Tips on Learning Russian (1)
Today I'm going to talk about Russian, my experience with Russian, about how I learned the language, some comments about the language.
I'm going to begin by explaining a bit about Russia and Russian culture as I perceive it. I had mentioned in my video about learning French that the French like to be very logical, at least that's what they teach at school, they'd like to be very precise in how they explain themselves and so forth. The Japanese are not at all that way. Also, there's a lot of understatement in Japanese. They don't say no. They say we're going to certainly consider your suggestion, which means no. The Russians aren't like that. The Russians say no. If it's no, they say no. All people generalize, but in Russia there's no political correctness there are just generalizations.
They'll say anything.”что угодно” as they say in Russian. They'll say anything based on knowing the subject, not knowing the subject, getting the facts wrong. I hear this all the time on Echo Moskvy — the most amazing statements, but with tremendous drama and conviction. So I'm going to do the same, I'm going to make very generalized statements about Russia and Russians without worrying too much about my facts. So, how did I get started?
Well, I was about 60 and I had really two reasons for getting into Russian. One was that I had read books by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy when I was 17-18 and I thought it would be really cool to read those books in the original. The second thing was that my approach to language learning is to de-emphasize grammar. Not to ignore grammar, but to not put it up front and to focus on exposing one's self to the language through lots of listening and reading, noticing patterns, rather than complicated grammar rules, explanations and so forth. I was sort of challenged and said you can't do that with Russian because the grammar is too complicated. Okay.
The grammar is very complicated, Russian is a difficult language. To some extent, some people say no language is more difficult, blah, blah, blah. In fact, some languages are more difficult than others. It all depends on the language you're starting from, of course, but for people without any background in Slavic languages Russian is difficult and I'm going to explain why. Before that, I'll talk a little bit about Russia. Russia is a phenomenal country.
I mean the scale; the size of Russia is mindboggling. If we go back in history, we'll see that the Dukedom of Moscovy was this little area up in northern Russia where a mixture of Slavic, Finnish-type people and Baltic-type people and so forth were up there doing their thing. I can't remember whether they were actually conquered by the Mongol Tartar Hordes that dominated Russia for 300 years. I think they were, but I can't remember. Whatever it was, the prince up there eventually defeated them. So, really, the growth of Russia, even though the people in the area of what's now the Ukraine were also Russians, Kiev is called the Mother of All Russian Cities and so forth, was very much under the rule of the Mongols for 300 years.
This Moscovy was up there interacting with Baltic countries, Germans, Swedes and stuff like that. Not very different perhaps, other than they spoke a different language, but culturally very much in that sphere and from that it expanded to the Pacific. From the moment they defeated the Mongols, within a few hundred years they had expanded south right down to the Caspian Sea. I think they reached the Pacific in the late sixteen hundreds and they overthrew the Mongol Yoke, as it's called, in the mid fifteen hundreds. Again, my history, you read it, you forget it, but roughly. It has become this tremendous continental country and you're very much aware of this.
Of course, subsequent to that under Catherine the Great and other czars they consolidated their hold on these central Asian areas and Caucasus. There was a significant expansion in the nineteenth century south and east. Russia was very much an imperialist power, an imperialist power on somewhat weak legs because they expanded too quickly and they were defeated by the Japanese in 1905. From that, largely because of the First World War, the czarist empire collapsed and they had their revolution and became the Soviet Union. All of that is still very international with people from central Asia, Turkish-type people, the Caucasus with all of their different languages and culture, some Islamic, some very early Christian and so forth and, of course, they were always meddling on the western side of their border participating in the partition of Poland and chipping away at Romania.
It's kind of been involved in all these different areas, so it's absolutely fascinating. That's one of the things you sense with Russia, that the scale is just huge.
Even now if I listen to Echo Moskvy, there are a lot of people there with Georgian names that are no longer Georgian. So even with the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, you're aware of these influences. There are issues with all the different minorities within Russia, plus immigration from countries in the former Soviet Union. That's the world, it's very much a Eurasian world and we have to understand that they're not just some European country that speaks a Slavic language. The Russian writing system is almost parallel to the Latin alphabet.
This is no surprise because both the Russian and Latin alphabets come from the Greek alphabet. There are some letters that are unique to Russian, [IЖж] and then there are two characters that are both pronounced [Шш and Щщ]. I can't tell the difference, and I've never worried about it. There are some things that differentiate the Russian writing system from its Latin counterpart.
Russian uses a little B flat sign [Ьь ], which softens sounds. There are some letters that look the same as Latin letters, but they are in fact pronounced differently. What looks like a P is actually an R, and since it's very much hardwired in our minds that that's a P, it takes a while to get over that. It takes a while, but it eventually happens. So the only advice on the alphabet is to get started on it.
You're going to be able to start reading with difficulty within a few hours, and then the more you read, the better you get at it. However, as I found when I started studying to Czech, it's always easier to read in your own alphabet — always. Word order is another aspect of the Russian language that takes some getting used to.
Russian is very flexible and different in some ways. You can say “This is a book”, in English. The Russians don't worry about articles, “This book.” [Это книга. You say “I read a book, the book, a book”, [я читаю книгу], but you could also say [я книгу читаю], so the word order can be kind of shifted around. It isn't word order you need to worry about when you want to ask a question in Russian, though.
Then you have consider intonation. The words used are the same, but intonation often determines if it is a statement or a question. These aspects of the language are minor in comparison to the three big bugbears in Russian: the cases, verbs of motion and the aspect of verbs.
Everything else you can kind of get used to, but those three I'm still struggling with. Some people don't know what cases are.
I had Latin at school and we had to decline latin noun bellum (war) as fast as possible. In Russian there are six cases. Latin has the vocative, which the Russians don't have, although the Czechs do. With cases the concept is quite straightforward. If a noun is the subject of a sentence, “I go”, “The book is on the table”, then it's in the nominative. If you do something to the book, “I give the book to you”, “I give the book”, now the book is in the accusative because you've done something to it.
If I give the book to you, I'm giving it to you, dative, donation, give, that's the dative. Then they have a thing called the prepositional case, which is basically where something is “On the”, “At the”, “In the”, sort of like a location-type case. In that case, the noun will have a different ending. Then they have the genitive, which means to belong to something. So “Of the book” would be in the genitive. And they have a thing called the instrumental, “By the book”, “By my pen”, anything that implies what instrument or agent you used to do something. In that case, in the sentence “I went by car” the car would be in the instrumental. So those are the six cases. With the cases, as a general overview, the concept is not difficult, but the specific explanations of why we use one case or another are extremely confusing.
I'll read from a Russian grammar book I have you will see what I mean. “The genitive case is used after words expressing measurement and quantity…”. That's fine, “…but if it's one of something it's the nominative singular. If it's two, three or four of something it's the genitive singular. If it's five or more it's the genitive plural.” Now, if that was the only rule you had to learn you could probably deal with it, but there's a lot more.
“The genitive case is used in a positive sense to express an indefinite incomplete quantity.” Okay, good for you. If you go on to the accusative, “The genitive case is normally used after negated verbs in the following instances: When the negation is intensified by another word; when a positive sentence is negated.” Of course, I don't know what all that means. I have to look at the examples. “The dative is used to express the logical, blah, blah, blah.” I mean it just goes on and on. The vast majority of prepositions don't take the prepositional case, they take the genitive.
Also, the same preposition will sometimes take the genitive and sometimes take the accusative. It's extremely different. The endings, the tables, I've looked at those tables so many times. You can kind of half remember it for a day or two and then it's gone, even if you understand the explanations after lots of examples. I should say that I always use this grammar book as an example of how horrible grammar explanations can be.
I have another book that I bought in Moscow which just has examples and with enough examples you can start to see it. However, what I've found is you just have to read and listen so often that certain phrases start to sound natural with their endings. It was much the same learning tones in Chinese. Trying to remember the individual tone for each character was very difficult, but with enough practice you eventually get better and better. So, cases, that's number one.
You're always, in my view, going to have trouble with the cases. Perhaps someone who attends a class and is studying it formally does better than I did. I was spending an hour a day listening, most of it in my car, or while exercising. It's an interest thing, I'm not passing a test. However, I must say, given that I spent five years at an hour a day, a lot of people study it very seriously in class and don't get as far along as I did and, besides which, I can understand so much. This is another thing.
When you don't understand or you don't know the cases it doesn't prevent you from understanding, if you have the words. I learned all of the Russian vocabulary I know on LingQ. Some things remain a little bit fuzzy, but the important thing is that I can understand and enjoy the language. Learn about the country, the culture, even though you haven't really nailed down the grammar. What I tended to do was I listened to simple content to begin with and then I moved on to more difficult texts.
Someone asked me on one of my YouTube videos, is it worthwhile listening to stuff you don't understand? No, get stuff where you can access the text. If you can access the text, the transcript, import it onto LingQ as I did, save the words and phrases and you will eventually understand more and more of it. The words “to go” in English appear like this “I go”, “I go tomorrow,” “I always go” etc.
not in Russian. The verbs have tenses, change for tense and change for person, but that's a minor problem.
