Job Discussion Forums

[scot47]

Russian is SLAVONIC. Cyrillic is the name of the alphabet used for Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian.

Other important groups in the Indo-European family of languages are Romance (you call them Latin) and Germanic.

For native sopeakers of any Indo-European languiage it is easier to learn another Indo-=European Language, rtaher than one from the Semitic or Sinitic families

[Gordon]

Once the 10 British guys get to China they may give up trying to learn Mandarin after awhile and start teaching English instead.

[Capergirl]

[joe-joe]

Hi Capergirl

I taught Russian students in Siberia. In what way do you find then challenging? I found them demanding in as much as they were transfixed on the belief that knowing grammar only, they would be perfect in English. They had some issues learning with the communicative approach, as they often felt I should have been 'teaching' them, rather than them learning themselves. But then perhaps the fact they were teenagers would account for this!

Some problems they had with English in particular were the fact Russian doesn't use articles and their verb tense system is much simpler, having only past, present and future, and they what are called perfective and imperfective verb forms in Russian, rather than auxillary verbs and continuous aspects, etc. So for every one verb we use, they have two forms of it. The usual suspects of phrasal verbs, prepositions and so on also cause headaches for them.

[Capergirl]

Hi Joe-Joe

I teach grammar and CALL classes to three Russian men. The problems you mentioned with grammar (especially the tenses) are exactly the difficulties I am talking about. I have the hardest time trying to explain the past perfect to them, for example, because they only have one tense for the past in Russian. No progressive, no perfect, no perfect progressive. We spent so much time doing stative (non-progressive) verbs and they are still struggling with it (although that's probably one of the hardest things about English grammar). The pronunciations are also challenging for them. They have these really sputtery (for lack of a better description) sounds in Russian that we don't have in English and it makes them very difficult to understand. We have a long way to go yet.

[dyak]

I had an eccentric Russian girl in my class last term. She wore a school uniform (a la TATU) every day and would listen to their music incredibly loudly during break. She was also at least 6ft (not sure how many cm that is) tall and would stare at me for much of the lesson. She would also speak to the Bulgarian girl in the class in Russian, who would (every time) frown and reply in English; and no, she didn't get the past perfect either.

[fat_chris]

[Wolf]

Compare English to Chinese: As a native English speaker I find it VERY hard to pronounce the Mandarin tones in such a way that the Chinese understand me. Then agian, I live in an area where Mandarin is not spoken, so I never know when I get it right or wrong.

Compare English to French: I found French grammar to be a bit easier to master than English. For me as a non-native speaker, I find it difficult to remember how to spell in French as it isn't phonetic at all to me. Also remembering if every single noun is masculine or feminine can be fun. When I was in high school, I found it more fun to rant angrily in French than I did in English.


Compare Engish to Japanese: Everyone says Japanese is hard. Well, the Koreans don't but everyone else usually does. Japanese has very few, if any, exceptions to the rules. There are only 2 irregular verbs in the language. And one (suru) gets used very often anyway. There are no irregular past participles, etc. I think there is a relation between the language never breaking the rules and the culture, myself. Anyway, I found pronunciation to be fairly easy. Learning the writing system is time consuming, but possible with effort. It's not particularily difficult, it just will take a really long time (it takes the Japanese 12 years of schooling to go through all the Jouyou Kanji, so don't feel bad.)

Is English the hardest? Not sure. I think it would be best to ask multilingua non-native speakers of English who have studied English and at least one other foreign language.

[waxwing]

Apparently, according to the linguistics experts I've met here in Russia, Russian is a synthetic language whilst English is an analytic one.
Consider for example the Russian word 'nabyegatca'. In translation that's 'to be tired after running about'. 6 words, count 'em.

One of my teacher trainers drew a little graph suggesting that compared to many other languages, English is much easier to learn in the early stages (say up to Int.). Consider: verb conjugation (OK we have irregulars but so does everyone), no cases or gender (OK a tiny bit). It means you can start babbling in no time. The problems start around Int-Upper Int when they have to deal with these appalling modals, perfect tenses and then even worse they get hit with phrasal verbs. Poor blighters.

Another difference between Russian and English is in the pronunciation-spelling mapping. We have something like 20 vowel phonemes and 5 vowel letters. Total nightmare. Russian pronunciation is 95% regular. Even the irregularities have patterns such as 'ogo' becoming 'ovo' in adjective endings. (I should mention, of course, that Russian is still difficult to pronounce for an Anglophone since they have phonemes we don't).

[Cleopatra]

There's a theory that no spoken language is inherently more difficult than any other, since all kids everywhere learn to speak their own language in the same amount of time.

However, I'mnot sure that applies to foreign langauges. I would venture a guess that just about anyone - whatever their first language - would find Arabic a good deal more 'challenging' than say, English or Spanish.

i've also heard it said that the learning curve with English tends to be very fast at first - it's easy to get to an intermediate level quite quickly. However, it's supposedly difficult to become really good at English, mainly bevcause of the wide variety of colloquial versions and the sheer size of English vocabularly. By contrast, gramattically 'complex' languages like Russian or German are much more difficult at the outset, but gradually level off at about intermediate level.

[joe-joe]

Hello again Capergirl I liked your description of the 'sputtery' sounds in Russian very much! The Russian language does have a lot of 'sh', 'ch' and 'zhuh' sounds, (well they sound like this to me, ok!? , as well as the putting together of groups and pairs of consonants in 'vr', 'vs, 'zdp', and so on. It must be a real bummer for Russian stdents to get their head around a lot of English pronunciation, and you, and they have my sympathy, (in fact the students have my empathy as by learning Russian I know what it's like in reverse to try and get my head round the pronunciation of those 'sputtery' Russian sounds! )

Waxming also made an additional good point about Russian verbs. In English we'd use a phrasal verb such as 'find out', 'to wait for someone', 'to be pleased with something', whereas they use single verbs to express such things. And I do agree English is easier in the earlier stages of learning, but with Russian, at least personally speaking is actually getting much easier now I've reached intermediate level.

I think every language has it's pros and cons in terms of ease of learning for a foreigner, but as others ahve already stated, I guess some are easier than others depending on the L1. So English will be more difficult for some than others. For example I've always found Scandinavians and Dutch people seemed to be able to learn/speak English without any apparent difficulty, but Turkish and southern European students seemed to struggle more. This is only of course my own anecdotal observation.

[Roger]

leeroy,
my answer to your question RE my learning of Chinese versus Chinese' learning of English:
I am absolutely positive I acquired more functional Chinese within the first couple of years on my own than Chinese students acquire English under the supervision of a Chinese English teacher in 5 years.
I qualify this specifically with "under supervision of a Chinese English teacher" because I believe Chinese can acquire as much English in the same time as I was able to acquire Chinese on my own - if they had a more enlightened teaching/learning environment.
One important difference between me and my Chinese counterparts: I studied Latin, and the study of Latin was at that time always advocated so that you learnt to think analytically. Thisa is a major reason why I find the logic of many teacher colleagues unconvincing - the logic that oral practice makes anybody proficient at English. China proves eloquently that this is a myth. The so-called "communicative approach" (a label for many unspecified techniques) simply doesn't work here. The minds of our learners are set, and not receptive to novel ideas and methods. They are geared to forming habits and reinforcing them.
That's unlike Russians, I suppose; they too like to discuss grammar intrinsicacies because these account for the more obvious differences between their language and English. I have had social contacts with many Russians and must say their foreign language skills can be admirable in spite of their continued relative isolation.
It seems to me that English is being acquired most readily all over the world, with various degrees of success; clearly, there are more foreigners mastering English at advanced level than there are English speakers that master other tongues as well.

[dduck]

[Dr.J]

I think one tiny advantage English speakers might have is the fact that there are so many different phonemes in English. I think only some eastern european languages have more. In other words, English speakers don't usually have to learn new sounds when they try a new language, and it may also make them more sensitive to different sounds when listening.

[Brooks]

When I was in Irkutsk, working at the technical university, I had good and bad students, but the good students really made a lot of effort.
The class of Russian professors I taught were about the most serious students I have ever had.

Some of my students were kind of shy.
It really helped that at that time I had over four years of learning Russian in America. It made it easier for me to teach them, because I knew what they were going through when they studied English.