- 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.
- 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
- > 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.
- 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.
by BXLE_1-1-BitIs1
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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.
by sublimefire
9 subcomments
- 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.
- I would really rather read his guide to learning English.
by vaskebjorn
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- How do russians differentiate between "Z3" and "33"? Font? Avoidance od names like "zone Z3" that could be read as "zone 33"?
by _DeadFred_
1 subcomments
- 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.
- After russian, other languages - georgian, hebrew, english seem reasonable. Especially hebrew.
Saying this as a native Russian speaker
by mettamage
6 subcomments
- [flagged]
by moralestapia
1 subcomments
- 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.
by syngrog66
2 subcomments
- I boycott all things Russian (where I can, easily) and so should all of you
- 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.
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