stereotypes about Russian language

[Deborah Hoffman]

I'm wondering also if there isn't some other factor that determines relative ease or lack of besides the similarities to one's native language. Not that I have a clue as to what that might be of course, but since my first day in Russian class there has seemed an internal logic in it that seems more easily processed by my brain (for lack of a better explanation) than other languages I've taken that are technically "closer" to my native language of English. I often tell people who opine that Russian is "hard" that I found French and German to be in some ways much harder. The tenses drove me absolutely mad in French, which makes no sense, as did strong and weak endings (of all things) in my college German. I wonder as well if preconceptions might play a role; when I started learning Russian and nobody had told me it was a "hard" language. I had heard that, say Latin was a "hard" language in comparison to Spanish or French, but I hadn't heard anything one way or the other about
 Russian and therefore for me it just was.
   
  >Date:    Thu, 1 May 2008 04:20:22 -0400
>From:    "Paul B. Gallagher" <paulbg at PBG-TRANSLATIONS.COM>
>Subject: Re: stereotypes about Russian language
>
>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.


Deborah Hoffman, Esq.
Russian > English Legal and Literary Translations

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life. -- R. G. Collingwood

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