Thread: Who's afraid of Russian Nouns...? [me!] Русские существительные........

The other European languages are much more similar to each other than the Slavic languages and one thing that is new to me is the situation where you absolutely couldn't even guess what something might mean. Even accumulating a basic vocabular takes time!

That's a piece of news. Of course, Germanic languages are similar, but Basque, for example, is completely different. You know, I'm studying a Western European language (Irish) and it is not closer to English than Russian. Well, there are three big groups of Indo-European languages in Europe: Germanic, Romance and Slavic. There are also Baltic languages (Latvian and Lithvanian), which are close to Slavic, Greek, Albanian, Brythonic languages (Breton and Welsh) and Goidelic (Irish and Scottish Gaelic). These are all Indo-European. There are also Finno-Ugric languages (Hungarian, Estonian and Finnish) and Basque, which is an isolate. I-E languages of different groups differ approximately as Russian and English. Languages of different families (Hungarian and Basque) are completely different. You always need to study basic vocabulary, if you study a language from another group. When you studied French, didn't you have to learn basic vocabulary? There are much more similarities between English and Russian than you think. For example, Passive voice in both languages is formed with the verb "to be" and past passive participle.
Sorry, Hanna, that I'm always arguing with you.

Originally Posted by Marcus

That's a piece of news. (...)
Sorry, Hanna, that I'm always arguing with you.

(I think the expression is "that's news to me" - it's a US like expression though)

Anyway, no, no it's not problem to argue with me and you are right --- there are plenty of languages where I couldn't guess the meaning of a word either. Finnish, Hungarian, Greek...

I was talking about the big languages that people tend to study as a foreign language in school.
These language (for Europe) are (other than English) German, French, Spanish and Russian.

Out of these, French and English have a million words in common, and French grammar is only marginally harder than English, and more regular. German to me at least, is often very easy to guess because it is not very far removed from Swedish. Spanish has lots of words in common with French.... So it all goes round in a circle.

When I was in Romania, a lot of words were familiar from Spanish words that I knew. In the Netherlands a lot of words are similar to German and English, so even if I don't know a word of Dutch I can often understand signs etc anyway.

That's the sort of thing I'm talking about, but it doesn't work for me yet, in Russian.

I am sure a Russian speaker would be able to use this method in Poland, Bulgaria etc.

This also means that if you can sometimes make up words in another language and the other person will be able to figure out what you mean.