Thread: I am looking for real Russian friends

Privet I am new here. I am looking for real Russian friends ( not fakes ) because I had some bitter experiences for friends in the past I'm Mina. I am from Japan. I am teaching myself Russian, but I still can't speak Russian, because Russian is very difficult for me to learn. But fortunately I could find this wonderful Russian forum. I will believe that I will be able to master my Russian here

Well, if you are interested in learning Japanese, I can also help your Japanese, so please always ask me.

Thank you.

Welcome to the forum, Mina.

Mina, привет и тебе!
I know what you mean. At one point I could write and read English, but could not speak or understand spoken word. My advice would be to watch a lot of russian movies over and over. Listen to audio tapes, over and over. And do not hesitate to ask your questions.

Fakes??! Do you mean fake internet Russians?!?!? Maybe you encountered Dogboy in one of his "I'm a Russian-Kazakh gangster" phases.

I don't know Pravit. How is Kabul this time of the year? Look see and do tell!

I like the avatar Mina

err not as cool as Lindzi's though (we don't want to have another one of those threads )

Mina, Japanese is phonetically close to Russian, much closer than English is, when I heard Japanese people spoke Russian they had almost no accent. Russian should not be hard to you.

Originally Posted by waxwing

I like the avatar Mina

err not as cool as Lindzi's though (we don't want to have another one of those threads )

Yeah, her avatar is cool, but mine is cooler. Credit goes to Josh Kirby for the surly little sketch.

(my avatar pwns you, etc etc)

Originally Posted by JJ

Mina, Japanese is phonetically close to Russian, much closer than English is, when I heard Japanese people spoke Russian they had almost no accent. Russian should not be hard to you.

REALLY?!?!?!? How is this, JJ? I would think all those consonant clusters would pose a bit of a problem to native Japanese speakers.

Maybe it depends on the people, Pravit. Those Japanese people could have been speaking Russian for some time. But I don't know anything about Japanese so I shouldn't say anything...

Of course it depends on the people, but JJ was referring to Japanese in general. Although I only have very limited experience with Japanese, it has a lot of...what do you call it...oh, if only I knew some linguistic terms. Syllables like "ka", "da", "na", and so on, and words made out of them, for example "tabemono", "gohan", "atarashii", and so on. A lot of Japanese speakers(at least the ones I've heard) had problems pronouncing words with more than one consonant together. Considering Russian has some consonant clusters that challenge even English speakers, I can only imagine how (most) Japanese would handle it.

I don't know much about the Japanese language. Aren't Asian languages quite different from Russian? Well, if it is I thnk that is very interesting.

Originally Posted by Pravit

REALLY?!?!?!? How is this, JJ? I would think all those consonant clusters would pose a bit of a problem to native Japanese speakers.

REALLY-REALLY! The consonants (i mean the hard consonants) and vowels are much closer to the Russian counterparts than to the English. I can discribe the Japanese accsent as ... hm... like they're speaking vowels faster and they're pronounceing consonants are a little bit harder but this pronouncatinon in times more understandable than English is.