stereotypes about Russian language

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Emily Saunders wrote:

> I always like to point out the following bits that make Russian  
> potentially easier than some other more commonly studied languages:
> 
> 1)  Gender is, for the most part, simple to determine.  Just look at  
> the ending of the noun.  Not so for German or the Romance languages  
> where gender must, to a great extent, be memorized.
> 2)  Russian has just one past tense and lacks all of those lovely past  
> perfects, perfects, past perfect progressives, etc.  And there are,  
> essentially, only 4 endings you have to learn FOR ALL VERBS in the  past 
> tense - l, -la, -lo, li.  How simple is that?
> 3)  Spanish has the whole ser and estar problem to work out.  Russian  
> has no "to be" verb in the present tense.  Very simple!
> 4)  German has complex word order that needs to be precise.  Russian  -- 
> quite flexible!
> 
> And I could go on, but you all know these points well enough or  
> better.  For all of the difficulties that case endings and verbs of  
> motion cause to native English speakers studying Russian, there are  
> many other aspects of the language that go down nice and easy.  I  
> figure that it sort of balances out.  I have heard that Chinese has  
> some of the "easiest grammar" to learn (no gender, no tenses), but  it's 
> got a complex writing system as well as tonality to keep one  busy.  Net 
> xuda bez dobra?
> 
> Not a scholarly opinion, but...

These are valid points, if the learner is from Mars or some other place 
where no human language is spoken. But an English speaker already has a 
head start in some areas (for example, he's accustomed to inflectional 
suffixes) and a handicap in others (he's not accustomed to palatalized 
consonants). So in judging whether Russian is easier or harder than 
Chinese or `Arabic, we need to assign appropriate weights to the various 
characteristics based on their similarity to the learner's native 
language(s). The various Chinese languages may be objectively simple, 
but their unfamiliar tone systems present huge challenges for an English 
speaker and don't faze a Thai speaker. And so forth.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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