Quote Originally Posted by Nichole. View Post
I just see Russian grammar as too overloaded.
You notice all the things Russian has but English doesn't have, and that makes it seem overloaded. I'm sure the same is true vice versa: looking at English with Russian eyes, one could ask why there are so bloody many different tenses, what articles are for and why the writing is so damn different from the spoken word.

Looking at both languages from my viewpoint as a native speaker of German I could ask why English needs a progressive aspect to its verbs and what's so hot about perfective verbs in Russian. I could say that the English lack of cases is just as insane as having six. Four is the truth.

But all that is moot. Different languages have different mechanisms, and the hard parts of each language lie in the mechanisms which are unlike the ones of your native language. English happens to be on one end of the scale of Indo-European languages, the end which has dropped most of the inflecting grammatival features (along with Persian, I'm told). On the other end you have heavily inflected languages like Russian, but even those have come quite far, as the process of losing grammatical inflection is going on in all languages of the family. If you wanted to learn Sanskrit, the oldest written Indo-European language, you'd have to deal with up to 792 distinct verb forms per verb. The worst verb in English has eight (be).

You should try to accept each grammatical feature as a given and try to deal with them one at a time. I think that the most complicated and weird features of a language are what makes the language intriguing.