10 Reasons Why The Russian Language Isn't That Difficult

  • Donovan Nagel
    Written byDonovan Nagel
    Donovan NagelTeacher, translator, polyglot
    🎓 B.A., Theology, Australian College of Theology, NSW
    🎓 M.A., Applied Linguistics, University of New England, NSW

    Applied Linguistics graduate, teacher and translator. Founder of The Mezzofanti Guild and Talk In Arabic.
  • Read time17 mins
  • Comments42
10 Reasons Why The Russian Language Isn't That Difficult

Today I’m going to convince you that Russian is actually far easier to learn than you’ve been led to believe.

It’s not (or at least doesn’t have to be) a near-impossible undertaking.

A year or so ago I moved to a small town in Russia and lived immersed in the language having learned almost nothing before arriving.

I kept hearing about how difficult Russian is to learn up until that point but my experience there said something very different.

Within 5 months I was communicating comfortably in Russian, befriending many new people and lived for several more months in Italy with my new Russian girlfriend at the time (who could only speak Russian).

And just a few months ago I was able to use Russian extensively during my stay in Georgia.

Russian is no more challenging than any other language I’ve attempted.

The truth is:

Wrong learning approaches make easy tasks unnecessarily challenging.

The Foreign Service Institute (FSI for short) places Russian into one its highest categories in terms of its relative difficulty for native English speakers (in other words one of the most challenging major languages).

But as I said regarding Arabic a while back, the FSI gets it wrong and the difficulty level primarily depends on the way the language is approached.

It’s also dependant upon your attitude!

Keep convincing yourself that Russian is insanely difficult and it will be insanely difficult.

So let’s get started on why Russian’s easier than you think.

NOTE: Before I go any further, make sure to sign up with your email at the bottom of this post and select Russian for more Russian content delivered straight to your inbox.

Reason 1: The alphabet is actually very easy to learn

Let’s start with the most obvious one.

The strange letters.

To the unititiated, Russian looks pretty intimidating yet also oddly familiar.

You see a bunch of letters that look just like regular old English letters (plus tweaked or inverted English letters) but in actual fact many of them represent something completely different.

H isn’t a H and P isn’t a P. 🙂

Cyrillic is very similar to (and mostly derived from) Greek which shares a common origin with our own alphabet. Just as I mentioned in my Semitic languages article, all these languages originally came from Phoenician, so even today you can see very close resemblances in many letters.

As a general rule, of all the letters in the Russian alphabet these are the ones that you should not have any trouble with:

Аа

Бб

Дд (almost looks like a capital ‘D’ with two feet)

Ее

Зз (looks like the cursive ‘Z’ in English (assuming you learned cursive in school that is))

Кк

Мм

Оо

Сс (‘S’ sound in Russian. Sometimes the letter ‘C’ is pronounced the same way in English)

Тт

These are the letters that you should be able to identify almost immediately and not have to worry about when learning Russian.

That leaves us with another 23 letters to learn.

If you studied math in high school (or Greek by chance), you won’t have too much trouble identifying these either:

Гг (the Greek letter gamma (‘G’ sound))

Пп (pi. Who doesn’t know pi? (‘P’ sound))

Фф (phi. (‘F’ sound)

Лл (very closely resembles the Greek ‘L’ lambda)

These symbols are universally recognizable.

So there are 19 unusual letters remaining for native English speakers.

Here’s where a bit of creativity with memory hooks and image association come in handy helping you to remember them.

These are some of the little hooks I used to remember these letters when I was learning. Associate sounds and text with your own images and hooks that help you remember:

Image association examples:

Чч looks like an upside down CHair (‘CH’ sound).

Жж looks like two top and two bottom teeth touching together just like they almost do when you pronounce it (‘ZH’ sound).

Memory hook examples:

Little b (Бб) = actually B.

Big b (Вв), actually V.

Ya, that R is backward.” (Яя)

Уу is a ‘U’ sound. The letter ‘U’ is pronounced ‘Yu’.

Be creative about it.

The trickiest two letters of all for English speakers learning Russian are technically not even real letters. They’re two signifiers/markers:

Ъъ – hard sign

Ьь – soft sign

They don’t make any sound on their own.

All they do is signify whether or not the consonant before them is pronounced soft or hard (palatalized or not).

The temptation at this point is to say ‘what the?’ and feel overwhelmed but I’m going to make a really important suggestion here (I’m sure a lot of Russian vets and teachers will argue with me here):

Ignore them until you’re past the beginner stage.

Just focus on listening and repeating.

As long as your learning material comes with clear audio so you can hear exactly how words are pronounced then that’s all you need to focus on. Trying to make sense of written explanations on pronunciation mechanics will confuse you and waste time better spent practicing what you hear.

Over time and with use, you’ll develop an ear for the differences and the hard and soft markers will make sense.

See my next point.

Reason 2: Russian pronunciation only becomes difficult when textbooks overcomplicate it

For goodness sake, learn pronunciation by imitation of what you hear (applies to every language).

Not by reading instructions!

When I first attempted (and failed) Russian many years ago, I made the common mistake of trying to learn pronunciation by following pronunciation guides.

Reading how to speak properly (eye roll).

You need to be able to hear (and imitate) language.

Most textbooks start with a lot of technical blather about things like ‘hard’ vs. ‘soft’ consonants. For example:

мат is pronounced as you would expect it to in English (mat).

мать has a signifier on the end of it which means it’s a little different (more like matye).

But explaining the process behind this just overwhelms people and is utterly meaningless to the average learner.

Yes, when reading Russian you’ll need to be aware of them (because they’re used a lot) but unless you’re a linguist studying Russian phonetics then you simply do not need to try to get your head around phonetic technicalities.

Remember: Phonetic changes happen in every language including English.

They’re a natural phenomenon.

The only difference is that Russians actually point out certain phonetic changes by including ь or ъ in writing. Russian is no more difficult to pronounce than any other language.

I’m convinced that if people would spend more time just listening to native speaker dialogue and repeating what they hear, there’d be so much less confusion!

Other common areas of trouble for English speaking Russian learners are Ы (which is just basically a combination of U+I) and Р (rolled ‘R’).

I offer the same advice that I would to people who struggle with guttural sounds in Arabic:

The more you do it, the better you get at it (aka practice!).

By the way, if you get pronunciation wrong in the beginning then people aren’t going to crucify you for it.

For the first month or so in Russia, I was pronouncing вы as vee instead of vui.

People understood me just fine.

After lots of usage, it improved and now I say it the right way.

So keep at it.

Reason 3: Russians EXPECT you to speak Russian and rarely if ever resort to English in Russia

This is an amazingly good thing.

The problem with a lot of overseas language immersion these days is that so many people already speak English and will try to accommodate you as a visitor.

It’s good for tourists who aren’t learning the language but bad for language learners.

One thing I found out very quickly in Russia however is that their society generally expects you as an outsider to assimilate and learn Russian. Finding people outside of the tourist spots in Moscow who speak English by default is an almost impossible mission.

You need Russian to get by.

For this reason, when I first moved to a smaller town I had no choice but to learn Russian quickly to live there.

It was essential.

The few times I was out and asked people “Do you speak English?” actually got me some very unappreciative stares so I learned fast that if I needed things done, it was Russian or nothing.

This ‘deep end immersion’ factor makes learning Russian a heck of a lot easier than many other languages.

Reason 4: There’s an abundance of cognate words in Russian

Russian actually has more English cognates than most other languages outside Europe.

These are words that look/sound very similar and have the same meaning.

Here are just a few common examples:

центр (tsenter) – center

студент (student) – student

класс (klas) – class

иде́я (ideya) – idea

проект (prayekt) – project

но́мер (nomer) – number

фильм (film) – film

ю́мор (yumor) – humor

сестра́ (sestra) + брат (brat) – sister + brother

вода́ (voda) – water

Of course there are some false friends too (words that appear to be cognates but have different (or related) meanings).

For example:

костюм (kostyum) – suit

магазин (magazin) – shop

фабрика (fabrika) – factory

Cognates can give you a huge leg-up when learning another language and thankfully Russian has many of them.

Reason 5: Long words aren’t tough if you see them as just compounded words and syllables

This goes with my other pronunciation point.

Russian, like German, has some really long words (including compounds) that look impossible to pronounce at first glance.

But they’re simple if you just carve them up into smaller pieces. For example:

Здравствуйте = hello/greeting

Obviously this is the first word that most people learn since it’s the most common greeting. It also feels like a tongue twister to a newbie.

But if you break it into two halves like so:

вуйте

Здравст

It’s a lot easier to say the two smaller pieces.

Practice the smaller pieces over and over until you’ve got it and then say them together.

This is especially helpful when adjusting to the consonant clusters (words with 3 or 4 consonants all together – e.g. Здр + авствуйте).

Reason 6: There’s no shortage of excellent Russian learning material

Thankfully there’s plenty of great Russian material to learn from – both free and paid.

Free sites like Russian For Everyone, Russian Language Guide and Master Russian have been really helpful to me when I’ve needed clarity on certain points.

RT.com also has handy section for starting on Russian.

There are two YouTube channels I love – incidentally both called Easy Russian (here and here).

As always, italki is the place to go for Skype Russian lessons. It’s incredibly cheap and the closest thing to actually being in Russia.

Rocket Russian is the best paid online course for learning the language. The natural dialogues and speech recognition are its strongest features.

Another excellent course for Russian is the Russian Uncovered course by StoryLearning.

If you prefer a mobile app for Russian, definitely try Babbel or Mondly.

For an audio-only course (good for learning Russian while commuting to work and so on), Pimsleur is the best.

When I was in Russia, I used Glossika’s Russian course and Rapid Russian MP3’s every morning. I can’t even begin to tell you how helpful both of these paid resources were for helping me pick up Russian quickly.

There are plenty of great books on Russian out there but two I’ll mention that I’ve found helpful are Shaum’s Russian Grammar (as a clear reference book) and The Everything Learning Russian Book (a simple, not-too-dense course book).

See my list of best Russian courses and Russian apps for more.

If you’ve got other suggestions for resources you’ve used, please share them in the comment section below.

Reason 7: See noun cases as a blessing rather than a curse

Noun cases are probably the most-complained-about aspect of learning Russian.

They’re certainly not unique to Russian but among English speaking learners it seems to be the area that causes the most confusion.

This is because in English, we don’t clearly indicate noun cases by affixing anything to the noun. For example:

“This book is good.”nominative

“I read the book.”accusative

“The book’s cover.”genitive

“On the book.”prepositional

“With a book.”instrumental

“I gave the book a review.”dative

In each one of these sentences, ‘book’ takes on a very different role. We write it exactly the same way in each instance even though it’s not the same.

In Russian, it’s different.

‘Book’ has different endings based on the role it plays in each sentence (and different again for plural forms):

**книг-**а

**книг-**у

**книг-**и

**книг-**е

**книг-**ой

**книг-**е

As I often say, if you approach this with a traditional, grammar-first learning style, it will be immensely challenging.

And tedious as hell.

But I’ll give you another way to look at it.

Firstly, if you look back at the English examples above you’ll see that in most of them the noun case is actually indicated by a word or ‘s’ suffix.

E.g. “The book’s cover/The cover of the book.”

We know that ‘book’ is genitive here because we see ‘s’ or the word ‘of’.

So start to think of it like this: bookof

Likewise for the other cases: bookis, bookwith, bookon, etc.

That’s basically what’s happening with Russian noun case suffixes. For English, we use a separate word altogether but in Russian it’s a suffix. You only think it’s completely foreign to English but it’s not.

Noun cases are also blessings in disguise.

I’ve had many different situations where I’m conversing with Russians and I don’t fully understand what’s being said but the noun case gives away the meaning and context.

Hearing the case ending helps me figure out what’s being said.

It’s also immensely helpful in this regard when the noun is the first word in the sentence which kind of preps you for what’s coming (e.g. if you hear кни**г-*у first then you know that whatever’s coming next involves something *being done to* a book).

Most importantly:

Freely and unashamedly use the wrong cases.

If you shut up because you’re afraid or unable to use the correct noun cases then you’re doing yourself a huge disservice.

You need to make tonnes of mistakes and not be shy about it.

Even if you only know the nominative case then I advise you to use it in every possible context you can as often as you can.

I did this constantly in Russia and over time I began to adjust and use the correct cases naturally (either (a) because I was corrected often or (b) because I was exposed repeatedly to correct forms in conversation). I’m still far from perfect but so much better through frequent use.

But you won’t be exposed to correct forms in conversation if you don’t actually put yourself there to begin with!

Reason 8: Learn verbs of motion individually AND contextually and they’re easy

When I first started, I was pulling my hair out over Russian verbs of motion.

But that’s because I approached them the wrong way (and textbooks overcomplicated them).

Take the verb ‘to go’ for instance which technically doesn’t exist in Russian the same way we understand it in English.

Russian verbs of motion imply the ‘method’ or ‘kind’ of movement (e.g. going on foot, flying, going by some form of transport, climbing, etc.).

The two most confusing are (were for me) ‘to go on foot’ (Ходить/Идти) and ‘to go by transport’ (Ездить/Ехать).

There’s an indefinite/multidirectional form (Ходить/Ездить) and a definite/unidirectional form (Идти/Ехать) of both.

That means that for verbs of motion, there are 2 separate sets of conjugation rules you need to memorize just to be able to communicate correctly (since ‘to go’ is one of the most foundational verbs in any language).

Sounds confusing as hell, right?

Well it is if you try to learn it this way!

But let’s look at it the simple way:

Suppose instead that you’re dealing with two separate words and instead of memorizing two conjugation tables and struggling to remember which one to use, you learn the verbs in contextual chunks.

So instead of seeing Ходить and Идти as two forms of the same word, see them as two completely distinct words and only as they relate to real situations.

Practice and apply them in context so they stick and become real-world applicable.

For example:

Я иду в школу

I’m walking to (definitively) the school (i.e. right now).

Я хожу в школу

I walk to the school (e.g. often, every day).

Instead of trying to get your head around an entire set of conjugation rules and when to use them, take one or two simple real-world applications like this and use them constantly until they become habit.

One other note on verb prefixes:

Russian attaches prefixes to verbs to indicate direction of motion. For example:

выходить = вы+ходить (to go out)

приходить = при+ходить (to come/arrive)

This is actually incredibly easy if you treat prefixes as if they’re individual words just like we do in English.

For example, in English we say “go around”, “go out, “go across”, etc.

Just think of Russian like this: “aroundgo”, “outgo”, “acrossgo”.

Simple.

Let me show you my unique method for learning Russian:Sign me up

Reason 9: There are many features of Russian that are comparatively very easy compared to other languages

There are many other features of the Russian language that make life easy for new learners.

Here are just a few in no particular order:

  • Word order is flexible. Although sentences usually follow the S-V-O structure, they make perfect sense in other orders too.
  • You don’t have to worry about the verb ‘to be’ in the present tense. You are beautiful is simply you beautiful.
  • Questions are formed by simply changing the intonation of regular statements (e.g. Мы смотрим телевизор -> Мы смотрим телевизор?). Easy!
  • To make verbs, nouns and adjectives negative you simply say не before it.
  • There are no definite or indefinite articles in Russian! (a/an, the)

Instead of talking about all the ‘difficult‘ aspects of Russian grammar, focus on what’s actually easy compared to other languages.

This will positively affect your attitude and attitude is everything in language learning! 🙂

Reason 10: Russians are some of the most enthusiastic people when it comes to sharing their language and culture

Russians are fiercely proud of their culture and language.

I love this about them.

I’ve found that the reception I’ve received from people when they see I’m trying to assimilate and learn their language is extremely positive and encouraging.

People want to help you succeed.

Getting back to one of my original points up top about Russians not resorting to English: my experience with Russian (which differed greatly in comparison to places like Korea and Egypt) showed me that for Russians, the world does not revolve around the Anglosphere.

In many parts of the non-English speaking world, people strive to learn English not just for career but so that they can adapt to us.

Being in Russia really feels like being in another world or dimension at times – one where English dominance never existed.

Granted, I’m sure that this is largely a result of politics and the Soviet Union being isolationist for so long but in terms of language immersion, it’s a really refreshing thing to experience.

Almost everywhere you go, you need to adapt to them.

As I’ve said before, ordinary Russian people are so warm and hospitable, especially when they see how much you respect and appreciate their language and culture.

🎓 Cite article

Share link Grab the link to this article
Copy Link
The Mezzofanti Guild

WANT HELP

Learning
Russian?

Who is this?The Mezzofanti Guild
Cardinal MezzofantiCardinal Guiseppe Mezzofanti was a 19th century polyglot who is believed to have spoken at least 39 languages!Learn more
Support me by sharing:
  • Reddit share
  • Facebook share
  • X / Twitter share

Let me help you learn Russian
JOIN THE GUILD:

Donovan Nagel
Donovan Nagel - B. Th, MA AppLing
I'm an Applied Linguistics graduate, teacher and translator with a passion for language learning (especially Arabic).
Currently learning: Greek
Greek

42 COMMENTS

Comment Policy: I love comments and feedback (positive and negative) but I have my limits. You're in my home here so act accordingly.
NO ADVERTISING. Links will be automatically flagged for moderation.
Cvgtrss

Cvgtrss

So… not so easy as you wrote. Yes, no articles… but cases, also adjectives change according to a case, verbs also have conjugations. And what about prefixes that change totally the meaning of an action?

By the way, yes it sounds like there are present, past and future. But it is not actually like this. It depends on prefix. Prefixes help to express the right tense. For example, if you would like to express that the person was reading during two hours you will use one form of a verb, if he read it once again in the past there will be another prefix to express it. If he used something like an example and read from it - there will be another prefix to express it. In Russian there are no robotic rules like in English. Everything depends on a verb or an adjective or a noun. And so on… But if you don’t care about grammar understand so… never mind😁.

Dee

Dee

Nice article, very useful for people like me who are interested to learn Russian. You made it sound less intimidating :-)

Wondering

Wondering

I’m sorry but... HOW can you not know where you come from?? I keep hearing this from yanks, they need a test to show you who your relatives were? BAHAHAHA!!!! Do you people not talk to your relatives? That’s right: you are the culture who doesn’t even eat dinner together. Separate rooms, in front of the TV will do. Plus you are a nation of absolute mutts! I only have one D.N.A. not only from the same country, but from the same city. Why dilute your own D.N.A. needlessly?! I know when immigrants first came to America, the Italians stayed together, the Irish in Irish camps, the Hungarians gathered together. Everyone spoke their native languages and didn’t mingle. This is how it should have been! I may be a polyglot but I recognize that nature SEPARATED us for a reason. And I think everyone should stay with their own kind. But for the majority of the planet, that has long been diluted. I, like the Russians, am of pure blood. No mixing as far as my family tree goes. Why you yanks never SPOKE to your ancestors and make a tree? Oh that’s right: Americans don’t like old people. So sad, too bad is your expression!

Donovan

Donovan

Hi Tom. I had a job as a private teacher for 3 kids to one of the wealthiest families in Russia. An oligarch family from Tatarstan. They paid me a small fortune, gave me my own apartment in the city and a villa in Dubai, as well as my own private driver. Sounds better than it was though - the family were a nightmare to work for (horrible to their workers). I ended my contract early as I couldn’t stomach seeing the Russian maids and drivers get treated like dogs. Long story which I shared in another post. If you want a job like this, they’re actually quite easy to come by but I would advise against it.

Tom

Tom

Hi Donovan. Love the site. Do you mind me asking how you funded your time in Russia? I’m looking to spend a couple of months over there to jump-start my Russian studies, but teaching isn’t really for me. Any advice aside from just building up a mountain of cash in advance?
All the best,
Tom

Shiyu

Shiyu

i am learning Russian right now for more than a month and i am trying to keep myself motivated and i found your articles and in just 15 minutes you put so many positive energy in me about learning Russian, with your content. Also, when you google russian language all the other sites will give you reasons why it is hard and your website is the first one to be positive and actually motivate people and want people to learn the language. Made me so happy thank you! Wish you the best

Ernest Acevedo

Ernest Acevedo

I really want to learn Russian

NIMA

NIMA

thanks. I am going to learn it.

Arina

Arina

Hi, I’m Russian, and thank you so much for your warm words about our country and culture! Your article was a very interesting experience for me to look on my native language from the other side.
I work in another country now (the Netherlands), and trying to learn Dutch. It is difficult, because everybody speaks English and it is so easy to not practice Dutch ... Your articles will be my motivation to not to be such lazy a*s :)

Good luck in all your language challenges and discovering the world around!

Ian McGivern

Ian McGivern

I wish you were my teacher...!
During lockdown, I considered learning a new language and I thought I’d give Russian a go. Then I read all sorts of horror stories about how difficult it was and I’m ashamed to say, I was intimidated by it all.
Reading your piece has re-kindled my enthusiasm!

Ernest Acevedo

Ernest Acevedo

I just love learning Languages. 🙂

K

K

Russian language is very difficult no matter how many videos you see and other lessons they all have not even tach you 5% of the language just showing you different words in Russian you learn nothing

KELLY

KELLY

I want to express the anger and frustration that someone feels when you see a post like this! It gives the impression that if you are not mastering Russian with ease and finesse there is simply something wrong with you. On contrary Russian is an extremely difficult language to learn and nobody should feel any sense of shame for not continuing to learn this language. Actually what honestly needs to be discussed is the extremely high amount of people that learn at new language, spend a lot of money on multiple courses to see very little progress , then drop out!! I find that Polyglots are the absolute worst people to teach a language, they skip through essential teething stages of learning and create the illusion that it can be done in a matter of weeks...The sad reality is there are many people keen to rake in massive profits and make huge promises on what you can achieve but once it doesn’t come into frution it’s funny how they conviently disappear!

Mr Pervaz Kaleem

Mr Pervaz Kaleem

what you have stated my friend just tip of ice burg of russian language there are so many words in Russian meaning same even Russian themself dont know all of them and one Russian word can have lots of meaning too in English mostly one word has one meaning and grammer is night mare you may get away with grammer in speaking but not in writting I am surprise you learn it in 5 or six months perhaps your russian girlfriend help you it took me 3 years to learn it and i still dont know many words and writting it i still cant write properly

philip v

philip v

Let me introduce you to the word ‘Jam’.

We’re in a jam. I like jam. Trafficjam. Jam it in there. We’re jamming. You’re really jammy. Wanna jam?

One meaning indeed.

Randy Jay Pine

Randy Jay Pine

I am very serious about learning to speak, read, and write the Russian language. After DNA tests were conducted on five members of my mother’s side, and, five members of my father’s side, it was discovered 20% of my DNA is from Russia. This fact of having Russian DNA in my bloodline makes me want to go and see where our families come from inside of Russia.

I grew up in the great state of Wyoming, I am 50, a widower, a U.S. Navy veteran, a veteran law enforcement officer, with degrees in administration of justice, political science, psychology, international studies, awards and certifications from FEMA, Special Response Team, Special Weapons And Tactics, patrol rifle marksmanship awards, a diploma in the history of naval warfare from the U.S. Naval Academy. Hopefully, I will be seen as useful to the Russian government so I can legally immigrate to Russia and obtain useful employment in Russian.

My children are grown up and have careers and families of their own. I have always wanted to visit Russia. I am making plans to make a move to Russia, and, if I am allowed, I will continue to either work in law enforcement in Russia or, work as an instructor at a small college or a law enforcement training center in Russia.

Karen Leanne Sandberg

Karen Leanne Sandberg

How long have you been experience living in Russia many years? When they see how much you respect and appreciate their language and culture from Russia? Have Russian extremely positive and encouraging themselves study hard works here in Russia;they have negative spoken thoughts about Russian!

Mij Orrison

Mij Orrison

What nonsense you speak!
If it’s so great why is it dying out in all the ex USSR countries? 2.97% speak it in the world. English 34%.
English is the INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS LANGUAGE!
Russian is laborious, dated and takes three times as long to get to the point.
In my experience these people are cold hearted. ignorant. racist. homophobic. Xenophobic.

Maybe you’ve been in the lab have you?

Mikas

Mikas

In many parts of the non-English speaking world, people strive to learn English not just for career but so that they can adapt to us. ADAPT To YOU ???

isa

isa

love this article. these are the things every beginner russian student (native english speaking) should be introduced to, to make the process easier...

Сефро

Сефро

Man.... People are rude! A guy gives his insight into learning Russian and takes a beating. I mastered Spanish at home with at least 50 trips to South America. I must say that immersion is definitely overrated. It’s time, time and time studying. I’ve been studying Russian for about six months and I can’t think of many words I know! Lingvist says I know 600 and I’m about half way done with duolingo. I just ignore cases for now but both apps are feeding it to me.

Ed Love

Ed Love

Absolutely fascinating! I loved my short exposure via Michel Thomas, and this article just encourages me further. Bring on that St Petersberg visit :)

learnrussian4u

learnrussian4u

”The hardest language?” In my opinion whoever said that never tried to learn other languages like Arabic, Chinese or Japanese. The Cyrillic alphabet is one of the easiest to learn, there are many cognates, only three tenses to memorize (past, present and future), no articles whatsoever, and no present tense of the verb “to be”.

Sure, it’s still hard to learn because of the cases, the verb aspects, and all those words that seem made up of way too many consonants, but it’s by no means the hardest.

john

john

Spanish is well known to be the easiest language to learn in the world !

You can compare learning Russian with Spanish !!!

A

A

Thank you for writing this post. It is really encouraging :) Your pronunciation advice has helped me a lot. I feel as though you simplified it. I really hope you will write more guides for Russian. It has given me hope :) I hope you have a nice day.

Birds Eye

Birds Eye

Another way to approach cases (in combination with gender and number) is to remember that personal pronouns in English inflect for case, gender and number. (he, him, his) / she, her, her(s) / they, them, their, their. I know the number of cases in English is not extensive but it helps.

It helped me (native Afrikaans speaker, similar vestigal cases as English) when I learned German (case wise, somewhat remiscient of Russian). Sadly I don’t know Russian yet, but I’m inspired. Great article.

SexyRexy

SexyRexy

So...

A guy lives in Russia then says its not as difficult as may seem. Did we all forget immersion is the #1 and will always be the #1 way to learn a language the fastest!?

A guy also says in a tip that certain books over complicate things... How many tips or reasons did you list?
What is the average number of things can a person can hold in there mind again...? What about NEW things...? Even lower!

This is just a cleverly veiled advertisement in which the writer gets $$$ back from linkage.

And you said Russian isn’t as difficult as think... Regardless of needing to put in more time and effort learning it than most other languages.

For shame.

Ramses

Ramses

Did you read some comments up? Donovan said that he was working full time while living in Russia, and from what I have understood is that he was not working in Russian per se so he still had to put in hours to learn the language.

I live in Spain now, but learned Spanish despite living in Spain. In fact, at one point I was living in Spain for a year and decided to go back to the Netherlands to finish my degree and get a better focus on learning Spanish. In that year prior to moving back I had mostly learned bad grammar, bad pronunciation and my vocabulary was not impressive at all. When I was away from the “immersion” (if you want, you can always live in your own little bubble and get little exposure to your target language), I was forced to put in some serious work and only then really learned Spanish.

Please stop promoting the immersion myth, someone can perfectly learn another language without living in the country where it’s spoken.

Edna

Edna

Just starting with learning the Russian language. I find this article very helpful, thank you!

Dan Flick

Dan Flick

Best resource I’ve see other than Glossika which I am now using is Modern Russian which you can buy the books on Amazon cheaply. I got for a couple of bucks. It is like the FSI courses. Tons and tons of drills. What makes it good is the numerous hours of recordings which you can get free here:

http://www.iu.edu/~celtie/russian_b09.html

Extremely thorough.

Dan

Dan

Donovan,
You make some excellent points as always. I am sure it is much easier to learn Russian than languages with insane writing systems that are completely foreign like Chinese or Japanese or languages without available materials.
I take some issue with the Case system and other various endings being “easy “ but they are not un-learnable. I still find it a struggle to get the right ending all the time but since I started using it rather than reading about it is getting better.
On the immersion aspect, when I met my wife she could hardly speak any English at all but had studied English quite a bit and could read. Within six months of living here she became nearly fluent. It wasn’t like we drilled all the time. That would seem to be difficult to duplicate without being in the country. Not that it can’t be done. When I ask her how she got so good so fast, while after four years of studying Russian hard she says there are two reasons: 1) She is here and must learn it and everything she sees is in English and 2) She practices speaking all the time.

Curt

Curt

It’s great that you could move to Russia and immerse yourself - that’s the best way to go. But many don’t have that luxury, and can’t get more than 3 to 5 hours a week in a traditional classroom. When your exposure is limited, I do think some grammar can be helpful as a shortcut.

I love the idea of listening before worrying about spelling. When I started Irish a few years ago I was intimidated by the spelling, so I listened intensively for a month before I allowed myself to look at the book; so instead of asking “How on earth do you pronounce [impossibly long Irish word]?” it was “Ah, so that’s how you spell [word I was perfectly comfortable saying].” So it makes sense that would work with Russian too.

Donovan Nagel

Donovan Nagel

Thanks for chiming in, Curt. Looks like you have a handy YouTube channel too!

You’re right that overseas immersion is a luxury that not everyone can afford but just so everyone knows, I was actually working in Russia too - long hours - so I still had to “find time” for language learning in a sense.

Irish was/is the same for me. If you learn how to say something before actually learning to read it, learning to read it is actually much faster and easier later on. With the soft and hard letters in Russian, I started by skimming over them and just focusing on the audio until much later.

Judith

Judith

”E.g. “Tony’s book/The book of Tony’s.”

We know that ‘book’ is genitive here because we see ‘s’ or the word ‘of’.”

Did you make a deliberate mistake here :)? Tony should be in the genitive, and not the book.

Donovan Nagel

Donovan Nagel

Oops not deliberate. Well spotted!

Fixed it with a hopefully better example :)

Roman "shinkarom" Shinkarenko

Roman "shinkarom" Shinkarenko

(this comment is made only to receive follow-up comments in the inbox. it can be disregarded, unlike the previous one)

Benjamin

Benjamin

“I bought a new bookmark for my book.” – dative

I’ve been learning russian for years and I can’t see any dative.
If you say “I bought you a book”, book would be dative. (тебе)

Xenia

Xenia

NO!
i bough you a book,
you - тебе (dative) - to who? whom? i boought a book fro who?
a book - книгУ - what did i buy - a book (object->accusative)
there are 2 cases in this sentence

Roman "shinkarom" Shinkarenko

Roman "shinkarom" Shinkarenko

And now, Mr. Everything-is-Easy, tell me the verb победить in future tense 1st person singular, and the verb пылесосить in 1st person singular present tense.
(Tongue-in-cheek, of course)

oleg petrov

oleg petrov

The two words you pointed are extremes. And пылесосить is somewhat artificial. It is possible to say ПОБЕДЮ, though it is not a common use. Usually when it comes to the verb ПОБЕДИТЬ for 1st person future, Russian people use more complex word combination or specified synonims like “I will beat him (я его побью), or I shall defeat him (я его разобью) or I shall win (я выиграю).
”Пылесосить”-is a relatively new word, derived from the noun “пылесос” (a vacuum cleaner), which means “a dust in-sucker”. The verb in 1st person presnt & future is as “пылесошу” and “пропылесошу”.
Yet, I agree, it sounds funny and almost as awkward, as “to vacuumeclean”.

Natalie K.

Natalie K.

This is such an interesting post because it shows how we think about Russian in such different ways. Honestly, I found a lot of your logic very different and even confusing from the way I think about it. You’re not wrong, of course, as I know you definitely speak Russian! I think we learn in completely different ways, though.

Case in point: to learn the alphabet, I just brute-force memorized it. What I mean is that I went over it again and again until I knew it. Then I asked my professor to explain мягкий знак and твердый знак to me. Same with cases: I did a bunch of declension exercises until I developed an intuitive feel for it and then practiced speaking with people.

These differences don’t matter, though, because I think we both can agree on one thing. Русский язык – самый лучший язык в мире!!! ;)

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
© The Mezzofanti Guild, 2024. NAGEL PTY LTD. All Rights Reserved.
Join The Guild

Let Me Help You Learn Russian

  • Get my exclusive Russian content delivered straight to your inbox.
  • Learn about the best Russian language resources that I've personally test-driven.
  • Get insider tips for learning Russian.

RussianRussian

No spam. Ever.