Little Heroes
Little Heroes
The Russian language is considered to be one of the hardest to learn, especially according to researchers of English speaking studies. Based on 70 years experience of teaching a wide range of languages to thousands of students, the Foreign Service Institute has been able to categorise languages according to the average amount of time it takes students to reach “Professional Working Proficiency”. FSI rankings include five categories of language complexity, where the category I assigned to the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn and the category V assigned to the most difficult ones. The Russian language falls under category IV, assigned to the languages described as “hard ones”.
But what makes Russian difficult? There are many difficulties one can face learning Russian and in this article I’ll try to highlight two of them.
The first one - the Russian alphabet.
If one knows English and decided to study German, French or Spanish, they can start reading with the guidance of a teacher on their first language lesson - of course, each of those languages has specific rules of reading and pronunciation, but imagine, that an English speaker opens the book and sees this:
A twelve-letter word and it seems like they already can read nine of them, can't they?
"No," objects the teacher, "you only can read "А", "Т" and maybe "С" - in case you learn, that it always stands for [s]-sound only."
"Why?" the English speaker wonders. "What's wrong with "P", "B", "Y" and "E"?"
"In fact, they stand for absolutely different sounds. They are your false friends, the evil twins of their “English” siblings."
The Russian alphabet seems a bit scary for those who had never studied the Cyrillic script (a writing system used as the national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and speaking countries). However, if one looks through it, they’ll find out that 12 of 33 letters look like in the Latin script:
Actually, the Russian alphabet can be divided into four groups. The first two are those 12 “Latin” letters - they are called friends. But only five of them are true ones, the others are called false.
The Russian alphabet is the first difficulty an English speaker faces starting to learn the language. However, once they learn to read Russian, things are going to become more and more interesting.
The second difficulty - Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.
Inflection is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories. Russian is a heavily inflected language, in other words, to speak Russian correctly and clearly one should change everything continuously in the process of speech - pronouns, endings of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.
For example, in the sentences “My pretty cat is walking”, “I can’t live without my pretty cat”, “I gave some fish to my pretty cat”, “I'm feeding my pretty cat”, “I live with my pretty cat”, “I talk to my pretty cat” said in Russian one is faced with six variations of the noun “cat”, adjective “pretty” and pronoun “my”. It happens because Russian has six cases. By the way, English has cases as well - it largely lost its inflected case system but personal pronouns still have them.
The other example: in the phrases “her green pencil”, “her green pen”, “her green apple” and “her green pants” the pronoun “her” and the adjective “green” have four different forms, because the nouns “pencil”, “pen” and “apple” has three different genders and the noun “pants” is grammatically plural.
Inflectivity of Russian is a major topic, the above mentioned serves to highlight just a few features of Russian grammar and I haven’t even touched on the topic of verbs - to complete a global picture, I can just add that studying in the university to become a RAL (Russian as an Additional Language) teacher, I had a whole semester on the subject called “Verb in the aspect of Russian as a foreign language” dedicated to verbs only. In case you are curious to learn more, you can Google Perfective and Imperfective Aspects, Verbs of Motion and Conjugation.
In conclusion
The Russian language is very difficult to learn, but do children complain? Well, sometimes. The older the students are, the more they wonder, why is it so different from the languages they know? And together we try to find some parallels between Russian and their native languages and discover why we can’t just ignore some grammatical rules. Above all, children work hard to learn one of the most difficult world languages - so I can say with certainty that all of them are little heroes.
Miss Irina, Russian as an Additional Language Teacher
