Explorer wrote: ↑Sat Oct 08, 2022 10:14 pm
gmads wrote: ↑Sat Oct 08, 2022 10:09 pm
I would have liked being a native Russian speaker, it seems to be more complex than Spanish
In your opinion, what makes Russian verbs so difficult? I've always thought the most complex part of this language was the declensions.
Fortunately, I was already familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet, so my first challenge had to do with phonetics, which involved dealing with around three different levels of complexity. The first one was that of regular vowels (with the hard sound): it seemed quite strange to me to hear the same vowel pronounced in so many different ways. I had to spend a lot of time reading and watching YT videos about the "rules" governing their sound, which finally turned out to be rather useless because the "initial rule", the one that would allow one to know where to stress a word... is non-existent, thus, just as in English, one has to learn how to pronounce each word
The classic example: milk → молоко. How does one pronounce it? It is a guessing game until one learns that the last "o" is the stressed one: молоко́, and so the word is pronounced: [məɫɐˈko]
The next level had to do with soft and hard sounds (and symbols), while the third one was about exceptions. The sad thing about all this is that one cannot actually read a word until one learns it
Of course, one thing is knowing how to pronounce a word and other actually pronouncing it... my mouth and tongue will have to achieve a Nadia Comaneci level before I am able to follow a simple song
I am just a beginner, around level -1, but from what little I have read, the declension system is going to be anything but a walk in a park: I've read that it's even more difficult than the German one. I am actually considering waiting until Elon Musk's Neuralink brain chip is ready
I don't know if I will ever be able to speak Russian, but I have loved this language since the first time I heard it, a few millennia ago. Sometimes when I am doing my Duolingo lesson I may listen to a small simple phrase, and it just makes me smile!