What Makes Russian so Hard to Learn?
If you’ve dabbled in linguistics or looked into learning a second language, you undoubtedly know that certain languages are harder for English speakers to learn than others. As a general rule, the more a language varies from English, the harder it is for a native English speaker to pick up. That’s the reason why those learning Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and other eastern languages tend to struggle; these dialects belong to entirely different schools of language with unique rules, writing systems, grammar structures, and, of course, really weird idioms.
But Asia and the Middle East don’t have a monopoly on languages that make you want to pull your hair out; Russia, ever the competitive nation, gives these languages a run for their money. Russian is very different from English in a lot of ways, and has a plethora of very difficult rules that can be daunting to the prospective student. But as they say, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. The first time you successfully nail a sentence in Russian is a momentous occasion, and brings a sense of pride that you really never forget. Russian is worth the effort to learn, and the very first step to learning Russian is to understand what exactly you’ll be going up against. In this article, I’ll attempt to break down some of the most difficult aspects of the Russian language in a way that makes sense to an English speaker in order to give a sense of what exactly makes Russian so hard to learn.
Bear in mind that this article isn’t meant to be a crash course in basic Russian; there are plenty of those on the internet already. Rather, it’s meant to be an accessible explanation of what exactly a prospective student of Russian will be facing. As much as possible, I’ll try for the most part to avoid using Russian words and Cyrillic (the Russian alphabet), as this guide is directed to the student with little to no Russian experience.
There are three major parts of the language I’ll focus on, after which I’ll touch briefly on a couple other minor things. The three fundamental things I feel everyone should understand before undertaking Russian are reading and pronouncing Cyrillic, using and conjugating verbs, and cases. Let’s take a more in-depth look at each of these.
- Cyrillic/Pronunciation
The Russian alphabet can be a bit infuriating for a beginning student (it definitely was for me) in that it uses a mixture of characters familiar to us with the same sounds (Т, К, А, М, etc.), characters with familiar shapes but unfamiliar sounds (The Russian “B” sounds like our “V,” their “X” sounds like our “H,” their “H” sounds like our “N,”) and characters that have no English Equivalent (И,Ч, П, Б, Ж, etc.). The first hurdle an aspiring Russian speaker has to overcome is learning to distinguish between these characters and not mix them up with their Latin alphabet counterparts.
There is a lot that can be said when it comes to pronunciation; the Russian accent is a beast to get down. Russian is (for the most part) a phonetic language, and once you figure out the sounds of the letters reading is relatively simple. But there are exceptions in pronunciation that are key to proper speaking. Certain words are spelled with letters that are either silent or pronounced differently than they should be; a good example of this is “zdravstvuyte,” which means hello (as a side note; Russian words have a tendency to be much more syllable heavy than their English equivalents). The first “v” in “zdravstvuyte” is never pronounced by natives. These exceptions aren’t remarkable prolific and you’ll pick them up over time. The best practice for reading and speaking correctly is listening to native speakers and imitating them. The difference between a good Russian accent and a great one lies in tiny details that are best learned by repetition.
2. Verbs and conjugation
If you’re familiar with any of the romance languages (French, Spanish, German, etc.) you know about verb conjugations. In essence, it involves changing the end of a verb depending on the proper noun used with the verb. There is a standard, unchanged form of a verb is called the infinitive; it equates to the English “to verb” (e.g. to run, to talk, etc.). In English, we have a very simplified form of verb conjugation; we say “I run,” “we run,” “they run,” but also “he runs.” In Russian, you’ll be changing the ending of a verb to match with one of six different pronouns (I, you [informal], you [formal], he/she/it, we, and they). We’ll talk more about informal and formal speech in a second. If we were to apply the same system in English, it could potentially look something like this; “I runi,” “you runu,” “we rune.” The Russian system is more complicated, but follows the same general principle; the ending of a verb always changes to “match” the subject of the verb (the thing or person doing something).
Now, there is a fundamental part of verb usage that foreigners find very hard to learn called tenses. Tenses (or aspect pairs; more on that in a second) are basically Russian’s equivalent of our convoluted time and tense system. For example, in English we have the phrases “I do,” “I am doing,” “I have been doing,” etc. we have auxiliary words and suffixes (have, been, -ing) that denote when and how an action takes place. In Russian, every single verb has two forms, called the perfective and the imperfective. These fulfill a similar function. A verb used in the past tense (I did) in the perfective form has the meaning “I did something once” or “I did something to completion.” It is a finished, or “perfect,” action. The same verb in the imperfective form means “I did something over an indeterminate period of time” or “I did something and didn’t finish it.” It is an action without a definite resolution, or an imperfect action. The difficulty comes in memorizing the two forms of each verb and using them correctly. There an TONS of small nuances (when to use which form, how to find both forms of the word, etc.) that are very difficult for foreigners to learn and for natives to explain; it’s something that comes only with time and extensive practice.
3. Cases
Cases are arguably the most difficult part of Russian. Similar to verb conjugation, it involves changing the end of a word depending on its relationship to other words in a sentence. However, it’s considerably more complicated. The use of cases, for all intents and purposes, makes word order nearly irrelevant in Russian grammar. In English, we have to say the phrase “I love you” in that order — “I, love, you” in order for it to make sense. In Russian, you can say that sentence in multiple different ways; “you I love,” “I you love,” “love you I,” and so on. This is made possible because in Russian, the end of each word is changed to reflect its proper position in the sentence. I is the subject, and thus is given an ending that denotes that fact (we’ll write it as I[s].) “Love,” following the rules of verb conjugation, matches the word “I” (we’ll write love[i]). “You,” as you probably guessed, is changed to show that it is the object of the sentence (the thing or person someone is doing something to). Thus it becomes “you[o].” With these changes in place, it doesn’t matter which order the words are in, as the [s],[i], and [o] fulfill that role and show us who is doing what to whom.
Note that in Russian, all nouns have a “gender.” This means that each noun is treated differently and connects with other words differently depending on whether it is masculine, feminine, or plural (there is also a “neuter” gender, but very often its use overlaps with the masculine gender, so we’ll skip it for now). Gender is normally denoted by the letter the word ends in, however there are exceptions. A word in Russian that ends in “a,” for example, will almost always be feminine, whereas a word that ends in a consonant will almost always be masculine. Similar to how verbs must match (or agree) with their subjects, all adjectives must match the gender of the noun that they are describing. Thus, in order to say “the tall girl” in Russian, “tall” must be fitted +with a feminine ending (since the word “girl” has a feminine gender).
The tricky part comes in mixing cases with gender. There are six cases in Russian, each used in conjunction with different prepositions (such as on, over, under, around, to, etc.) or different grammatical circumstances. Each gender (masculine, feminine, and plural) has its own set of six word endings that correspond to the six cases. Let’s take for example the words “big house.” Assuming that house is a masculine word, we’ll need to give “big” a masculine ending. Thus it becomes “the big(m) house(m).” Now here’s where it gets a bit harder. In order to say “on the big house,” both “big” and “house” need to agree not only with each other (big(m) house(m)), but also with the preposition “on.” This changes the endings on both of the words, and we end up with this (the number 4 is used to denote which of the six cases the word is using, but since I haven’t defined the cases it’s largely irrelevant): “on the big(m4) house(m4).” The correct gender of the three possible has been used (m), and the correct case of the six has been used (4). Out of 18 possible ways to say “on the big house” (3 potential genders multiplied by 6 potential cases) this is the one correct way.
If that didn’t make sense, it’s OK. This is an incredibly complex system and I can’t hope to explain it sufficiently in a single article. Russian is, without a doubt, a very difficult language. At the same time, it is a beautiful language that is incredibly rewarding to learn (not to mention highly sought after in the workforce). If you’re taking the first steps on your journey to becoming a master of Russian, I hope this helps to give you an idea of what exactly is coming. But don’t get discouraged; as in everything, give it enough effort and eventually it will just start to click. Good luck!