stereotypes about Russian language

[pscotto at MTHOLYOKE.EDU]

For a speaker whose native language is American English, it IS a hard 
language to learn.

In fact, it has certain grammatical features (like movable stress) that 
I would argue are as challenging as anything Chinese offers - even with 
its vaunted tones and ideographs.

Peter Scotto

> Rating of language difficulty is a slippery and complex task, but the US
> Department of Defense has done it for its own purposes by classifying
> languages in four categories I thru IV, I being the easiest (including
> many of the Romance languages) and IV being the hardest (including
> Arabic and Chinese, for example).   Russian is Cat III language, so
> using this logic, it would NOT be one of the hardest.
>
> Here is a non-exhaustive list of the categories from
> http://www.military.com/benefits/military-pay/special-pay/military-forei
> gn-language-proficiency-pay
>
> Category I - 95: French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish
> Category II - 100: German
> Category III - 105: Greek, Hebrew, Moro, Persian-Farsi, Persian-Afghan,
> Afghan, Russian, Serbian/Croatian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Uzbek, and
> Vietnamese
> Category IV- 110: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
>
> John Pendergast
> Assistant Professor of Russian
> United States Military Academy
> 745 Brewerton Road
> West Point, NY 10996
> 845-938-0310
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list
> [mailto:SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of alexaaa at bgnet.bgsu.edu
> Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 3:16 PM
> To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
> Subject: [SEELANGS] stereotypes about Russian language
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> Is there really a strong stereotype among our students that Russian is
> one of the heardest languages to learn? Is it anyhow discussed in
> scholarly works? If you know any works, could you please redirect me to
> them?
>
> Thank you very much!
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Anastasia Alexandrova
>
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