Why students do not study Russian anymore

[Pavel Samsonov]

>
> I have specialized in Russian literature and also spent about two years
> learning Japanese (and one living in Japan) because I married a specialist
> of Japanese literature.  I personally found Japanese to be the hardest
> language I had ever studied, at least from the point of view of starting
> out as a beginner.  Furthermore, learning to speak Japanese is difficult
> enough; learning to read and write at a high level is quite
time-consuming.
> Most Japanese cannot properly read the newspaper until they are in high
> school.  The amount of time and energy needed to master the number of
> characters necessary to read and write at an educated level is enormous.
> For non-native learners of Japanese, this task can be very lengthy and it
> tends to take people a very long time to get a Ph.D. in Japanese
> literature, for example.  Nonetheless, as Martha and others have pointed
> out, Japanese has much higher enrollments than Russian.  I also believe it
> has everything to do with economics and, for want of a better word,
> fashion.  And in the "fashion" department (and probably also economics),
> Chinese may even be edging out Japanese.


Exactly. I used to teach US military translators, whose first language was
Russian and they had to have yet another language.
Their main concern was Arabic and Korean. Those who had gone through Russian
and Arabic or Korean would tell their peers: "stop whining about Russian.
When you start Arabic, you will see that Russian was a breeze".

I happened to learn and speak some Arabic when I worked in Africa. It was an
eye opener. We can know Spanish, French, Russian and Polish and we may still
not realize that we are locked in the framework of our Indo-Europeism. We
don't realize how a non-Indo-European language is different from ANY of
Indo-European ones. Spanish, Russian and French would seem like cousins, if
not brothers.

The whole grammatical structure, the whole system and philosophy of Arabic
is entirely different. Word formation, semantics,
gender, number - all these are present, but entirely different. Thinking in
Arabic is like seeing the world from an entirely different perspective.

Currently I am working on an interesting project: Belarussian and Taiwanese
students were writing essays toward their TOEFL examination and e-mailing
them to us. The format was the same, and the requirements were the same. The
language was English. But boy, what a difference!

The Belarussian essays may have grammar mistakes: some more, some less. But
the word order, the logic of composition, the underlying semantic structures
are very close to those of a native English speaker. Not with Taiwanese.
They see the world somewhat differently, they see different aspects of
things, they pay attention to what we normally would not. Their sentence
structures are different, the way they start and finish their essays are
different.

And of course, the nature of errors is different - I insist this is the
influence of their native Mandarin which is a long way from English.

Notice how long it takes to an Oriental adult student to learn English when
they come to the USA at the age of 18 +.
It is much easier for a Russian, Pole or Bulgarian to learn English in the
same conditions. Similarly, for an English native speaker to learn
Indo-European languages would be much easier than non-Indo-European ones.

So, yes, there are "difficult" and " easy" languages. And Russian, of
course, can be more difficult than Spanish for an English speaker, but way,
way  easier than Japanese or Korean.

With compliments,

Pavel (Paul) Samsonov
EDAD, College of Education,
Texas A&M University
tel. (409) 862-7771 (lab)
      (409) 862-9152 (home)
fax (409) 862-4347
e-mail p0s5658 at acs.tamu.edu

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