Introduction:
Have you heard about Vodka, Tsar, Sputnik, and Babushka? Voila! You already know Russian. Well, fun aside, if you have just started your journey towards learning Russian and are wondering how different it is from English and are skeptical about your learning, do not worry. Though there are many differences in English and Russian there are many similarities as well that would help you feel better and find Russian easy.
In this blog, we will look at the top similarity between the Russian and English language
Some similarities
To begin with, both the languages belong to the Indo-European family, though Russian is close to Slav languages and English is a Romantic language, they share the same ancestor.
Alphabet – the Cyrillic alphabet might seem to be daunting but it need not be because well you have only 33 letters to learn and that can be learned very quickly. Also, there are many letters in the Russian alphabet which are the same as in English. This definitely makes it a little easy for you. To be specific A, B, D, K, L, M, O, T are the same in both the languages in look and pronunciation.
Cognates – these are words that have the same origin or are related or are similar in some way. We can find a huge number of cognates. It may not be wrong to say that one in every ten words resembles an English one. This makes it further easy for you. Some examples are
проблема (“problema”) – “problem”
кофе (“kofi”) – “coffee”
свитер (“sviter“) – “sweater”
автомобиль (“avtomobil’”) – “automobile”
фильтр (“fil’tr”) – “filter”
A very common point in both languages is that they have absorbed many new words from other languages or concepts and made their own. This is especially true when it comes to technical terms in Russian.
When it comes to gender, similar to English, Russian also has masculine, feminine, and neuter genders.
Grammatical numbers that are singular and plural exist both in English and Russian.
You can also find similarities in terms of variable stress patterns in both languages. Depending on whether a letter is stressed or unstressed, the vowel sound can differ and you can find change in consonant sounds depending on hard or soft letters.
As you dig deeper and learn further, you may find these are just some similarities in Russian and English when compared to the many differences that everyone has told you about.
The fact that both languages have certain similarities, especially in terms of vocabulary which have loaned words from other languages and from each other can be a little comforting when it comes to learning Russian.
But, do not worry, similar or not, it is your reason to learn Russian and your approach towards learning that keeps you going. With advanced technology and a plethora of resources available, these days learning a language is not very difficult. Unlike the good old traditional methods which are definitely very popular with many, you can find many online options that help you understand and learn Russian completely based on your needs if you are pressed for time and cannot attend a physical class due to many commitments of yours.
