Why is Russian so Difficult?

Let me begin with some basic facts…

The Foreign Service Institute’s (FSI) School of Language Studies has categorized Russian as a level 4 language.  According to their 70 plus years of observation, it would take an average student with no prior knowledge of Russian, approximately 44 weeks or 1100 class hours to learn it.  Looking at this number, may at first seem rather small, like 44 weeks is nothing, right?  But in reality, that is an extreme amount of time.  Let’s break it down, 44 weeks equates to 25 hours a week, that’s 5 hours a day for a total of 220 days, which, of course, equals 1100 hours.  And the given figure of 1100 class hours is just an approximation. So, this truly is an extreme amount of time to dedicate to language learning.  Unless, of course you have nothing else in life to do.

Okay, so what do I get for my 1100 hard earned, class hours?…

According to FSI, you would have what is called, Professional Working Proficiency. Professional working proficiency is sometimes referred to as an S-3 or Level 3, which is equivalent to the European standards as a B2 level. Here are a list of the language skills you would have acquired:

• You are able to speak the language with sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social and professional topics.
• You can discuss particular interests and special fields of competence with reasonable ease.
• You have comprehension which is quite complete for a normal rate of speech.
• You have a general vocabulary which is broad enough that you rarely have to grope for a word.
• You have an accent which may be obviously foreign; have a good control of grammar; and your errors virtually never interfere with understanding and rarely disturb the native speaker.

Now that those are out of the way, let’s dig a little deeper…

I’ll give you a small list of some of the more difficult topics of the Russian language.  Did I say “small” list?… Okay!  I will try to keep it as small as I can…

• First, the Cyrillic alphabet, although looks intimidating, it is actually quite logical, since it was specifically designed for Russian and Slavic based languages.  It’s very closely adapted from the Greek alphabet with additional letters to represent certain Slavic sounds. Cyrillic helps greatly when learning to pronounce words, although there are exceptions with this as well.  But, it’s pretty straight forward.  Thank you St. Cyril!
• Every noun has gender, masculine, feminine, and neuter. Most of these can be identified by the last letter, however, when they end in a soft sign, (ь), you have to memorize these instances, others have natural gender, in words such as man (мужчина), uncle(дядя), papa(папа) etc.  Gender also plays a big part in the Russian language, because many parts of speech must also match the gender of the noun.
• The word “it”, doesn’t necessarily exist, in Russian.  The pronoun “it” in Russian takes the gender form of “he, she or it”.  When replacing singular nouns, you must match the gender of the noun.  For example:  “Here is your book. It is interesting.” (Вот твоя книга. Она интересная.), book is feminine therefore to say ‘it’ is interesting you would use ‘she’ is interesting. Likewise it would be the same for masculine, “house (дом)”, ‘he’ is interesting,  (он интересный) and neuter,”window (окно)” ‘it’ is interesting (оно интересное).  Notice too, that adjective must also match the gender as the word interesting in the above examples, (f) интересная, (m) интересный, and (n) интересное.
• There are six cases in Russian. Each case governs different parts of speech to identify their role in the sentence.  These cases are named, nominative, instrumental, accusative (which has two forms for masculine and plural , animate and inanimate), dative, genitive, and prepositional (also called locative).  This basically means that every word can have six to seven different case endings depending on their role.  Cases effect nouns, numbers, adjectives and even names. So this means you basically need to know how to recognize words in all six case forms.
• • Nominative – answers the questions, who? or what? and identifies the subject or predicate.
• • • Москва-прекрасный город. (Moscow is a beautiful city.)
• • Instrumental – answers the questions, by whom? or with/by what? and is used with preposition of, with or by.
• • • Вот открытка с Москвой на заднем плане. (Here is a postcard with Moscow in the background.
• • Accusative – answers the questions, whom? or what? and identifies the direct object.
• • • masculine plural animate – Москва любит медведей. Moscow loves bears. [медведи] bears, becomes [медведей] in the Accusative animate plural.
• • • masculine singular animate – Москва любит медведя. (Moscow loves a bear.)
• • • masculine inanimate – Москва-Большой город. Moscow is a big city.
• • • feminine –  Я люблю Москву. (I love Moscow.)
• • Dative – answers the questions, to whom or to what? and identifies the indirect object.
• • • Моя квартира находится в Москве. (My apartment is in Moscow.)
• • Genitive – answers the questions, whose? of whom? or of what?, and identifies the possessor of an object.
• • • Здесь находятся лучшие рестораны Москвы. (Here are Moscow’s greatest restaurants.)
• • Prepositional – answers the questions, where, about whom? or about what?, and identifies the location or activity.
• • • Я живу в Москве. (I live in Moscow.)
• Verbs!  There is so much to say about verbs I have to keep it brief, otherwise you would probably stop reading this right here, if you haven’t already. Verbs are complicated, especially verbs of motion as there are many of them, you have to know which factors are involved to choose the right one. Then next, you have aspectual verb pairs, of which most Russian verbs have a perfective and imperfective forms of the verb, depending if the action was completed, incomplete or ongoing.  Let’s not forget reflexive verbs, as they refer to the idea of ‘self’ as an action on ones self, ‘to dress myself’ as and example. Then you have verb conjugations, which depends on who is doing the action, as to how it is conjugated.  Oh, by they way, verbs are also effected, if the action is in the past, present or future.  We also must not forget gender, when talking about past or future actions also effects the verbs as well as to who is doing the action.
• I will sum it up with a collection of smaller difficulties of the language. There are so called ‘spelling rules’ that you must follow, because certain letters don’t play well together, so they need to be replaced with other ones.  There are endless prefixes that add on to the meaning of words. Pronunciation is another aspect that you must master, although not hard to do in general, however, there are many exceptions that will trip you up.  Another is word ‘stress’.  Russian in written form does not indicate the stress of a word.  So these have to be basically memorized.  Then you have instances where the certain cases of a word changes the stress to another syllable.  Needless to say, it will be some time before you can sound like a native, if ever.

Closing thoughts…

This article’s intention is by no means, to discourage you from learning Russian.  Quite the contrary.  It is the very challenge it presents, that should urge you forward to conquer this mammoth task face to face.  Just think, there are over one hundred forty million people who claim Russian as their native language.  So that shows you right there, it’s possible to learn!  And now knowing how complex this language is, just think of your accomplishments, once you master it.  Be encouraged and may your journey be successful.

-Eugene