Question for Those Who Have Studied Russian

[skysurfer]

If you are a native English speaker, what kind of difficulty (if any) did you have learning Russian? There is an intro course that I'm considering taking and I'd love to hear about other people's experiences with the language. I've studied Japanese so I'm okay with having to learn a whole new writing and speaking system.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. Two problems:

1. The pronunciation. I found the alphabet to be a cinch, especially since things are spelled pretty much as they sound. However, the series of consonants, the question of whether or not to palatalize consonants, and the pronunciation of the vowel know as "yerii" were hard to master.

2. The conjugations and declensions. Japanese, as you know, has only three irregular verbs. Russian has tons, all with lots of endings. Russian also has a concept called "aspect," which refers to whether a verb describes a habitual or an instantaneous action. Most verbs come in pairs, with one verb describing the imperfective (habitual) and perfective (instantaneous) aspects.

It's a difficult language, but very expressive. Unlike Japanese, you will find words that are related to English.

[rickrok66]

2. My experience with Russian

Hi Skysurfer

I minored in Russian in college and went to the Defense Language Institute.

I would recommend memorizing the alphabet immediately. Once you do that, tons of Anglicized words or cognates will jump out at you. Also the Russians have borrowed many words from the French and Germans because of former Tsarist influences, like "lieutenant" and "soldat".

Lydia is write in that the pronounciation of the "soft sign" is difficult. However, Russian grammar and pronunciation is pretty straight forward overall.

Just studying the Cyrillic alphabet will open new doors to you. If you see any new stories dealing with Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, or Serbia, you will be able to make out names of towns and such.

Good luck in your studies.
Rick

[skysurfer]

3. Thank You!

Lydia and Rick, thank you very much! Your insights have been very helpful. I still have a few weeks to decide so I'm going to visit with one of the professors in the department to get a better feel of what the summer program is like.