context triggers people?
Yes, actually, I am. And not only that, I'm also wondering why you think the linked post is "glorifying" anything.
You are not alone in this my friend.
As a Ukrainian, seeing how US sometimes romanticizes Russia and takes active interest in its culture is heartbreaking. But I guess having an ocean between you and the continent with Russia does that to you.
So we should hate all Russians and it's culture because of Putin?
As a Ukranian you should know that there is a lot of shared [positive] culture between the two, so where do we decide where the interest lays?
I don't think he suggested hating all the Russians.
But I agree that we shouldn't promote or glorify any aspect of the Russian culture, including the language, until they face the truth and start making amends for their history. Instead they are currently doubling down on the atrocities and russification.
So yes, this article is misplaced here.
Majority of Ukrainians want nothing to do with Russia, Russia culture, language etc. Given that a bulk of "shared culture" is Russian attempts to suppress anything Ukrainian over past few hundred years.
This is where interest of Ukrainians lay.
And I'll quote you a Russian journalist, that had to run away from Russia and later was assassinated by Russians in Ukraine. 10 years ago or so he wrote: west should dig a deep ditch around Russia and fill it with alligators.
There is also non-zero amount of actual russians that think that russian culture brings only misery and should be destroyed together with russia (state as we know it)
Just a reminder, a lot of people throughout the world would say the same about your country.
Also, the journalist you seem to have in mind, Arkady Babchenko, is weirdly alive for someone that's been killed.
my country also suppressing ukrainian culture for hundreds of years ? it's something new for me
did I say that he was killed ?
No, your country genociding Palestinians, with the cruelty that would make a zetnik horrified. Saying that it, in its current state, should be destroyed certainly isn't a fringe opinion these days.
well, we have difference of opinion about genociding. and you obviously not sufficiently exposed to russian opinions about ukrainians: to kill all adults and reeducate children to be good russian and use them to fight west, is not exactly fringe opinion.
but given that we were talking about cultural suppression, in my country, there is an state financed arabic school system where everything is taught in arabic, state sponsors muslim clerics/mosques and by law all signage and documents must have arabic.
ps. kinda ironic that you actually want to genocide entire country while complaining about "genocide"
Please spare this forum the "it's not a war crime if I was having fun" argument. However many Arabic schools you have, after all that's happened in Gaza, nobody needs a morality lesson from an Israeli.
i don't have habit of giving morality lessons to somebody. especially to somebody who willingly misrepresents what happens in israel, ukraine and russia
But how does this makes any sense? Do you refuse to speak English when USA (English speaking) invades Iraq? Or you are ok with double standards?
Russian is neither a common lingua franca nor is it commonly spoken by foreigners (with the obvious exclusion of former Soviet countries). It belongs culturally to Russia and it's people. English belongs to half a dozen countries.
I'm not sure I agree with the original commenter, but I see the merit in their perspective.
Is English commonly spoken by countries that aren't former British colonies? I am a Ukranian citizen, and if I can speak Russian, and not have that kind of prejudice, you should also be able to. In fact most Ukrainians speak Russian.
This is not true. Like literally factually incorrect.
Most people in big cities can speak russian due to russia's colonization strategy. But it's far from "most Ukrainians".
Saying this as Ukrainian citizen who has seen more Ukraine (both eastern and western parts) than just a few big cities.
It's true that Ukranian is more prevalent in western Ukraine, but that is a minority. Most people live in Kyiv, and prefer to speak Russian, including the current president of Ukraine. Or at least this was the case before the war started, and a huge chunk of population left the country.
Ukraine population before russian invasion of 2022 ~40M Kyiv population before russian invasion if 2022 <3M
> Most people live in Kyiv
This perfectly demonstrates your level of expertise and trustworthiness of your opinions.
Go home, and don't forget to buy some vodka in пятерочка.
after russian invasion many of those who preferred to speak russian swore off speaking russian. do you want to guess why ?
as other poster wrote, don't forget to collect your 15 rubel and buy some vodka on the way home
> do you want to guess why ?
Because they were brainwashed by the government.
let me guess, they consumed spiked up oranges ? and you are the only one who could resist it ? and russia launching war in the middle of the night has absolutely nothing to do with it ?
Exactly that gives ruskies propaganda talking points to invade Ukraine by saying they don’t like how Ukrainians treated russian speakers.
British King isn’t delusional enough to start war with neighboring English speaking country.
> Exactly that gives ruskies propaganda talking points to invade Ukraine by saying they don’t like how Ukrainians treated russian speakers.
The Russians have a point there. I wish the Russian language was an official language in Ukraine, and I wish I could speak Russian in Ukraine without restrictions, but unfortunately the Ukranian government chose to instead try and force people to speak Ukranian at school, etc. But that obviously doesn't justify starting a war.
> British King isn’t delusional enough to start war with neighboring English speaking country.
Do they even have a neighbouring country that speaks English? They are dumb enough to quit EU though.
Wishing a national identity and sovereignty did not exist just for your convenience is what this thread is about.
> I wish I could speak Russian in Ukraine without restrictions
There weren't meaningful restrictions. A large number of Ukrainians still speak Russian a lot. Instead this sounds like "forcing" a number of people to speak to you in a particular language in order for you to not feel "restricted".
> There weren't meaningful restrictions.
I was forced to speak Ukranian at school. Is this not a meaningful restriction to you?
> Instead this sounds like "forcing" a number of people to speak to you in a particular language in order for you to not feel "restricted".
Unlike Ukranian government, I never forced anyone to speak any particular language. In fact, what happens when one person prefers to speak Ukrainian, and the other person prefers to speak Russian, is they just do, and they both understand each other just fine.
100%. I saw some vids from Ukrainian frontlines where people say speaking Russian is a problem because in fast situations it's more difficult to identify if you're enemy. This means even there some people speak Russian
It's just about education in schools and official use. And it's crazy to blame a country for requiring using its home language at schools
Ukranian was not my home language. Russian was.
So if Ukrainian is not your home language why didn’t you move home where Russian is your home language?
> Do they even have a neighbouring country that speaks English?
Ireland.
English is an official language in Ireland, so it is not like Ukraine.
Take any neighbouring country in Europe
Tons of people totally speak English there. But it's not an official language. And government totally forces kids to speak French/Dutch/whatever in schools. if England invades Netherland will you say they also have a point?;)
The point is that Ukraine used to be a part of Soviet Union, and this is why "obviously" Ukranians speak Russian, and we are drawing a parallel to how former British colonies also speak English. France et al are not former British colonies, and I assume they prefer to speak their native language at home, and not English. Not because they are forced to, but because English is not their native language.
Kazakhstan is in the same situation. The people would be better off speaking Russian, although it should not be forced through violence.
See Hong Kong + Mandarain, etc...
You're free to go to russia, where russian is the official language.
But I think you're already there, just trying to spread russian propaganda posing as Ukrainian
Why would I want to go to Russia? I left Ukraine because I don't want to be sent to war, and the same could happen if I were in Russia.
The propagation of English is due to the influence of America and Britain. If you look at the history of what those two have been up to all around the world, it's not pretty.
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Because there is 0 logic in blaming the language.
My man, if you think language is just a communication tool, you're very wrong.
Language is a carrier for centuries of cultural evolution. Russian language is rich with unique untranslatable slurs for neighboring nations. Why?
Language is a powerful colonization engine. Read history of any colonization. First thing colonizers do: teach colonized their language.
Once you impose your language on a person, you immediately integrate that person in your cultural domain.
I assume you just have no experience with the matter, and haven't seen this in action.
The language is literally pretext for the current war, if you read just a little bit about it.
I speak Russian and due to war I've completely abandoned the language and the culture. Russians not showing any resistance is a good litmus test whether culture is worth being involved with and the answer is a clear no imo.
Kinda sad as russian language is quite incredible but any sane individual must sanitize their environment for their own sake and abandoning russian culture is a perfectly reasonable take.
>Russians not showing any resistance
You mean not the level you would feel satisfied, there are plenty showing resistance, they just disappear. Very easy to judge others when you have little risk.
The ones showing resistance are leaving Russia and immigrating to other countries if they can.
You should take pity on them. They are unfortunate people who live in a dictatorship. Russians who tried to protest were arrested and taken in unknown direction by authorities.
I live in Baltics. It took 50 years and many dead people, but we got rid of them.
Ahem. The Baltics got independence when the Soviet regime collapsed. With all due respect to the struggle of anyone who opposed this regime while it existed, attributing the collapse of the Soviet Empire to the resistance in the Baltics is a bit too much. It was mostly driven my processes internal to Russia itself.
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Hence, the weak spot in Russia‘s age old decrying of „NATO-encroachment“: It is Russia‘s neighboring countries themselves that immediately sought NATO-membership
Ah yes all the freedom fighters and culture preservationists had zero impact in securing Lithuania's freedom - what an incredibly dumb, disrespectful and frankly depressing take.
depressing - certainly, disrespectful - perhaps, but dumb? if instead of Gorbachev there had been another Stalin (or the current version of Putin), the empire would have endured that period of turbulence intact, and you would still be part of it.
also, the provinces that didn't fight for independence - Kazakhstan, for example - had got it anyway, whether they wanted it or not at the time.
No your logic is fundamentally flawed because it assumes a job has to reach 100% completion to have an effect. What if soviet empire collapsed precisely because the resistance was too costly.
In Lithuania in particular sabotage was a constant reality of the country for bigger chunk of a century. People were breaking the empire not only via outside resistance and cultural identity preservation but also by sabotaging soviet operations in daily activities. The empire fundamentally became unsustainable and collapsed under it's own weight and no new glorious leader could have saved it.
So whether Lithuanians are free because of their own efforts or because it just so happens that soviet empire collapsed is a fundamentally flawed question as these two things are not only correlating but are causal as well.
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what exactly am I propagandizing here?
also, Путин - хуйло, Крым - Украина. happy now?
You're are feeding into a myth of unbreakable ussr and belittling efforts of former member states.
In any colonizer's strategy, this tactic achieves following goals
1. Instills fear, and demotivates and fragments resistance 2. Internalizes inferiority into a colonized nation
I might've been too hasty assuming you are doing this on purpose. But otoh, saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich. The moment Kazakh government thinks about denouncing russian as official language, putin will send a new government. Well, maybe not now, as his resources are strained.
Point is: Kazakhstan is far from independent, and Baltic states have done a lot to gain their true independence.
>otoh, saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich.
Kazakhstan is dependent on Russia and there is massive corruption, but for the most part it is independent. Just as independent as any other country with massive corruption.
Also, Russian speaking non native-Kazahk people are not treated so nicely there.
Young Kazakh people indeed started questioning the state of things. And I celebrate that.
At the same time, russia has huge influence over the country. Yes, corruption is exactly how russian influence is usually maintained. That doesn't contradict my claim, however.
>saying Kazakhstan is independent... that's rich. The moment Kazakh government thinks about denouncing russian as official language, putin will send a new government
at the time of the empire's collapse, Putin was essentially a nobody. Yeltsin and the oligarchs didn't really give a fuck about Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the Baltics, and the rest. they were truly and unconditionally independent, and Russia, given its humiliating defeat in Chechnya, couldn't do shit about it even if it wanted to (which it didn't).
Oh, they gave a lot of fucks. They ensured russian language has a special status in Ukrainian constitution, for example, despite freedom of speech and non-discrimination were already there. They ensured the presidential candidate with strong nationalistic views, arguing for severing ties with russia, won't make it to elections. They financed political parties pulling Ukraine back to russia.
There might've been a temporary loss of russian grip on Ukraine in those turbulent times, but that was just a tiny blip on the scale of whole timeline
I honestly do take pity on russians but I also chose to not engage with russian culture to sanitize my own environment as it's just too ruined for any healthy engagement.
As Russian many crazy supporters of Putin and Ukraine war I met outside of Russia are foreigners speaking English. Sure it's worse among Russians but if you were serious about anti war position you would want to speak Russian more because that helps spread your position. It's not like PRC yet, people can disagree with government without being so afraid
Thank you for stating your position.
My good friend once taught me that people without shame are the most dangerous people. I am shocked by how much russian-speaking people are shameless.
When russia starts the biggest war since WWII using language/national justification¹, promoting russian culture is shameless beyond limits.
¹ putin promised to solve "Ukrainian question" ("украинский вопрос" – an obvious reference to "Judenfrage" which later was used by German fascists to justify holocaust) when he announced his svo
I boycott all things Russian (where I can, easily) and so should all of you
When you open your eyes, are you amazed to see the person in front of you come back into existence?
are you insane, or just a troll?
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have you?
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Into the trash it goes.
I've never seen the appeal of this guy's famous novel and find it quite weird how it's supposedly a literary masterpiece. Sick people.
If you’re referring to Lolita, the novel is written from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, that Nabokov very clearly holds in complete contempt. You would know this if you had actually read the book.
Not really a topic that piques my interest.
Glad you enjoyed it, I guess.
Face it. You have grown up thinking that all teachers should be as kind as your kindergarten teacher and the amount of details about verbs should not exceed the your gaming console instructions.