Thread: Is studying Russian the right choice? (serious replies plz)

He likes it there? That's a new one. Or does he keep some blog where he complains about everything that isn't the same as in his home country? Anyhow, good luck if you actually do go to China.

вообще имхо от русского сплошной fun и никакой пользы причем fun такого толка, что не дай бог никакому почтенному европейцу

автору ветки это читать не обязательно

Originally Posted by Aleph

Learning languages for a weird reason is anything but weird on this forum..

SideNote. Having some spare time I've recently started learning French for no obvious reason and when I was thinking which language to learn - Spanish, French or German somehow Spanish seemed least appealing to me . So , is it something about Spanish or is it just me?

In the United States where I live a lot of people get turned off on Spanish because they resent the large Mexican population. It's actually pretty useful for me to know. I adore taking it (currently in highschool) and it inspired me to try to learn Russian. It's a good foreign language to get started on because I hear it's fairly simple compared to a lot of other languages, that and it's phonetic.

Originally Posted by Pravit

He likes it there? That's a new one. Or does he keep some blog where he complains about everything that isn't the same as in his home country? Anyhow, good luck if you actually do go to China.

China was a complete disaster for me for the two days i was there

That's the spirit!

well he didn't like it when he just got there, but he does like it now

The weird thing is that all the expats I know of generally adore Thailand but talk about having a terrible time in China. There are even several more-or-less famous singers in Thailand that were originally from Europe.

Know why I started studying Russian?

I had just finished my junior year in high school and my best ham radio buddy, a year older than me, told me he was going to take Russian his first year in college, and why didn't I take Russian too, so then we would be able to talk to each other in Russian over the air. having completed 3 years of Spanish with straight A's and already signed up for my 4th year, naive me said "Why not?" instead of "Say what??!!"

So there I was a senior, in 4th year Spanish and 1st year Russian. Fortunately had a good teacher, a recently immigrated ленинградец, who would bring his accordion to class and teach us songs. Right away my Spanish teacher mentioned smth about how my accent was getting worse. It was all those unstressed o's I think.

Next topic.

Found these interesting bits in my mail and on the web today:

Categories of Difficulty of Second Language for Americans
(i.e., Native Language = English)

Russian is a category 3 language (requiring more than 700 hours of classroom instruction to attain advanced level proficiency), whereas French and Spanish are category 1 and German category 2 languages. Students of French, German and Spanish often have substantial learning experiences before coming to college; with the elimination of many Russian programs on the high school level in the US, the same cannot be said of college-level students of Russian.

https://depts.washington.edu/llc/main/p ... tands.html

1 = Category 1 languages (e.g., Spanish, French, Swedish)
2 = Category 2 languages (e.g., Gerrman)
3 = Category 3 languages (e.g., Russian)
4 = Category 4 languages (e.g., Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic)
L = Latin (and other classical languages)

Swedish, anyone?

A Ceiling Effect in Traditional Classroom Foreign Language Instruction: Data from Russian. Benjamin Rifkin, MLJ 3/2005, vol. 89, pp.3-18.

ABSTRACT
This article compares previous language gain studies in foreign languages with new data on language gain in the instructed second language acquisition of Russian. The acquisition of listening, reading, speaking, and writing proficiency shows a significant correlation not only with hours of classroom instruction in immersion and nonimmersion settings, but also with grammatical competence. The data suggest that there is a ceiling effect in traditional classroom foreign language instruction.

Im going to try to take summer courses in Russian at a different university than the one ill be going to (Russian isnt offered at my college).


anyway, i did read an article a while ago about how one elementry school in Alaska is teaching russian to 1st graders.

I also get Russian at my study. I study european studies. Here they think russian is an important language to learn. Last year a few eastern-european countries have joined the eu, so russia is getting closer and closer, especially when it comes to economic relations. I think it's definitely not useless to study russian! Just look at how big this country is!

My advice: don't listen to the people who don't know anything about Russia and go study what you would like to do!!

Originally Posted by Aleph

Learning languages for a weird reason is anything but weird on this forum..

SideNote. Having some spare time I've recently started learning French for no obvious reason and when I was thinking which language to learn - Spanish, French or German somehow Spanish seemed least appealing to me . So , is it something about Spanish or is it just me?

Yea, same with me. I have no desire to ever learn Spanish. It just doesn't appeal to me. I take French and German at school; I don't take them for a career advancment just because I am interested in the literature and the culture. I think in order to learn a language you have to be truly interested in their culture and history. If that's not the case then you will, in my opinion, a difficult time mastering somthing in which you are not facinated.


Actually, Sylvie, I think there is a greater chance of me turning into a bird than Russia wanting to join the EU.

I like your attitude, Nikolai!

Originally Posted by Pravit

No "should"s or "shouldn't"s, man. The best language learning comes when you actually care about the language you're trying to learn. And although с. Хреново has a large Spanish-speaking population, there has never been a single situation where I actually wished I knew Spanish. But even if there was, I probably still wouldn't learn it.

I'm glad someone said it. I live in central Florida and Spanish would be a very useful language to know due to the influence of puerto rican, dominican, and cuban cultures. However, I have been drawn to the Russian language and culture for quite some time and recently have begun to learn it. I have some background in Latin so it doesn't appear to be too difficult, but that is probably because I have a genuine interest in learning it. Think of a new language as a new relationship - money will not buy love. Learn the language because you want to know how to speak it and not for any other reason.

Originally Posted by GKnight

Think of a new language as a new relationship - money will not buy love. Learn the language because you want to know how to speak it and not for any other reason.

Exactly. I'm finding Russian "easy" to learn because I'm very much motivated, and encouraged by the fact that I'm able to get most of the difficult sounds down correct from the beginning, and there's a lot of lightbulbs going off in my mind.

I'm the kind of person who needs to read material several times before I truly understand it, and that is in fact benefiting me much so as it does help in memorizing aspects of the language, for instance, the present tense of the verbs, congugations I and II. If you throw an nominative pronoun at me, I can now sort of roll off the matching ending of the verb. And the verb if that is thrown at me as well (at least those that I know at this point).

Sometimes I even dream of going back to school to get a second degree, this time in Russian . . .

Originally Posted by JonasL

I don't know whether Russian will be that easy either, since you have dativ,akkusativ,genitiv,nominativ and 2 others
plus the cyrillic alphabet

If you've already learned English and French to a good standard, then I don't think that Russian will be much more difficult. The Cyrillic alphabet is quite easy to learn and is very consistent - a lot more consistent than English or French.

As for the cases, they decline quite regularly (most of the time) and it's pretty easy to understand when to use which one. Verbs aren't too much hassle, and adjectives are easy, so I think you should be fine.

I think that the Russian language appears more scary to people who haven't learnt it than it really is. Once you get into it, you shouldn't have any problems at all ...

... and if you do, of course, you can always come to us for help!

I think French actually has very consistent spelling(much more so than English). People just get turned off by the accents acutes and graves and apostrophes.

The important thing, IMO, if you already know one foreign language, try to get out of comparing Russian to a language you already know. Everyone loves doing it, because they can feel themselves at least an "expert" in the one language they know and compare to it(well, since it's this way in French...), but trust me, it's best to just treat Russian as a seperate language, despite any similarities you may see at first.