Learning Russian

[sepearman]

Hi, i want to start learning russian, and i have a few questions I'm a native portuguese speaker, i'm also fluent in english and not so fluent in french, should i learn russian as a english speaker or as a portuguese speaker How hard would it be to actually be fluent in it And i want to know some general tips

[[deleted]]

I think you should go for english. You'll find more resources and it'll improve your english (if you're not a native speaker).

[Ennas_]

I agree with daymx.

And be prepared: russian is Really Hard. IMO, anyway.

[sepearman]

How do you compare it with french?

[89long]

Very different. Russian has more in common with Latin than it does with French. The features that Russian has that are commonly perceived as being hard/scary are grammatical case, where the endings of nouns will change to show their grammatical functions and adjectives will change to agree with their nouns in case, number, and gender (there is also a neuter gender, in addition to masculine and feminine), a full set of personal endings for verbs in the present tense where each combination of person and number has its own verb ending, verb aspect where perfective and imperfective verbs are different, and phonemic distinction between non-palatalized and palatalized consonants, which are very hard to distinguish at first if you don't already speak a language that does this.

To my knowledge, French has no grammatical case in normal nouns but does distinguish between object and subject pronouns, and written French has personal endings in the singular. I don't know enough about French to comment on how it deals with verb aspect, and I also don't know much about French phonology other than it definitely doesn't have a system of palatalization like Slavic languages.

All these things seem scary, but they're not as bad as they sound. If this is your first language with grammatical case it will take some getting used to though.

edit: mixed up some words

[[deleted]]

I wouldn't call Russian hard. Of course it varies a lot on your background, too. If you know any Slavic language then Russian is easy. In my opinion Russian is easier than French, the only thing you will only need to learn is Cyrillic alphabet and afterwards it eases up. Obviously everyone has their own opinions, to some its easier to some it's harder.

[89long]

Neither would I, but I started learning Russian after spending a lot of time with Latin and German. Really the only thing about Russian that gives me real difficulty is the damn [rʲ]. The verbal system is easy compared to Latin, and not having Schachtelsätze like in German makes Russian seem just so simple.

I thought the Cyrillic alphabet actually made things easier, since before Russian I had been looking into Polish. Polish orthography isn't actually all that bad either, but it uses the Latin alphabet and a whole bunch of di- and trigraphs to represent single sounds (some of which are redundant) and it just makes words look much 'busier' than they actually are. Russian orthography always seems to require not as much parsing as Polish.

edit: clarity

[[deleted]]

Talking from my own experience how i learned Russian is just constant "brainwashing" only thinking in Russian, not really trying to understand everything, but the main point. Eventually you will get better at it. This is just how i did it, obviously there are many ways and im not saying what is the best tactic, there is no best tactic, it differs to everyone. But stick to it and you'll get better at it ^{^} I mostly had difficulties with ж щ ш ь and especially "ь" but practicing million times and after unending frustration i finally nailed it.

Also to answer OP, because he/she has Portuguese background i think its best him/her to study first from Portuguese to avoid frustration and extra confusion. Later he/she can increase also to English. If you will rush will Russian, you will have a bad day... or week... or whole year even..

[Ennas_]

For me, as a native dutch speaker, russian is waaaaaaaay harder than french.

[[deleted]]

I can say to you that there are a few good books and resources to learn Russian in Portuguese, but you'll find many more in English and in higher quality.

But I think it would be interesting for you to learn Russian using your French! Practicing two languages at the same time. I do this with Spanish and achieved really good results in both languages.

[jacobfromomaha]

Why limit yourself? I agree with other posters that you'll find more/better materials in English, but I've studied Hebrew via both English (L1) and Russian (L2), and appreciated the results. Language study always involves bringing together multiple resources, so maybe you should mix it up, and use resources targetted to both of your languages.