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This is a blog by JustRussian about learning Russian. You will find useful tips for learning Russian, Russian courses available in London, information about Russian culture and links to websites with information for students of Russian.
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Learning languages
By Vlada 26 July 10
What does it take to become a good linguist? More notes from a Russian teacher in London, or something you may be interested to know but may not learn in your Russian lessons.
We’ve all heard of polyglots – people who can learn (and retain!) many languages. Apparently, a polyglot is someone who fluently speaks 8 or more languages. But do such people really exist? And what does it take to master a foreign language, just one, but completely different from your own? In 20 years of Russian and English teaching (and a lifetime of learning!), I’ve worked with a lot of talented linguists, and here are my observations. For a good linguist, it is important to have:
• A good memory. Being able to memorise, and more importantly, retain words and sounds. To become fluent in a language, you will need to learn at least a thousand words and their forms. Is it realistic for anyone? Yes, it is. People are not born with a good or bad memory. Memory can be trained to be good, and paradoxically, the more you learn the better your memory becomes! So people who have a lot of experience in learning and using foreign languages can usually memorise words quickly and in large quantities.
• A lot of patience and practice. To retain a word in your memory takes repetition and practice. That is why it is not realistic, in my experience, to speak many languages to a very high standard (unless you are a linguistic genius – but I’ve never seen one!) – you simply won’t have a chance to use them often enough, and when you don’t use them, they slip away.
• The ability to listen and imitate. Musicians are usually very good at languages because they can hear very well the sounds of the language and can imitate them. Studying phonetics and knowing how sounds should be formed will help, but having a good ear means having a good accent.
• Logical thinking. It’s important to understand how a language system works, especially in languages with complex grammar, like Russian. Just to decide which ending to use for a noun, one needs to recreate a whole logical sequence in one’s memory, recalling a word, and then choosing its correct form judging from the word’s gender, number, and case.
• Ability to “play it by the ear”, and try to develop a “feel” for a language. When you’ve used a language for a while, you can sometimes instinctively predict what a word should sound like. Not a hundred percent reliable, but a good linguist is not scared of making mistakes!
• Does age matter? It is true that the older you become, the more difficult it is to learn a new language, simply because your head is so full of other things! But with a bit of effort and persistence one can learn a language regardless of age. My oldest students are in their 70-s (and maybe even 80-s, I am not sure), and they cope perfectly well. And on the contrary some people in their teens and 20-s find it hard to concentrate and retain information. So it’s more about your learning skills and mental discipline than age. Also, in my experience older learners may take a longer time to learn not because their brain cannot hold the extra information, but because they are too busy, always thinking about lots of things at the same time: work, family, kids, houses, travel, – all sorts of worries come first.
• Motivation and interest in the culture and people of the language. A language cannot be learned in isolation from a culture it belongs to. With it always comes a whole set of values, history, literature, music, the way of life of the people who speak it, and who created it. It is usually the student’s interest in the whole culture, or a particular aspect of it (or person associated with it!), that is the driving force of the language learning.
My students of Russian sometimes ask: is it possible to speak many languages to the same high degree of proficiency? Theoretically, yes, but in 20 years of language teaching in two countries I have never seen anyone who could speak more than 3 different (not closely related, like Russian and Ukrainian) languages to native speaker standard. One can know 5 or 6, and use them from time to time, but they would make all sorts of mistakes that would an educated native speaker would not.
Another question that comes up in Russian lessons: is it possible to get rid of your foreign accent? In my experience, almost, but not quite, if you started learning a language as an adult. You have to study a bit of phonetics, be a good imitator and have a good musical ear to perfect your accent. How important is it? It’s up to each learner to judge. A slight foreign accent may add charm and character to your speech. After all, as my teachers used to say, most of us are not training to be a spy! On the other hand, if you are a professional linguist, a teacher or interpreter, a heavy accent will not contribute to your professional credibility. I have seen foreign students of Russian (speakers of Western European mother tongues) whose accents are so good that I would not be able to place them and it would take a few minutes of careful listening to realise that Russian is not their first language.
To cut a long story short, there are no bad linguists – there are lazy ones! As we say in Russian, “hard work and patience will grind anything”, even the solid rock of Russian grammar… So if you’ve never learned languages before, do not be put off – just do it!
History of the Russian Language
By Vlada 9 July 10
Where does the Russian language come from? More info from a Russian teacher on something that you might want to know but will not learn in a Russian lesson.
Russian comes from the same source as English. It’s an Indo-European language, with its origin in Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language. But that’s a very broad classification, covering the whole “family” of languages. Narrowing it down, Russian is classified as a Slavic language, belonging to the Eastern branch of Slavic languages, along with Ukrainian and Byelorussian. In the Middle Ages (from the 6th to the 10th century) the Slavs, who occupied a large territory of Eastern Europe, from the Balkans in the south to the very North, had a common language – Old Slavonic, or Church Slavonic. Although the actual spoken languages of Slavic tribes may have differed from each other, the written version could be understood by all the Slavs. Even today, the grammatical structure of different Slavic languages is very similar, and it originates in Old Slavonic. I remember the bitter complaints of my fellow students at University who had to study Old Slavonic, about it being fiendishly complicated and awful to learn! (I didn’t have to learn it, fortunately or maybe unfortunately… my main subject was English, so we had to learn Old English!) If you compare words and grammar of different Slavic languages, you will see that it was clearly one language at some point in history which then split into several branches.
In the 9th century, two Greek missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, had to translate and write down Biblical texts in Old Church Slavonic, to convert Slavs to Christianity. For this purpose, Cyril devised a new alphabet, now known as the Cyrillic alphabet, based on the Greek alphabet, with a few additional letters invented to represent specific Slavic sounds.
Old Russian was one of the Slavic dialects, spoken in Eastern Europe, today’s Russia, until the end of the 13th century. Around this time the Russian language started to separate from the other Eastern Slavic languages (Ukrainian and Byelorussian). At the same time, the prevailing written language was still the Old Church Slavonic, introduced and supported by the Orthodox Church (Russia was christianised in the 10th century, having been a pagan culture before that). With time, written and spoken languages separated, but Old Slavonic remained as the literary and official language until the 18th century. By that time, it was almost incomprehensible for most ordinary people!
In the early 18th century, the Czar Peter the Great (who was determined to westernise Russia) introduced and promoted a large number of foreign words from Western languages that were borrowed and incorporated into Russian. This resulted in the mixture of the archaic Old Slavonic with borrowed Western words and colloquial Russian, which started being used in writing. Peter also simplified the Cyrillic alphabet, getting rid of some unnecessary Greek letters.
The famous Russian poet and Scientist Mikhail Lomonosov who lived in the 18thcentury, wrote about 3 different styles of Russian which were in use during his time: the high one, for high poetry and religion, the middle one, for literature, poetry, prose and science, and the low one, for personal communication and low comedy. The Middle Style, which combined features of East Slavonic dialect and Church Slavonic, became the basis of the modern Russian language. In the middle of the 19th century, modern Russian, based on the Moscow dialect, was formed and became the official language of the Russian Empire.
The first person who started writing in the modern colloquial Russian was Alexander Pushkin, the most famous Russian poet, the Russian equivalent of Shakespeare. He is considered the “father” of modern Russian. Poets before him used a very artificial bombastic language that no one spoke in real life!
Russian was the official language of the Russian Empire (which used to include Poland and Finland!), and later the Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 80-s the individual nation states have been reviving and bringing back their native languages. However, Russian remains the “lingua Franca” of the whole post-Soviet territory and Eastern Europe. In a recent census, 153 million people considered Russian to be their mother tongue and another 61 million said they spoke it fluently as a second language. The number of Russian speakers in the world is about 220 million.
So, we are looking forward to seeing you in our Russian lessons, so that you could join the club!
Learning Russian Vocabulary
By Vlada 25 June 10
How many of all those words that you are trying to learn in Russian lessons, are actually Russian? And how many of them do you have to learn? More notes from a Russian teacher on something that you might want to know.
The biggest dictionary of the Russian language (“The Contemporary Dictionary of the Russian Language” in 3 volumes) lists about 250 thousand words. The vocabulary of Pushkin (Russian equivalent of Shakespeare) is about 20 thousand words. An ordinary person needs a couple of thousand words to communicate successfully.
How does Russian everyday vocabulary compare with English? My personal observation is that in Russian there are more simple everyday words describing things and actions than in English. Thus, for example, what can be expressed in English with a simple verb “to clean”, in Russian would be rendered by different verbs, according to HOW you clean it (with water, or with a dry brush) and WHAT is being cleaned (cleaning a house is different from cleaning a car or cleaning your teeth etc). Some verbs are so narrow in meaning that they can only describe one particular action, for example, “umyvatsa” means to wash one’s face, and nothing else! Talking about having many words for one thing: students like to ask – are there many words in Russian for snow? Interestingly, no! There is only one, “sneg”. However, we do have several for a snow storm… On the other hand, it looks like in English there are more “sophisticated” difficult words, often borrowed from foreign languages. And that is why the most comprehensive English dictionary (The Oxford English Dictionary, 291 thousand words) lists more words than a Russian one.
Where do all those words come from? Russian (as well as English) belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, which originates from Sanskrit. So very simple basic words are often similar to other European languages: names of relatives, numerals, common animals, simple words like “water”, or “sun”. But that won’t be a great help for an English speaker: there aren’t many of those simple words, and the similarity is often very vague.
Following the language classification further, Russian is a Slavic language, so the main bulk of vocabulary is Slavic. For those who already speak a Slavic language, such as Polish, Czech or Bulgarian, learning Russian words is much easier than for a native speaker of a Western European language. That said, there are a lot of “false friends” in Russian for speakers of other Slavic languages. A classical (and a very amusing!) example is the word “uroda” which in Polish and Ukrainian means “beauty”, but in Russian – a complete opposite, “ugliness”! In Soviet times, among very few foreign magazines available, was a Polish glossy called “Uroda”, dedicated to fashion and beauty. What were Russian supposed to think it was about?! Or another good one: a “sklep” in Polish is a shop, and in Russian – a crypt. You can see how these words developed – “uroda” is something extraordinary (good or bad!), and “sklep” is a place of storage (foods or bodies!)
But the Slavic vocabulary in Russian was “diluted” by additions from other languages. With the Tartar invasion in the 13th century came Turkish words (they say all the worst swear words in Russian come from that period in history) And with the epoch of Peter the Great, who loved all things European, and especially German and Dutch, came a lot of German words. The Russian for “potato”, for example, is “kartofel” and a sandwich is “buterbrod”. As time went by, and we developed connections with other cultures, more and more non-Slavic words entered the Russian vocabulary. Catherine the Great, Peter’s granddaughter, loved everything French and decided that all her courtiers should speak French to her and to each other. And what a Russian monarch says, Russian people do! As a result, from that time until the communist revolution in 1917, Russian aristocracy and all well-educated people were bilingual in Russian and French, brought up by French governors and tutors. They would talk French to each other, and Russian to commoners and servants (quite handy – the servants could not overhear and then gossip!) As a result, a lot of French words became part of the Russian language – albeit often distorted in meaning. So a “planchette” is a military note pad, and a “plafond” is a round glass lampshade (possibly attached to the ceiling but not the ceiling!). A “portefeuille” is a briefcase, and “manto” is more like a cape than a coat. The coat is “paletot” – a very old French word which is not used any more.
In more recent times, with the advance of modern technology and the Internet, we have been borrowing more and more English words. Traditionally, English words in Russian are names of sports, some breeds of dogs, and more recently, all the computer terms and words related to the world of media and high technologies. Scholars complain that Russian is now littered and ruined by a host of completely unnecessary English words, that have a perfectly good Russian equivalents. But they sound “cooler” and more sophisticated, so journalists and politicians love to use them, and they get spread around. Should that be regulated and restricted? Perhaps, but a language is a living organism created by its native speakers, and not by learned scholars. Despite what the French Academy might think, you can’t regulate it. It will regulate itself!
So good luck in learning it all! Or maybe just a couple of hundred words to start with, and a couple of thousand to finish. It’s a nice sounding language though. You won’t regret it!
Learning Russian grammar
By Vlada 27 April 10
More info from a Russian teacher in London: a lesson ABOUT the Russian language as opposed to lessons OF Russian.
What should you know about learning Russian if you are considering taking a Russian course?
This is another article in my series of my blogs about the Russian language. This time, let’s talk about Russian grammar. What are the main features of Russian grammar that you need to be aware of, if you are about to start learning Russian?
I am afraid most English speakers who have never learned a Slavic language before underestimate the complexity of Russian grammar. The reason is that in a beginner Russian course grammar is usually presented in a simplified way while the course is centered around vocabulary, useful phrases and reading skills. This is a totally justified approach because for a beginner it is more important to get to grips with the alphabet and basic vocabulary than to tackle grammatical complexities. Also, at a beginner level in Russian some grammar aspects are actually easier than in Western European languages! For example:
• The verb “to be” is not used in the present tense, which makes a learner’s life much easier. So if you want to say “This is a table”, all you have to say is “This table” – as simple as that. Or, “I am a student” equals to “I student”. All you have to do is FORGET about “am”, “is”, and “are”, rather than learning those forms. How good is that?!
• There are no articles “a” and “the”, so again, all you have to do is forget about them. Unlike Western European languages, Slavic ones do not have articles. The whole concept is completely alien to us, and Russians who are learning English always struggle with using “a” and “the” correctly. If you listen carefully to a native Russian speaker talking English (especially someone whose English is not very advanced!) you will notice that some articles are missing, and some will probably be used incorrectly and inconsistently.
• There are very few irregular verbs. The overwhelming majority of verbs conjugate in a regular way, sometimes with small variations. For comparison, while learning English as a foreign language, you have to learn about 120 irregular verbs (3 forms) by heart!
Russian belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, the same as all Western European languages, so all the grammar concepts are familiar and easy to understand. In fact, its grammatical composition is very similar to Latin. So for those students who are familiar with Latin grammar, Russian grammar will be nothing new.
The complexity of Russian grammar lies in the fact that grammatical forms are incorporated in the word itself, unlike in English where a lot of auxiliary words are used and grammar forms consist of several words rather than one. So as a result, the minute you reach an intermediate level, you will have to learn a lot of endings for different parts of speech and operate little logical sequences in your mind, of the type: this is a noun, it’s masculine, it’s singular, it must be the genitive case, so the ending is – “A”! It means that you’ll be doing a lot of memorizing and a lot of practice. It’s a great exercise for your brain and memory! After a while, once you’ve said the same thing a hundred times, it becomes automatic, and you don’t have to strain your brain any more. As the saying goes: “Repetitio mater studiorum”.
Here are the key features of Russian grammar:
• Gender, which is very important for Russian grammar. There are 3 genders – masculine, feminine and neuter. Masculine and neuter words have the same endings in most cases, and feminine ones have different endings.
• Case: there are 6 cases: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Instrumental and Prepositional (Locative). Each case has certain meanings attributed to it, which are quite logical and correspond to the Latin case system (for example, Genitive is the same as possessive, and Accusative is for direct object etc). Changing the word ending for case is called declension. In Russian, practically all parts of speech decline: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and even numerals. They all have their own endings in different cases. The only part of speech that does not change is the adverb.
• There are 3 types of declension for nouns, depending on their gender and the type of ending in the nominative.
• Adjectives do not have their own gender or type of declension. They follow those of the noun they “belong to”.
• Verb categories include the 3 tenses – present, past and future, and 2 aspects – perfective and imperfective. In the present tense, verbs conjugate (that is, change their endings according to the person of the subject – I, you, he, etc), and you will have to learn 6 personal endings in the present tense. There are 2 types of conjugation but they are very similar. Most verbs are regular, which is good news! The past tense is really simple: there is no conjugation. Instead, there is a very simple set of endings for masculine, feminine, neuter and plural. In the past and the future, there is a choice of 2 aspects: imperfective for regular or long actions, and perfective for short and completed ones. The future tense is the most complicated one: there are 2 kinds of future, depending on whether you need to use an imperfective or perfective verb.
• All this may sound complicated, but it’s logical and generally the verb system is easier than in English! The only down side is that every time you learn a new verb you will have to learn “two for the price of one” – the imperfective and perfective infinitive forms.
• Conditional mood is very simple. It is basically the same as the past tense, with the addition of one little word that stays the same. And there is no subjunctive!
• The most grammatically complex part of speech is the participle. Participles have every conceivable grammatical category: they can be perfective or imperfective, past or present, passive or active, and they have genders and cases and decline like adjectives. A complete language student’s nightmare! The good news though is that they are a feature of written and formal style, so we don’t use them much in colloquial speech.
• Another interesting feature of Russian grammar is that the word order is flexible, and you can put words in a sentence wherever you want, without being incorrect. You can say “I know him” or “I him know” or even “Know I him” or “Him I know” and all these phrases will be grammatically correct. The former two are completely interchangeable, and the latter two are emphatic, with the word in the 1st position in the sentence being the most important. So in Russian it’s more about using the correct case and ending, than sticking to the fixed word order!
Russian grammar has of course been changing through the centuries. Just like all modern languages (and English especially!) it has a tendency to become simpler. For example, we used to have 7 cases and somewhere along the way we have lost one – the Vocative case, which other Slavic languages still have.
Is Russian grammar difficult to master? As a teacher who has been running Russian courses for many years, I can assure you that while Russian grammar is highly “synthetic” (all based on endings and word changes), it is also logical and can, no doubt, be learned and used very successfully by anyone who is willing to dedicate some time and effort to it. As you can see from the description above, it has its moments, but it also has some simple features. The complicated system of cases for nouns, adjectives and pronouns is balanced out by a relatively simple system of verb tenses and the absence of subjunctive.
Let me also assure you that it’s worth it. You will be rewarded when you have mastered the complexities of Russian grammar and can appreciate the beauty of the language. Russian is not a verb-based language, so not a language of action, like English. Russian is great for poetry, songs and literature and less good for business correspondence. That is why all Russians love poetry: it is romantic, musical, often sad but soothing. It’s a language of contemplation and description, which perhaps reflects the Russian national character. But that’s quite another story and a topic for another article.
So, good luck with your Russian lessons, and happy learning! And remember that even if you don’t get it 100% right, people will still understand you and will appreciate your effort!
Russian alphabet and spelling
By Vlada 20 April 10
More info from a Russian teacher in London: a lesson ABOUT the Russian language as opposed to lessons OF Russian.
What should you know about learning Russian if you are considering doing a Russian course?
This is another article in my series of my blogs about the Russian language. This time, let’s talk about the Russian alphabet and spelling.
Most English speakers who have never learned Russian before are daunted by the prospect of having to learn the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. I can see why: it looks exotic and completely different, so just the look of it can put you off! But is it difficult to learn for someone doing a beginner Russian course? The answer is a definite No! Let me assure you that of all things that you will have to learn in your Russian course the alphabet will be one of the easiest and the most fun things to learn. Here are some facts about our alphabet, for those who are interested in learning Russian:
• The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters. Two of them are silent and serve to modify the sound of the letter before (the soft sign) or after (the hard sign).
• It is called Cyrillic because it was invented (or, rather, compiled from other existing alphabets) and popularized, by St Cyril, and to a lesser degree, by his brother St Methodius. Cyril and Methodius were highly educated Greek monks from Thessaloniki who became Christian missionaries in Eastern Europe in the 9th century AD. The initial purpose of the new alphabet was to translate the Biblical texts into Slavic languages.
• The Cyrillic alphabet is a mixture of several alphabets: some letters are the same as in Greek, some are the same as in Latin, there are even a couple taken from Hebrew, plus a few “original” ones, that might have been “recycled” from an older alphabet. So if you are familiar with the Greek alphabet (even with the symbols from your school lessons of physics!), it means you know half of the Russian alphabet already!
• There are 10 letters representing vowel sounds. The rest of the letters are consonants, and two letters are silent.
• The handwritten version of the alphabet looks different from the printed one at first sight, but if you take a closer look you will see that most letters are exactly the same as the printed ones, they are just “curvier”, so that you can join them up in handwriting. However, about 6 of them do look different.
• The question that my students often ask is – do I have to learn the joined up writing? Strictly speaking, no. At this day and age, we type more than we write by hand. And when we do, we often do not stick to the classical version of handwriting, mixing the styles. So printed letters will do, everyone will be able to read them perfectly well. However, this kind of writing will not look very sophisticated!
• Russian spelling is based on the phonetic principle (one letter represents one sound), which makes it reasonably easy. It is in fact a compromise between a phonetic approach and the rules of word-formation and grammar. It has, of course, a number of exceptions and arguable points (it wouldn’t be a living language if it didn’t!)
• There have been several reforms of Russian spelling and the alphabet. The current spelling is the result of the major reform of 1918, which was carried out by the Bolsheviks after the October revolution of 1917, but was in fact prepared by scholars long before the revolution. Four letters were deemed to be unnecessary and were abolished. To be fair, those letters did make spelling and reading more difficult. So if you take a book published before 1918, the text will look even more exotic than modern Russian writing! All the books printed after 1918 follow the “new” spelling rules, so all old books had to be edited carefully to bring them up to date. What a gigantic task it must have been, in the absence of computers! It is said that Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” (a huge book that has about 1500 pages) became 80 pages shorter because of the 1918 spelling reform!
• Russian punctuation follows strict rules (there is no such thing as the author’s choice of punctuation!) and is similar to French and German punctuation.
• Russian word stress is unpredictable but we do not use the stress marks while writing. However, you will see accents marked in all materials and textbooks for foreign students of Russian, just to make reading easier.
• There is one letter, E with two dots over it, which may cause difficulties in reading for foreign learners of Russian. The thing is that E without the dots represents a different sound from the one with the dots but in modern spelling the dots are not marked! The exception is made for books for children and foreign students. This is a tendency that has developed in the last 15 years, and I think the reason for omitting the dots over E is fast computer typing: this letter is in the far corner of the keyboard, and most people save time by not using it! So as a speaker of Russian you are supposed to know which words contain which kind of E. I can see that this is frustrating for anyone learning Russian, but if it’s any consolation, Russians struggle with it too: since the use of the dots became optional even in documents, people have been complaining that their surnames have been mispronounced!
• The Cyrillic alphabet is used to write in about 50 different languages, mainly in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Such languages as Belarusian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Kazakh, Kyrghyz, Mongolian, Serbian use Cyrillic. Most of them use a version of the alphabet which is slightly different from Russian, with additional letters from Greek or Latin alphabets, and variations of standard Cyrillic letters.
• And finally, as a teacher who has been running Russian courses for many years, I can tell you that an average learner takes 2-3 lessons to master the Russian alphabet, and a couple of months of practice to be completely confident with reading and writing. That’s if you do a standard extensive course with one lesson a week, where only a part of the lesson is dedicated to practicing the alphabet.
So, good luck with your Russian lessons, and happy reading!
Learning about the Russian language: Facts and Figures
By Vlada 23 March 10
More info from a Russian teacher in London, or a lesson ABOUT the Russian language as opposed to lessons OF Russian.
What are the main points about the Russian language – the language that we at Just Russian are striving to learn or teach? How many people speak it? Where does it come from? What should you expect if you have decided to learn Russian or if you’re just considering taking Russian lessons?
You will find the answers to these and many other questions in my new series of blog articles about the Russian language.
Let’s start with some key facts and figures:
• Russian is the most widespread language of Eurasia, and the most widely spoken Slavic language. In Europe, more people speak Russian as a mother tongue than any other language.
• Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages (which means that it is related to all Western European languages) and is one of three modern East Slavic languages, together with Ukrainian and Belorussian.
• Russian is spoken by about 165 million people as a mother tongue and by about 114 million as a second language.
• Russian is the 6th most widely spoken language in the world.
• It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
• It is spoken in most of the ex-Soviet states, such as Byelorus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and the Baltic states, either as a native or a second language.
• In some areas of Ukraine and Belarus, 2 languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas this resulted in a language mixture called Surzhyk in Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus.
• In the Soviet times (1920s – 1991), each of the republics of the Soviet Union had its own official language, but the unifying role and superior status was given to Russian. Since the break-up of the USSR in 1991, the newly independent states have been encouraging and developing their native languages. However, the role of Russian as the post-Soviet language of international communication has continued.
• In Soviet times, Russian was mandatory for school children in the ex-USSR states and Soviet allies: Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, Mongolia, Cuba. However, younger generations are not learning it any more, giving preference to English (with Mongolia being an exception).
• Russian is spoken in large Russian-speaking immigrant communities in Israel (about 750,000 people), the USA (about 700,000 people) and Canada.
• Russian is the official language of the Russian Federation but it is not the only language spoken in the country. In some regions it shares official status with other languages belonging to ethnic autonomies within Russia, such as Bashkir, Tatar, Yakut.
• Written examples of Old East Slavonic, the predecessor of Russian, come from the 10th century.
... and a few facts about the history and the structure of the language:
• The Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet has 33 letters and is phonetic in principle, which makes it relatively easy to learn. It is called Cyrillic after St Cyril, a 9th century Greek monk who, together with his brother Methodius, devised this alphabet (or, rather, a much older version of it!), incorporating elements of Greek and Latin into it, as well as introducing a few new letters.
• Russian grammar is close to Latin in structure, and is based on a system of noun cases (6) and verbal conjugations, which makes it relatively difficult to master.
• The core of Russian vocabulary is Slavic, so native speakers of other Slavic languages will find it easy to learn, while native speakers of other languages would have to memorize large quantities of completely new words. There are, however, quite a lot of words borrowed from French, German and English in the last couple of centuries.
• Russian punctuation rules are similar to French and German ones.
• The modern Russian literary language traditionally dates from the time of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), the most famous Russian poet and writer. Pushkin hugely influenced Russian literature by introducing a simpler style of writing based on the colloquial Russian of the time, as distinct from his predecessors who used very old-fashioned “literary” grammar and vocabulary.
To be continued.
Learning more about the Russian Language: the scope of change
By Vlada 28 September 09
More info from a Russian teacher in London, or something you may be interested to know but may not learn in Russian lessons (although you should if your Russian teacher follows the latest news related to the Russian language!)
A modern language is much like a living organism. Languages can emerge, change, develop and die. Russian is not an exception: it has changed hugely in the last century, and even in the last decade. Most of this change is prompted by the changing realities of life, others are due to the fact that there is no censorship any more and there are more opportunities for people to publish materials written in real colloquial language that is not controlled or regulated by anyone. After all, it is almost impossible to find a human being who speaks any language perfectly correctly.
So here are a few things that happened to our language in the last hundred years (starting with the oldest one!)
• Those of you who are learning Russian already know that Russian spelling is based on the phonetic principle: one letter=one sound, to make reading and writing as easy as possible. But as the language developed and some pronunciations changed, this principle was weakened. After the 1917 revolution a major reform of the alphabet was carried out: 4 letters were scrapped because they were deemed unnecessary (they were either silent, or read in the same way as other letters) and some spelling changes were introduced, to simplify the spelling. Those changes, although implemented by the new Bolshevik government, had been prepared and proposed by Russian scholars long before the revolution. So spelling became easier, all books were reprinted using the new, revised and abridged alphabet, and it is said that “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy became 80 pages shorter! In libraries you may still see old books published before the revolution, with the old characters – still easy to read but looking a bit unusual.
• The letter E has lost its dots on top in the last 20 years, in my memory. I think it happened together with computerisation and switching from writing by hand to typing on computers. The thing is that when you are writing by hand, it’s easy to put on the two dots above your Es, but when you are typing (and trying to do it fast), you need to reach the very far corner of the keyboard to type the E with the dots. So most people don’t bother to do it, because it’s clear anyway to any native speaker where the dots should be. So the poor dots survived only in textbooks for foreign students of Russian and for children. You won’t see the dots in any documents or the press any more. In some books, the dots are sometimes used in the words “vse” (everybody) and “vsyo” (everything), to differentiate between the two, but not in any other words. And with its love for official regulations, the Russian authorities issued a decree a few years ago legalising the missing dots even in people’s passports and documents, which lead to mispronunciations of some less common surnames. There have been public complaints about it, but it looks like there is no way back now. People have already got out of use of putting the dots on the E! I usually mention it to my students in one of their first Russian lessons. Needless to say, they hate this development, and I apologise on behalf of the Russian people for inflicting it on you!
• Changes in grammar are less obvious and slower than the ones in vocabulary or spelling but they happen as well. We lost the vocative case at some point in the 19th century (we used to have 7 cases, and now there are 6), but that’s already ancient history in comparison with some modern changes. In modern Russian, for example, the plural masculine form ending in -Y (stol-stoly) is rather aggressively being replaced by the plural ending -A – which at the present moment is an exception but is becoming more and more common. So the traditional “professory” and “directory” is now almost completely replaced by the previously incorrect “professora” and “directora”, and these forms are now considered to be the norm. Another thing is that some previously undeclinable foreign words (such as “bigudi” – “hair curlers”, one of the many French words used in Russian) are becoming declinable, which is more natural for the Russian language.
• As far as the vocabulary is concerned, the most obvious change is of course the recent introduction of English words related to new technologies and the Internet culture. Unlike the French, we are not trying to counteract this trend, because it’s clearly futile – I don’t think you can regulate a living human language by law. So the word “e-mail” is used by almost everyone instead of the Russian equivalent “electronnaya pochta” – and you can see why!
• Russian slang, just like slang in any other language, changes all the time. So I always advise students of Russian to be careful with it. The words and expressions that were trendy when I was a student, now sound ridiculous and outdated. Teenage slang is a whole world in itself, and I don’t even want to go there. They use some words the meaning of which grown-ups don’t understand or find very strange. Among the numerous latest slang/colloquialisms that have taken off big time and are used by everyone, are “tarakany” (“cockroaches”) meaning problems or hang-ups, and “vynosit’ mozg” (“to take out someone’s brain”), meaning to load someone with your own problems, to give them unnecessary or boring information. I quite like both expressions: they are very juicy and create a good picture of what’s going on.
• The latest example of an official amendment to the Russian language is a regulation published on the 1st of September this year, the official beginning of the school year. Certain “doubtful” usages of words that people are usually not sure about have been made “legal”. So the word “coffee” is now officially both masculine and neuter: you can use it as you wish, although logically it should be neuter, and according to the rule it is masculine. That makes life a bit easier for people learning Russian!
• The greatest problem in Russian for native speakers is of course word stress. My students learning Russian always complain that it is impossible to stress Russian words correctly because stress is so unpredictable. It’s true, but the good news for learners is that Russians themselves get the stress wrong all the time! One of the most common examples is the verb “zvonit’” – “to telephone”. When people conjugate it, the majority tend to stress it incorrectly, on the 1st syllable instead of the last one. The question is – if 90% of the population prefers this variant, shouldn’t it be the norm? After all, it’s the native speakers who create and use the language, and not a small group of scholars in the Academy of Science or officials in the ministry of education. So the stress rules do change all the time as well.
The question is – can language norms be established by official directives from the relevant ministry? Of course not! As a teacher, I would love everyone to use the beautiful correct forms all the time, but after all, using this or that form is just a reflection of somebody’s education and background. The norms change, and what seemed to be incorrect and unspeakable 50 years ago is the norm now!
Learning Russian: Old-fashioned ways are best?
By Vlada 31 December 08
Languages and us: how do you learn to speak perfect Russian? A few comments from a Russian teacher about the methods and different approaches to language learning and teaching.
The real shock came when I started teaching Russian to groups in Kingston University, fresh after Moscow University, the Faculty of Law. I said the word “adjective” in front of my Russian class, and someone asked “what is an adjective?” Oh my God… My Moscow response would have been: “And what do you think you are doing at University if you don’t know what an adjective is?!” but I was on foreign territory so I tried to explain what it was. Which brought on another problem – how do you explain what an adjective is to someone who is not familiar with any language learning vocabulary? So I said: “It’s a word that describes another word, called a noun, and it tells you what kind of thing it is – white, or blue, or big or small…” And then I thought “How on earth am I going to explain the system of cases?” and almost decided to become a seamstress, rather than a Russian teacher and never go back to my Russian group class again… But it was a professional challenge, and I’ve been tackling it ever since.
The Russian and Eastern European system of education is still very old-fashioned, structured and academic. Pupils still sit in neat rows, two at each desk, listening to the teacher and keeping silent until asked. Languages are (or are supposed to be, with a qualified teacher) presented as a system, the components of which must be learned, drilled and taken for granted. Also, of course, in Slavic languages the grammar is so complex that it is simply impossible NOT to teach it. So in Russian lessons, children would have to learn all the cases, the genders, and the numerous endings and how they are formed. In English, on the contrary, native speakers can do without any grammar knowledge – the complicated verb system can be picked up because it’s intuitive and there are no cases or conjugations. The only “killer” point of English for its native speakers is spelling (it’s not intuitive, it’s ancient and often unpredictable) but it is not important for speaking the language. In Russian and other Slavic languages, it’s the other way round. Spelling is relatively easy but the grammar needs attention. So we all grow up learning and teaching the Russian language through grammar.
My first contact, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say clash, with the English system of language teaching took place in 1997 when we tried to write a book (a reader/textbook for advanced students of English, about the system of English education, ironically) with a British co-author from a British university. He came to Moscow, and we went to England, we got on well and had some fun times together but completely failed our task. He hated almost everything we contributed, and the other way round. Our meetings sometimes ended in heated arguments and door slamming … all because we could not agree on methods of presenting the material. The English teacher wanted everything to be vague and creative, while the Russian teachers wanted it to be conventional, rigidly structured and predictable. I even remember (God forgive me, I was young and presumptuous!) attempting to explain to him some points of English grammar…
The Anglo-American system of teaching languages is very foreign to us, especially the new “playful” and communicative methods of teaching. Teachers tend not to explain language points but illustrate them and lead the student towards understanding and interpreting grammar themselves (I often thought – please forgive me, Ladies and Gentlemen British teachers, for thinking so – do they not explain things for some good reason, or is it because they simply cannot explain it clearly and comprehensively?)
Can this approach be applied to learning Russian? It probably can be, but I would still explain things first. One of the rules of our profession is that you cannot expect students to learn anything unless you’ve given it to them first. A teacher in Russian is called “prepodavatel”, from the verb “davat’” – “to give”, so we’ve got to give the knowledge and make sure it sinks in. And then you can play games, make creative stories, chase each other around the room and even sing. I am afraid I personally like to explain, time and again, in the students’ native language, everything that can be explained! Because if you understand the system, you can use it. If you don’t understand it, you’ll be lost every single time when you have to speak Russian. Call me old-fashioned!
Sometimes my students in Russian lessons ask: and what about children? They learn to speak Russian without any grammar explanation! Well, they do and they don’t. Their brains are free, quick and ready to suck in all the information around them. They are immersed in the language completely, their whole life is dedicated to learning the world around them, and they do have a lot of guidance from the adults on how to use this or that word or phrase, and often even why it should be like that. Kids who don’t get much attention and guidance end up speaking not terribly well… Just like adults who have never learned the rules of the language end up making the same mistakes again and again.
And finally, just to show that I don’t and can’t really make any general conclusions on this subject, I can tell you that in my 9 year experience as a full time Russian teacher, my slowest progressing student took about half a year to learn the alphabet, and the quickest spoke fluent Russian, from nothing, in just three months. Both are British!
Learning Russian Accents
By Dmitry Matchin 26 November 08
Telling you more about things you may be interested to know but may not learn in a Russian course.
This article is about Russian accents. Given Russia’s immense size, this must be a fascinating subject. There is something striking for you to learn about Russia, but, if you are studying Russian, it may well come as a nice surprise to you. I will try to explain here why Russian is different from most major European languages when it comes to language variation.
When we think of languages, we tend to perceive them as uniform entities that are represented in speakers’ minds intact. But any language exists in many forms. Languages are in constant flux. Most people think of variation in terms of the existing accents of a particular language. More broadly, variation is about dialects, but it is true that differences in pronunciation are the most conspicuous and that speakers draw on them more easily when it comes to distinguishing between different language varieties.
Usually, accents are geographically distributed. Cockney, for example, is the accent (dialect) of East London, and Scouse is that of Liverpool. In fact, it is common knowledge that in Britain accents change every 50 miles or even less. What is interesting about such diversity is that different language varieties in England (and in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland) are easily recognisable. If you happen to come from Yorkshire, it is most likely that your accent will give you and your origin away (unless you go out of your way to conceal it). There are also social dialects and accents. Of course, they emerge on the basis of a particular geographical variety (usually the one employed by a group with more power and status), but with time this dialect becomes, due to a process known in linguistics as standardization, a standard (or literary) variety. It is available, in principle, to everyone regardless of their geographical background. Thus, in France the standard variety is based on the Parisian dialect, in Russia on the Moscow dialect.
You might be aware of the high status of what came to be known in England as Received Pronunciation (RP). RP is also known as BBC or Queen’s English (although the Queen’s English is a unique variety that nobody else speaks and BBC English is no longer as prescriptive as it used to be). It is RP that is taught to foreigners as the standard variety of British English. What you probably do not know is that, according to estimates by sociolinguists, only about 4% of the total population of the United Kingdom speak RP. Even when speakers modify their speech according to the norms of RP, they usually retain at least some local features in their pronunciations (this is evident with the present-day BBC: there are an increasingly large number of presenters with modified local accents). Most people in Britain are proud of where they come from, their way of speaking being the most important facet of identity.
Russia, however, presents quite a different picture. To be sure, there are local accents and dialects but their standing on the map of Russia is very different from the situation in Britain or other European countries. For one thing, standard Russian is not only the most prestigious, but also the most ubiquitous variety in Russia. A person from, say, Novosibirsk (in south-west Siberia) may sound exactly like someone from Moscow. Generally, people will employ one way of speaking (in Britain or in Germany, for example, speakers can have more than one accent in their repertoires). Secondly, in Russia it is being educated vs. being uneducated and coming from an urban centre vs. coming from the countryside that are more important indicators of identity.
One reason for the lower variation in Russian accents is purely linguistic. Generally, most accent variation is due to vowel sounds. In standard British English, there are 20 vowel sounds, called ‘phonemes’ in phonetics. In Russian, there are only five. This means that in Russian there is less scope for producing different variants of each vowel phoneme.
The most important reasons, though, are social. Factors like large-scale migration and the mixing of dialects, intensive linguistic standardization, education, social mobility, and the spread of radio and television have all contributed to the high homogeneity of the Russian language. The Moscow dialect itself was formed as a mixture of northern and southern Russian dialects. Since the late eighteenth century, Russian has emerged as one of the most standardized European languages (classical Russian literature had something to do with it, too). The standard variety of Russian has basically always been the only language of secondary and higher education. Social mobility with its aspirations to Moscow as the centre of human activity in the country is still very strong in Russia (remember the three sisters in the eponymous Chekhov play who desperately wanted to go to Moscow). And finally, if you watch Russian television and listen to Russian radio, you will hear no other dialect but standard Russian (which is still a dialect!).
As has already been mentioned, all this has something to do with being educated and the city vs. village opposition. In Russia, these associations are extremely strong. So if you have a non-standard accent, the implication is that you come from a village or that you are not educated – or both. Most non-Russians are unaware that Russians always viewed the first Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, as somewhat uneducated. Both of them were born and grew up in the countryside and had some non-standard features in their accents. And these features have always been perceived as not geographical or local but as “uneducated”. In contrast, both Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, coming from St. Petersburg, speak the standard variety of Russian and are regarded by most as well educated. Most people from urban centres speak like Putin and Medvedev (even though not all of them are necessarily highly educated!).
So what are these features that most people in Russia (those with the standard accent, of course) consider uneducated? There are historically three major groups of dialects in Russia: northern (to the north of Moscow), southern (to the south of Moscow), and those in between (with Moscow at the centre). One of the striking phonetic features of standard Russian is so-called akanye or a-saying (this is due to such a common phenomenon in Russian as vowel reduction which also exists, in a different form, in English). Akanye basically means that the vowel /o/ is pronounced as [a] in unstressed position. So moloko (“milk”) is pronounced as [malako] (the last /o/ is stressed). Such pronunciation is typical of Moscow and southern Russian dialects whereas in the north of Russia people (mostly in the countryside) say [o] both in stressed and unstressed positions (hence no vowel reduction): [moloko]. This is known as okanye (o-saying). The only difference between Moscow and southern Russian accents is that in the south the usual hard [g] (like in the English word “get”) is pronounced as the so-called fricative [g] (like the voiced “ch” in the Scottish word “loch”). This may seem a very minor difference, but Russians are very sensitive to it and, to standard speakers, it sounds quite rough (Gorbachev, for example, has the fricative [g]).
There are some other recognisable accents in Russian which are commented on. But these are employed by non-native speakers of Russian (for whom Russian is a second language), usually from far regions of Siberia (such as the Chukchi Peninsula) and from the Caucasus and central Asian republics (Russians who live in these places usually command the standard variety of Russian). Very often these accents become a source of numerous jokes (like, for instance, the Russian accent of English in the English-speaking world).
So where does all this leave you as a learner of Russian? When people who learn English as a second language come to the UK, they are baffled by the sheer number of English accents (remember that only 4% of Britons speak RP). Very often, this leads to considerable difficulty in understanding locals. With Russian, there is no such danger (unless you plan to go to a village and talk to old people). Wherever you want to go, be it St. Petersburg in the west or Vladivostok in the east (just imagine Russia’s vast expanse), if you have any comprehension problems they will not be because of differences in accents!