Why students do not study Russian anymore

[VShell]

On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Marta Sherwood-Pike wrote:
> Look
> at Japanese departments. It's a much harder language than Russian, but the
> enrollments are up. -Martha Sherwood-

Just curious, but upon what do you base this last claim?  As someone who
learned four foreign languages as an adult, and who has dabbled in a
couple of others, I'd be hard to pressed to say one language is harder to
learn than another.  Each language offers its own challenges and has its
own simpler aspects (from a learning perspective).  Why would Japanese be
fundamentally more difficult to learn than Russian?  And is French really
easier to learn than Russian?  Sure, the former shares a lot with English,
but these similarities only go so far in easing language acquisition.
Anyone interested in become proficient, if not fluent, has a lot of work
to do in either case.

-- Stephen Bobick

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