# Forum Other Languages English for Russians - Изучаем английский язык Learn English - Грамматика, переводы, словарный запас  Helping to learn English

## B_Knotty

Just thought I would pass on this tip from a Russian who now lives in Canada.  When she first moved here, she found that watching movies was a really great way to understand English.  Actors are portraying emotions which everyone can understand, and when you associate that with their words, it aids your comprehension.

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## Anton Kuratnik

Yep, definitely. When I came to US, I watched TV all day long. At first I couldn't understand a thing, but by the time I had to go to school, I could already understand English pretty well. I couldn't speak it well enough, but still...

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## raskolnik

i met a Russian last year who claimed he learnt English from watching 5 years worth of tv. the problem i find is the quality of russian tv on the internet is so bad i can only stand around 30mins of it   ::

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## z80

The quality of Australian tv is so bad I'm supprized any one can watch it !!

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## Rahul

> Just thought I would pass on this tip from a Russian who now lives in Canada.  When she first moved here, she found that watching movies was a really great way to understand English.  Actors are portraying emotions which everyone can understand, and when you associate that with their words, it aids your comprehension.

 I do that for learning French. Only problem sometimes is that people speak too fast to be understood by me because I'm still relatively new to the language. However, when there's closed captioning, that's less of a problem.

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## mike

To z80:  With quality programs like Ocean Girl and Round the Twist exported to the United States I cannot believe you are telling the truth.

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## Dogboy182

i dont know how anybody could learn another language from just watching TV i have rented a few russian movies, and i can barely understand anything, probly cuz its spoken... but still... i have seen brother one, and two, some movie i forget what its called, its about some girl who is a detective i think... she investigates the murder of some guy who shocked some girl with some shocker thing, and then broke her neck when she was passed out and made it look like she fell off her stool. i dunno much after that lol, and i have seen DMB. andi couldn't fallow that one either... how are u suposed to learn from just listening? if i could do that i would just order the russian channel, its like 7.99 a month....

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## mike

I think it has a lot to do with relating to what's going on with what's being said.  I think it works with English because there is just so much English-speaking culture broadcast and sold all over the world that it's easier to do (not to mention English is just a much easier language to learn than most others).  It probably isn't as effective with any other language since their influence is not as widespread and there are many more rules and conjugations you have to learn.  I think watching Russian television for five years would only be as effective as studying Russian for one year as far as vocabulary and grammatical comprehension go.  Of course, watching Russian television _and_ studying Russian will be more beneficial than both.  What do they show on the Russian channel?  Is it an actual station based in Russia or an American network?

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## Rahul

Does anyone know of any international or Canadian channels with Russian programs?

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## A

> Does anyone know of any international or Canadian channels with Russian programs?

 In Toronto on multicultural channes OMNI1 and OMNI2, you can catch up some glimpse. But the content can be very dubious.
What kills me - why you studying Russian?
You Americans and British have nothing to care about, seriously. 
The only way to learn a language is to live in it. The earlier the better. Generally, English is more flexible and innovative and productive than Russian.
To me, get English - especially the spoken part of it - to the level of my former Russian is the same as to get to the Moon. Sometimes I think, "What a stupid language", mainly when I listen to people with a bad diction. And there's a LOT of them.

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## piehunt

I asked my tutor the other night for her opinion on learning a language from TV. She laughed and said нет!!  I have to agree with her.

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## Sinister_Cleric

I think it IS possible to learn a language from TV for many reasons the main one being is, infants watch there perents and try to mimic the language; they don't get tutored untill they know enough of the language to understand what there being tought; so because of this I think you can learn from watchnig a lot of TV... but it's a very slow meathod of learning it

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## z80

Oh god mick, they don' show ocean girl over there do they? 
Round the Twist (The old ones) where good, the new ones are not so good.  
As long as you don't get home and a away or things like that.... How embarasing for australia.

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## A

piehunt,
I don't no how to express it, really. Is it that hard to get yourself that if you wanna learn language, and learn not for marks but "for your soul" - as the Russians would say - you should learn it at every opportunity, sitting on the toilet - pardon if it works towards your goal - included?

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## Sinister_Cleric

> Oh god mick, they don' show ocean girl over there do they?

 Ocean girl is austrailan?....that explains why it is crap. well thats just my opinion anyway.

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## mike

They used to.  There was another bad one, but I forget the name.  It was these Australian and English teens who were "punks," but so obviously from the 80s.

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## raskolnik

wasnt austraila reponsible for 'the tribe' aswell   ::

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## z80

I don't know the trib, but then again, I don't watch tv too much.

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## Vyacheslav(English)

> (not to mention English is just a much easier language to learn than most others)

 How is it easier to learn english. I grew up here i america and i hate english. You have to worry about perfect phasing, subject-verb agreement, prepositions. Of course, once you've gotten rid of all that stuff it's just words. We can't leave out words like in Spanish. The onlything close to leaving a word out is the understood you. (Fror people who don't know what i'm talking about with "the understood you" it's like this. In the sentance "Go shut the door" the subject is not the door but "you". It is simpley understood that the sentance is directed to you.)  ::   ::   ::   ::   ::

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## V

> (not to mention English is just a much easier language to learn than most others)   How is it easier to learn english. I grew up here i america and i hate english. You have to worry about perfect phasing, subject-verb agreement, prepositions. Of course, once you've gotten rid of all that stuff it's just words. We can't leave out words like in Spanish. The onlything close to leaving a word out is the understood you. (Fror people who don't know what i'm talking about with "the understood you" it's like this. In the sentance "Go shut the door" the subject is not the door but "you". It is simpley understood that the sentance is directed to you.)

 Name one language except Swedish, Norwegian and Danish that doesn't have subject-verb agreement? Or one that doesn't have prepositions? 
Edit: The two difficult parts of English are spelling and, to an extent, pronunciation.

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## ekalin

> Or one that doesn't have prepositions?

 Japanese. It has _post_positions.  ::

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## V

Big difference

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## scotcher

Ahhh, but those postpositions are in the form of particles, which are an intrinsic part of the Japanese language and contain much more scope than just their postpositional use, as well as being a lignuistic oddity not found in any other language (so far as I have been lead to believe anyway).

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## carlalingua

Hi I am new and I feel like jumping into this conversation.  I speak Spanish pretty well and I watch the Spanish HBO sometimes and I found I can understand the movies pretty well when they are dubbed into Spanish.  It must be something about the dubbing process that makes it easier to understand.  A movie in orignal Spanish  is harder though and I have to pay attention much more intensely.  So my suggestion would be to find movies originally in Russian dubbed into English.  Start there and then go to movies originally made in English.

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## jejik

Espesially those films that you know by heart  ::  Иван Васильевич, Свадьба в малиновке, все фильмы с Шуриком + у каждого есть еще и свои.  ::

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## igorfa100

> (not to mention English is just a much easier language to learn than most others)   How is it easier to learn english. I grew up here i america and i hate english. You have to worry about perfect phasing, subject-verb agreement, prepositions. Of course, once you've gotten rid of all that stuff it's just words. We can't leave out words like in Spanish. The onlything close to leaving a word out is the understood you. (Fror people who don't know what i'm talking about with "the understood you" it's like this. In the sentance "Go shut the door" the subject is not the door but "you". It is simpley understood that the sentance is directed to you.)

 the subject verb agreement in English is almost non existent , esp in the simple past tense, for all the other tenses all you have ot learn is the s ending for the third person singular in the simpel present and how to "congugate" do have and to be in all the tenses cuz these are used to form analitical verb forms like perfec, progressive and perfect progressive and that's abt it, the only language that is probably even easier than english to learn would be esperanto but it's a planned language and it has no exceptions, even though its verbs do conjugate and words agree with each other much more than in english so you can toss them around in a sentence the way you like

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## Aaa

English is rough for a few reasons: 
Veyr strict word order
Many irregular verb forms
Spelling is completely inconsistent
Single negatives only  
However, the *grammar* is much simpler than most languages.  Conjugation of verbs is almost nonexistent.  Learn 3rd-sing. and present part. and past part. and you're done!!!  Then all you need are the complementary verbs, and you can conjugate anything! 
Second, besides pronouns and plurals, there is absolutely no noun conjugation or gender!!!  Russian has six or more cases and 4 declensions, Spanish has two (or 3) genders. 
"The thing wrote a thing to the other thing with the thing on the thing's thing."  Try that in Russian without a month of intense study! 
Third: with the exception of "to", most of our prepositions are straightforward, and do not change in meaning from phrases to phrase.  It's easy to make strict rules for preposition use in English.   
I've heard that Swedish is fairly easy to learn, kind of like English with consistent spelling.  Can anyone confirm?

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## igorfa100

> English is rough for a few reasons: 
> Veyr strict word order
> Many irregular verb forms
> Spelling is completely inconsistent
> Single negatives only 
> I've heard that Swedish is fairly easy to learn, kind of like English with consistent spelling.  Can anyone confirm?

  I heard the opposite abt Swedish, that it's more like German and German is almost like Russian, as for the reasons why english may not be that easy for some people that you outlined, I'd say there are certain limitations on the word order but you can't say it's strickt like you can say I've never seen that man over there before, or you can say never before have I see that man over there, or you can say that man over there, I've never seen him before, so there is a certain degree of freedome to how you arrange words in sentences in english.
 The number of irregular verbs is not that great, plus some of them are kind of dying out, like in the UK you might still hear someone say she leant against a tree, or  I learnt a lot of new words but I take it the standard US would be she leaned against a tree and I learned a lot of new wrods.
 spelling , true it's a nightmare
 signle negatives only? well some people seem not to know abt it thats probably why they say things like it ain't not good and she ain't never coming back and hit the road Jack and dontcha come back no more
and the pros are obvious.

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## carlalingua

> English is rough for a few reasons: 
> Veyr strict word order
> Many irregular verb forms
> Spelling is completely inconsistent
> Single negatives only  
> However, the *grammar* is much simpler than most languages.  Conjugation of verbs is almost nonexistent.  Learn 3rd-sing. and present part. and past part. and you're done!!!  Then all you need are the complementary verbs, and you can conjugate anything! 
> Second, besides pronouns and plurals, there is absolutely no noun conjugation or gender!!!  Russian has six or more cases and 4 declensions, Spanish has two (or 3) genders. 
> "The thing wrote a thing to the other thing with the thing on the thing's thing."  Try that in Russian without a month of intense study! 
> Third: with the exception of "to", most of our prepositions are straightforward, and do not change in meaning from phrases to phrase.  It's easy to make strict rules for preposition use in English.   
> I've heard that Swedish is fairly easy to learn, kind of like English with consistent spelling.  Can anyone confirm?

 Your example sentence does not make sense to me as an English speaker.  Can you rewrite with real nouns instead of "thing" so I can get the gist of what you are saying. 
I think English is a very difficult language because we have so many words and many more nuances in our language that does not exist in other languages.  You really have to learn almost each word one at a time and our words can be nouns and verbs without any changes in spelling. 
What time is it?
I am going to run the 50 yard dash will you time me? 
Also English speakers are more tolerant of bad English than speakers of other languages which make it seem that English is not as difficult. 
I am in the baby stages of Russian but even with the declensions and ending changes I think it is easier than English.

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## Линдзи

I think that English is an easy language to become comprehensible in, and a very, very difficult language to master.  You don't have to know all of English's ridiculous spellings and verb forms in order to be understood, which is good, because when the past tense of "feel" is "felt" but the past tense of "reel" is "reeled"...well...it comes down to memorization, and it's hard to memorize every single verb you'll be using.  Luckily, if you said "I feeled sick yesterday" every English speaker would understand you.  You'd be wrong, but understood.  And understanding is what really counts, right?

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## igorfa100

> Originally Posted by Aaa  English is rough for a few reasons: 
> Veyr strict word order
> Many irregular verb forms
> Spelling is completely inconsistent
> Single negatives only  
> However, the *grammar* is much simpler than most languages.  Conjugation of verbs is almost nonexistent.  Learn 3rd-sing. and present part. and past part. and you're done!!!  Then all you need are the complementary verbs, and you can conjugate anything! 
> Second, besides pronouns and plurals, there is absolutely no noun conjugation or gender!!!  Russian has six or more cases and 4 declensions, Spanish has two (or 3) genders. 
> "The thing wrote a thing to the other thing with the thing on the thing's thing."  Try that in Russian without a month of intense study! 
> Third: with the exception of "to", most of our prepositions are straightforward, and do not change in meaning from phrases to phrase.  It's easy to make strict rules for preposition use in English.   
> ...

  it's probably because you're in the baby stages of Russian that you think english has more nuances than other languages, plus to a native speaker their own language will always seem to be more difficult to learn than any other after they get asked a few questions abt their language by foreigners who are studying it, natives are proficient at making the right choices in concrete contexts but they're almost always at a loss when it comes to generalizations abt their own langauge so it seems to them that there are only nuances and exceptions in their language, like elsewhere in this forum I wrote that russian only consists of exceptions and I was being honest whenever I was typing that because this is the way russian looks to me from the inside and to me english seems easier to learn than russian cause I learned to speak russian over a period of several years by endless repetition and imitation and listening to it being spoken and it took me more than two years before I was able to put together my first decent sentence in Russian, a sentence other people could understand that is, and it only took me  a few minute's worth of reading an english grammar book before I was able to say my name is Igor which is a good english sentence. i have at one point had to face this problem where I had to learn one word at a time because of the crazy spelling, I'd come across a new word reading a text and I would guess its meaning from the context but I had to look it up in a dictionary anyway cuz I had no clue as to how to say it the right way. This nightmare went on for a few weeks until I found a really good book that had a very good course on how to read english, the course took up something like 100 pages or a bit more but aftet completing it I was able to get the pronoinciation right in 70-75% of cases, in English, just like in Russian the key to correct pronounciation is the stress, if you know where to stress the word you'll get it right and just like in Russian there's no rule abt where to put the stress but unlike russian english the majority of words tend to be short, one - two syllables. The thing abt one and the same word acting as different parts of speech in different context (the techincal term for this is conversion) is actually no problem in fact it even makes things easier sometimes, at least it certainly does make for more meaning getting fit in shorter sentences which is one of the coolest things abt english. Tolerance of bad language is present in Russian also come to Moscow and check out the Cherkisovskyi market, there's a lot of tolerance of poor Russian in that place cause most of the vendors are non native speakers. I think the biggest diffculty with any language is not the language itself but how people speak it, lots of people who are very proficient at reading texts, or listening to news bulletins or e-mail communication cease to understand anything when it comes to following simple short dialog exchanges like in the kitchen or in movies, let alone police or fire brigade radio exchanges.

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## VendingMachine

No, it isn't possible to learn a language by watching TV. This is a popular misconception, but alas science has evidence to the contrary. Hang on, wait a minute, but how do babies learn? The answer is simple - babies pick up their mother tongue because adults interact with them. Do you Brits acquire an American accent from watching American films on your TV? Nope. Why? Well, do you talk to your telly?  Those who do: I'd like to see a transcript of your recent meaningful conversation.  ::  (tellies which take voice commands don't count, so don't post conversations such as 'Hallmark' - 'Yessir!'   ::   ::   ::  ) 
What watching TV can do is improve your listening comprehension skills. That Russian guy in Canada, I bet he wasn't just sitting on his backside watching TV all day, I bet he was out and putting what he had heard to practice. 
I have been watching satellite TV in English for the last 5 or so years and yes, it has helped me a lot, but if I hadn't gone to English language classes and done a lot of formal grammar and vocabulary work I wouldn't be able to enjoy English language programming to the full now. 
So here's my advice to anyone thinking about subscribing to Russian channels or getting video tapes: by all means do so, but don't think that that alone will be enough - you'll still have to work on your grammar, vocabulary, speaking, etc.

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## Aaa

> Originally Posted by Aaa  English is rough for a few reasons: 
> Veyr strict word order
> Many irregular verb forms
> Spelling is completely inconsistent
> Single negatives only  
> However, the *grammar* is much simpler than most languages.  Conjugation of verbs is almost nonexistent.  Learn 3rd-sing. and present part. and past part. and you're done!!!  Then all you need are the complementary verbs, and you can conjugate anything! 
> Second, besides pronouns and plurals, there is absolutely no noun conjugation or gender!!!  Russian has six or more cases and 4 declensions, Spanish has two (or 3) genders. 
> "The thing wrote a thing to the other thing with the thing on the thing's thing."  Try that in Russian without a month of intense study! 
> Third: with the exception of "to", most of our prepositions are straightforward, and do not change in meaning from phrases to phrase.  It's easy to make strict rules for preposition use in English.   
> ...

 
"The girl wrote a letter to the boy with the pencil on the teacher's desk."  In Russian, you would have to use all six declensions, plus you would have at least 2 genders!!  _I think English is a very difficult language because we have so many words and many more nuances in our language that does not exist in other languages._ 
This is true!!  English has, for most nouns and adjectives, two different words for every one word in other languages.  This is due to our double roots: Germanic and Romance.  It's also due to our unhesitancy to borrow additional words when necessary, unlike French. 
I agree, this makes English harder to MASTER, because the vocabulary is double.  But it does not make it harder to speak English.  It also gives English writers an advantage: our language is more descriptive, and carries more nuances within written words.  Other languages may reflect these nuances with stress.  _"words can be nouns and verbs without any changes in spelling"_ 
Exactly!!  It's simpler that way.  The only hard part ( mentioned before) is that you have to locate the word in the sentence.  And our location rules are strict, so it's easy.

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## VendingMachine

Whaaaaaa'? English has more nuances than Russian? Dream on! I can assure you that as you're making progress in Russian you will be finding more and more nuances. In fact, I don't think it's possible to compare the two languages at all. IMHO only a balanced bilingual with a PhD in linguistics is qualified enough to make such sweeping generalisations. And how many balanced bilinguals are there on this forum? Zilch. (Note: the word *balanced* here is the key. The thing is that the vast majority of people who consider themselves bilingual aren't balanced bilinguals - one language always dominates. In fact, balanced bilinguals can exist only in test tubes. The social environment around us will always insure that one language becomes dominant.) 
A bit off topic: 
They say that it's easier to master languages which are closely related to your own. Well, I tried to learn Polish once. I thought my native Russian would help. It didn't. It even made things harder. While I could understand short simple dialogs in Polish because it basically sounds like broken Russian with a strange accent (any Poles here, no offence, I know you extract the urine out of Russian too), when I got to do advanced stuff I realised that my Russian was constantly getting under my feet. I was constantly making wrong assumptions about words and grammar and producing words and grammar patterns that didn't exist. If I hadn't known any Russian I would've learnt those things the "honest" way and wouldn't've had any problems.

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## Aaa

> Whaaaaaa'? English has more nuances than Russian? Dream on! I can assure you that as you're making progress in Russian you will be finding more and more nuances. In fact, I don't think it's possible to compare the two languages at all. IMHO only a balanced bilingual with a PhD in linguistics is qualified enough to make such sweeping generalisations. And how many balanced bilinguals are there on this forum? Zilch. (Note: the word *balanced* here is the key. The thing is that the vast majority of people who consider themselves bilingual aren't balanced bilinguals - one language always dominates. In fact, balanced bilinguals can exist only in test tubes. The social environment around us will always insure that one language becomes dominant.) 
> A bit off topic: 
> They say that it's easier to master languages which are closely related to your own. Well, I tried to learn Polish once. I thought my native Russian would help. It didn't. It even made things harder. While I could understand short simple dialogs in Polish because it basically sounds like broken Russian with a strange accent (any Poles here, no offence, I know you extract the urine out of Russian too), when I got to do advanced stuff I realised that my Russian was constantly getting under my feet. I was constantly making wrong assumptions about words and grammar and producing words and grammar patterns that didn't exist. If I hadn't known any Russian I would've learnt those things the "honest" way and wouldn't've had any problems.

 I never said English has more nuances than Russian, or any other language.  We just have more WORDS, which allows for more WRITTEN nuances with respect to the meaning of an individual word. 
Per Denning and Leben, this is the rough count of base words in some common languages: 
English:  460,000
German: 200,000
French: 150,000
Russian: 130,000 
Note that this doesn't include endings, such as the Russian declensions.  To confirm this, note that the major unabridged dictionaries in English have well over 400,000 entries.  Are there Russian dictionaries with that many entries??  
English is also very efficient.  Look at the "Rosetta Stone" of directions on any internationally marketed product.  Count the words in English vs. any other language.  We have less.  Why? 
Because we freely allow creation of new words as necessary.  Note that the English word count well-exceeds that of French & German combined.  That's because we make up words every day.  Software, hardware, hatchback, antilock, autoimmune, normalcy, inbox, email, snailmail, catch-22, scrunchy, binky, microwave, downsize, outsource, mallrat, nerd, laserjet, buckyball, microbrew, rent-a-cop, port-a-john, jumpstart, minivan.  Many other languages require two words, and won't merge them to make a new meaning. 
Plus, we allow adjectives at will.  A "baby-changing station" in English is "a station for changing diapers of babies" in many other languages.  "Antilock brakes" become "brakes with a system to prevent locking". 
English is horrible to spell, and restrictive in sentence form, to the point of stifling certain logical constructions.  However, it makes up for this in efficiency of words, and a much-larger vocabulary than most languages out there.

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## mike

> Many other languages require two words, and won't merge them to make a new meaning.

 And many others will.  In Finnish you can make an entire sentence (subject + verb + direct object) out of one word.  In Esperanto I could basically just keep adding prefixes and suffixes to a root until I had a very, very, very specific (and very, very, very long) verb (or noun or adjective or adverb or whatever). 
And do I even want to know what the hell a binky is?

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## VendingMachine

> I never said English has more nuances than Russian, or any other language.  We just have more WORDS, which allows for more WRITTEN nuances with respect to the meaning of an individual word.

 I never said you did. And more words you don't have because it doesn't matter how many words there are in dictionaries, what counts is how many words an educated native speaker knows. Now, to suggest that a native speaker of English can operate more words than a native speaker of Russian or German or French or Dutch etc, would be simply preposterous. Average educated native speakers of all languages know something in the order of 20,000 words.    

> Per Denning and Leben, this is the rough count of base words in some common languages: 
> English:  460,000
> German: 200,000
> French: 150,000
> Russian: 130,000 
> Note that this doesn't include endings, such as the Russian declensions.  To confirm this, note that the major unabridged dictionaries in English have well over 400,000 entries.  Are there Russian dictionaries with that many entries??

 Well, from what I remember my old Ozhegov Russian monolingual dictionary had something like 600,000 of base words and there are lots of words that we use every day that you couldn't find in it....   ::  But again, what does this say? See my comment above. 
The thing is that English has a long-standing tradition of including mainstream dialect and slang words into dictionaries which we hardly ever do. You lot a better at compiling dictionaries, I agree, and this makes you jump to conclusions about other languages.    

> English is also very efficient.  Look at the "Rosetta Stone" of directions on any internationally marketed product.  Count the words in English vs. any other language.  We have less.  Why?

 Not always... But generally yes. But still in most cases that's because of poor quality Russian translation. I have always been able to edit the Russian translation to make it noticeably shorter than the English original   ::      

> Because we freely allow creation of new words as necessary.  Note that the English word count well-exceeds that of French & German combined.  That's because we make up words every day.  Software, hardware, hatchback, antilock, autoimmune, normalcy, inbox, email, snailmail, catch-22, scrunchy, binky, microwave, downsize, outsource, mallrat, nerd, laserjet, buckyball, microbrew, rent-a-cop, port-a-john, jumpstart, minivan.  Many other languages require two words, and won't merge them to make a new meaning.

 So do we - we're inventing new words all the time. Not to mention the power of diminutive and whatcha call'em what do the opposite suffixes in Russian. (I bet of all other Indo-European languages only Afrikaans can rival Russian in this respect and only due to the fact that they can add such suffixes to verbs and other parts of speech, not only nouns and adjectives). Now, can English boast such a powerful mechanism? Alas, English can't even compete with Dutch and Plattdeutsch in this respect.   

> Plus, we allow adjectives at will.  A "baby-changing station" in English is "a station for changing diapers of babies" in many other languages.  "Antilock brakes" become "brakes with a system to prevent locking".

 I bet in languages like German and Danish a "baby-changing station" will actually be *one* word. As for "antilock brakes" I need to check this with my neighbour - I believe the last time we spoke he used a short monosyllabic word for them.....   

> English is horrible to spell, and restrictive in sentence form, to the point of stifling certain logical constructions.  However, it makes up for this in efficiency of words, and a much-larger vocabulary than most languages out there.

 I'm afraind this is wishful thinking. There isn't a word in English for which there is no Russian equivalent or shortcut and vice versa. All European languages have equal power of expression. 
A bit of an off-topic: this may come as a shock to you, but there are dialects in Russian where they use *articles* (sic!). You won't read about this in any textbook I bet. Most native speakers, however, don't know about this either. These articles are a bit like in Scandinavian languages - they are added to words instead of preceeding them.

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## mike

What are the articles used?

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## Aaa

> I'm afraind this is wishful thinking. There isn't a word in English for which there is no Russian equivalent or shortcut and vice versa. All European languages have equal power of expression.

 Only learning Russian now, so I can't say for them, 
BUT, with respect to *Spanish* vs. English, English has way more words, hands down.  In many cases, two English words translate directly to only one Spanish word.  The average English speaker uses more different words than the average Spanish speaker because MORE WORDS ARE AVAILABLE. 
This doesn't mean that Spanish speakers are any less expressive, it just means that they convey the same meaning using fewer words, or by using combinations of words to express what in English is done with a single word. 
For example, there is no word in Spanish for "toes".  Weird, huh?  But it's true.  They convey exactly the same meaning with the phrase "dedos del pie", which literally means "fingers of the foot".  Same goes for toenail, it is "fingernail of the foot". 
Plus, we steal words from Spanish and give them secondary meanings in English.  In Spanish, "mesa" is table, or a table-like geologic structure.  In English, "mesa" only means the geologic structure, and "mesa-like" means shaped like a mesa, as opposed to "table-like", meaning shaped like a literal table.  Poof!  Spanish has one word, we have two. 
So in Spanish, "a toe-like structure" would be a "una estructura como un dedo del pie". 
They make do with less words, by generating phrases to accomodate.  English, OTOH, just steals new words: schadenfreude, RSVP, je ne sais quois, smorgasboard, shlep, vamoose, mesa, fjord, duvet, fleur-de-lis, maize.

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## Pravit

someone mentioned dialects of russian that use articles. which? 
also, if you'll notice, almost all langauges that have had some contact with each other will "steal" words from one another.  i noticed in a lot of languages they felt the need to say some form of "hello" when using a telephone even if they wouldn't use it in ordinary greetings. plus all the new technology words are usually "stolen" from english. "fad" words from english are often used as well, other miscellaneous words you will see pop up...in german and japanese especially you will see a lot of 'loan-words' from english.

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## V

Loan words... or a lack of them: isn't there some eastern European language (some Baltic language perhaps?) where the word for computer literally translates as "guesser"?

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## Zeus

> I never said English has more nuances than Russian, or any other language.  We just have more WORDS, which allows for more WRITTEN nuances with respect to the meaning of an individual word.

 Don't forget Russian can make words joining them together, adding suffixes and prefixes - and they rarely appear in dictionaries, unless they have a new distinct meaning. Meanwhile, all these suffixes etc. add nuances. Two prefixes (like in English 'reinforced') and three suffixes (not counting endings) are quite common in Russian. 
Moreover, Russian dictionaries are very conservative and usually don't include informal words, regardless how often they are used.   

> English is also very efficient.  Look at the "Rosetta Stone" of directions on any internationally marketed product.  Count the words in English vs. any other language.  We have less.  Why?

 You have more  ::  But they are shorter. 
For example, in English you have to use many prepositions to replace declensions. Look at that example:  _The girl wrote a letter to the boy with the pencil on the teacher's desk._
Девочка написала письмо мальчику карандашом на учительском столе. 
Wanna count words?  ::  Then change "wrote" to "was writing", and this will make Russian sentence two letters shorter: писала instead of написала - and exactly twice as few words  ::    

> Plus, we allow adjectives at will.  A "baby-changing station" in English is "a station for changing diapers of babies" in many other languages.  "Antilock brakes" become "brakes with a system to prevent locking".

 It is so because these phrases are invented in English and then _translated_ into other languages. If they were originated elsewhere, you'd have the same headache. And if the interpreter is clever enough he can usually find an appropriate native word or expression. 
baby-changing station = комната матери и ребенка
Antilock brakes = антиблокировочные тормоза or better антиюзовая система 
And yes, we don't have a word for toes, too. But what for? No Russian would think in terms of "toe-like structures"  ::  Likewise, we don't have appropriate words for 'civic' and 'civil' (the closest are "цивильный" and "гражданский", but they are not 100% the same). We even don't have a word for 'privacy' - there was no such conception in Russia for centuries. 
But we do have separate words for "free" and "free of charge" (свободный и бесплатный). We have words уметь и мочь, which can both (esp. 1st) be only roughly approximated as 'can' (including be able to). 
It's just the way of thinking...

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## VendingMachine

> mike wrote: 
> What are the articles used?

  

> Pravit wrote: 
> someone mentioned dialects of russian that use articles. which?

 The article in question is the definite article *то* and *та*. Yep, it may well have been derived from demonstrative pronouns. Here's how they are used: 
Дай карандаш. - Give me *a* pencil.
but
Дай карандашто. - Give me *the* pencil. 
Жил-был старик. Старикто был вечно пьян и женуто бил. Жената от него и сбежала.
(Once upon a time there lived an old man. The man was always three sheets and knocking his wife about. So the wife up sticks and left.) 
It should be noted that it would be incorrect to drop то and та in those dialects, thus
"Жил-был старик. Старик был вечно пьян и бил жену" would sound to the speakers of those dialects as "Once upon a time there lived an old man. A man was always drunk and knocking a wife about" What man??? Whose wife???  AFAIK these dialects can be found around Smolensk and other parts of South Russia. I once spoke to a woman who was brought up to speak such a dialect. Later she went on to study in Moscow to become a linguist that's why she could explain to me this thing about articles in detail. Common people who speak this dialect don't even know the term 'article' I guess.  
The rules of use of this article are basically the same as the rules of use of the definite article in English.   

> Aaa wrote: 
> The average English speaker uses more different words than the average Spanish speaker because MORE WORDS ARE AVAILABLE.

 Nope, the average Spanish speaker uses as many words as the average English speaker does. The thing is that people with more or less similar lifestyles and educational backgrounds operate a comparable amount of words, I would even say that by and large they operate the same set of words and word combinations. English may have gazillions of words but the human brain makes do with something like 20,000. One could create endless streams of words in Russian using prefexes and suffixes and russifying loan words etc (which we do all the time), but what's the point? At the end of the day it's only those 20,000 something words that we all operate.

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## mike

I would say the size of a vocabulary depends on the person's background and occupation. 
Poet - 20,000
Doctor - 15,000
Character in a Quentin Tarantino movie - 40-50

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## Pravit

keanu reeves - 5-15

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## Zeus

> Дай карандаш. - Give me *a* pencil.
> but
> Дай карандашто. - Give me *the* pencil.

 AFAIK they should be written with hyphen: 
дай карандаш-то! 
Старик-то etc. 
A little echo of them remains even in modern Russian. Apart from defining the subject, it can reflect a touch of impatience: 
Дай карандаш-то! - give me the pencil at last!

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## VendingMachine

> Originally Posted by VendingMachine  Дай карандаш. - Give me *a* pencil.
> but
> Дай карандашто. - Give me *the* pencil.   AFAIK they should be written with hyphen: 
> дай карандаш-то! 
> Старик-то etc. 
> A little echo of them remains even in modern Russian. Apart from defining the subject, it can reflect a touch of impatience: 
> Дай карандаш-то! - give me the pencil at last!

 The reason I didn't hyphenate them is that they are something completely different from the -то of the modern mainstream or standard dialect. (AFAIK *-та* isn't used at all in mainstream Russian.)
While дай карандаш-то means 'give me *the/a*(sic!) pencil at last'  (we may not be interested in any particular pencil here) in most varities of Russian, the same sentence has a different meaning in the dialect I mentioned - there it means simply 'give me *the* pencil' and doesn't show impatience at all (unless you mark it with intonation). On the other hand 'дай карандаш' is either 'give me *a* pencil' or 'give me *the* pencil' in mainstream Russian, and only 'give me *a* pencil' in the dialect in question.  
As you can see from the above their grammatical function is different.

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## Zeus

> As you can see from the above their grammatical function is different.

 Of course it is different! But not always. I feel the ancestry is there. Even in modern Russian -то can act like definitive article: 
Это уже не секрет. Журнал-то они видели. 
Here -то implies _some particular_ magazine. In English it would be "It's not a secret anymore. They've seen _the_ magazine".
If you try to rearrange the sentence to make it formal, you'll have "Они видели _тот (этот)_ журнал". 
Even with pronouns: ты-то это знаешь! "Ты-то" - you in particular. 
And anyway, if you try to write down the dialect in normal Russain (I suspect it doesn't have its own writing), I believe you have to use hyphen. It is incorrect in Russian to write non-existent words (like "старикто") without quotes. Meanwhile "старик-то" is correct even from the point of view of formal Russian. 
P.S. Can you explain when "та" is used? You wrote "жената", but "женуто"...

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## Dima

Может "то" является сокращенной формой от "того", "тот" и т.д. 
У старика*то* (у *того* о ком идет речь)
Карандаш*то* (*тот* о котором говорим)
Жена*та* (*та* самая о которой мы раньше сказали)
а
Жена*то* (это может Жена *того* старика) 
Жил-был старик. Старикто (тот о ком сказали) был вечно пьян и женуто (того старика) бил. Жената (та самая) от него и сбежала. 
Это так, просто предположение. 
Вообще круто. Столько нового можно здесь о своем языке узнать. Я обычно забываю про все эти "the" и "a". Теперь наверное будет легче зная про такую аналогию в нашем языке. А что, очень даже логичная грамматическая конструкция. Мне нраица  ::

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## Propp

Ну тогда это вообще как в болгарском языке получается. У них тоже определённость выражается прибавлением -то к слову. А поскольку слова в болгарском не склоняются, то нельзя по нему судить, должны в русском языке эти -та, -то, -ту, склоняться или нет.

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## VendingMachine

> Originally Posted by VendingMachine  As you can see from the above their grammatical function is different.   Of course it is different! But not always. I feel the ancestry is there.

 Of course it is. Of course this where it came from. But the point is that while in standard Russian -то can only sometimes be thought of as some sort of definite article, the dialect in question always treats -то as an article in much the same way as English uses the. But you're quite right in recognising its traces in mainstream Russian.   

> And anyway, if you try to write down the dialect in normal Russain (I suspect it doesn't have its own writing), I believe you have to use hyphen. It is incorrect in Russian to write non-existent words (like "старикто") without quotes.

 It seems like you haven't read much dialect literature in Russian. The thing is that they do write non-existent words without quotes when spelling out dialect words - it's called 'eye dialect' by the way. You can see a lot of non-existent (from the point of view of proper spelling) words in dialect literature like ярославскыя робяты, сино, двуор, снех, рецка, etc. When spelling out dialect words and dialect pronunciations it is considered OK to omit quotes.   

> Meanwhile "старик-то" is correct even from the point of view of formal Russian.

 It is indeed. However, the semantic value of 'старик-то' in formal Russian is, strictly speaking, not always identical to that of 'старикто' in the dialect.   

> P.S. Can you explain when "та" is used? You wrote "жената", but "женуто"...

 As far as I can remember 'та' is used with singular feminine nouns in the nominative case, i.g. машината, руката, ряката, etc. In other cases they use 'то', i.e. машиныято, руцето, рякойто, etc.

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## VendingMachine

> Может "то" является сокращенной формой от "того", "тот" и т.д. 
> У старика*то* (у *того* о ком идет речь)
> Карандаш*то* (*тот* о котором говорим)
> Жена*та* (*та* самая о которой мы раньше сказали)
> а
> Жена*то* (это может Жена *того* старика) 
> Жил-был старик. Старикто (тот о ком сказали) был вечно пьян и женуто (того старика) бил. Жената (та самая) от него и сбежала. 
> Это так, просто предположение. 
> Вообще круто. Столько нового можно здесь о своем языке узнать. Я обычно забываю про все эти "the" и "a". Теперь наверное будет легче зная про такую аналогию в нашем языке. А что, очень даже логичная грамматическая конструкция. Мне нраица

 Впринципе да, одного поля ягода. Только вот в то время как в литературной речи мы не говорим все время "та, того, той", мы можем лишь эпизодически их использовать для усиления, конкретизирования и т.д., в рассматриваемом диалекте они используются *всегда* когда требуется определенный артикль в ситуациях, очень похожих на ситуации употребления определенного артикля в германских языках. Опускание в таких ситуациях этих "то" и "та" в данном диалекте является ошибкой, и, кстати, сильно режет по ушам его носителей. (Как я уже показывал на примере истории про старика-пьяницу.  ::

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## Zeus

Да, все это очень интересно. Спасибо большое. 
Dima: тебе может еще помочь тот факт, что the произошло от that - и грамматически они чаще всего взаимозаменяемы.

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## VendingMachine

Spoke to a friend yesterday, he majors in lingustics at uni, and he said that in addition to -то, -та in South Russian dialects there was also another form of the definite article in some North Russian dialects, namely *-от* (possibly from *вот*): старикот, карандашот, etc. Almost like the Danish/Norwegian/Swedish -et  ::

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