Why students do not study Russian anymore

[Marta Sherwood-Pike]

        Generally the difficulty of language acquisition after childhood
is related to how closely it is related linguistically to your own.
Speaking English, Spanish, and German when I entered college, I readily
learned to read French, Dutch, and Italian for research purposes, though I
had the frustrating experience in Paris of being able to more or less
understand what Frenchmen were saying to me, while being utterly unable to
communicate with them. Non-Roman character sets such as cyrillic present a
problem with reading and writing - my daughter is currently struggling
with Thai, and of course Japanese Kanji represent a particularly difficult
case. Really natural speaking in a foreign language also involves
acculturalization. There are grammatical concepts in Indonesian which it
is very difficult for a westerner to conceptualize. Language reflects
one's view of the world, and one's view of the world is reflected in
language. A translator of poetry must consider this; a translator of
business correspondence need not, for the culture is uniform.
-Martha Sherwood-

On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, VShell wrote:

> 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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