What makes the Russian Language a hard one to learn?
Russian is an East Slavic language native to the Russians in Eastern Europe. It is an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and is used widely throughout the Caucasus, Central Asia, and to some extent in the Baltic states. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages, one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages alongside, and part of the larger Balto-Slavic branch. Russian is the largest native language in Europe and the most geographically widespread language in Eurasia. It is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, with over 258 million total speakers worldwide. It is the seventh most spoken language in the world by a number of native speakers and the eighth-most spoken language in the world by a total number of speakers. Russian is written using the Cyrillic script; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. Almost every consonant has a hard or a soft counterpart, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language.
Russian is one of the hard languages to learn because:
It’s hard as you do not have knowledge of other Slavic languages. Main difficulties faced by language learners are the new grammar structures. Russian grammar rules are very complex and have numerous exceptions like, one syllable is always stressed in Russian words containing two or more syllables, which means that it is pronounced in a stronger tone and with a longer sound. Sentence structure is also another obstacle. Capitalizing is one too, in Russian, capitalization occurs only in two main instances: at the beginning of a sentence and when spelling a proper name. The intonation of Russian changes accordingly with the type of sentences and it’s desired meaning. Devocalization of Voiced Consonants happens when a voiced consonant is at the end of a word or is followed by a voiceless consonant. Vowel reduction occurs in unstressed syllables. In Russian, the basic rule for plurals is that words in the ending changes to either и, ы, я, or а, apart from several exceptions. Russian has 3 tenses like English but the past and future have two aspects each: perfective and imperfective. It has 6 cases in which nouns decline in accordance with their respective genders. The cases are Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Instrumental, and Prepositional. Russian contains many prepositions that are used both to denote the context of a noun as well as that of the verb. Their alphabets are also one to mention that the Russian language is hard to learn. It is hardest to pronounce a word in Russian. We should use the tip of our tongue between our teeth to pronounce Russian words.
Finally,
Remember the difficulty level of a language doesn’t make it ‘unlearnable’. Learners need to put up adequate efforts to learn and master the Russian language. One may need to take a proper Russian class. A student always needs the help of a teacher and their teaching method to learn the language in the right and effective way. To do so, you can comfortably learn from home with Multibhashi.