I’m too late for my advice about learning Russian, which is “Don’t!” I struggled with Russian in college. My teachers and classmates were great, but the language is hideously complex.
And I have a TERRIBLE head for languages. I cannot emphasize enough that your mileage will vary with learning any language if you are not me.
If you’re going to do this, I would agree with the posters upthread who said to learn Cyrillic right away - both block and cursive letters, and both reading and writing. I had enough math background that I was able to learn the Cyrillic alphabet in a week - it’s based on Greek after all. The script isn’t that hard, but half the script letters are groups of swirls - you need to put lines over or under certain letters so you can tell a “T” from a “Sh”. I’m sure the Cyrillic “M” needed a line also, but it’s been nearly 30 years since I’ve had to deal with the language. I had terrible handwriting to start with, and Cyrillic script just killed it, but being able to read and write the alphabet is crucial.
Another criticall thing you should learn about Russian ASAP is “perfective aspect”. Making a verb into the simple past tense in Russian is drop-dead simple. Take the infinitive, chop of the last two letters, and add a suffix. The suffix depends slightly on the gender of the subject (and Russian treats “plural” as another gender), but it’s EASY. Imagine if every English verb’s past tense was verb plus “ed”, and you’ve got the idea.
However, for complex past tenses Russian is not so simple. Russian brings in a whole other verb for complex past tenses. Most of the time the “perfective” verb differs by a vowel or a suffux or a prefix, but the Russian verb for “to listen” and the verb for “to have heard” are completely different words. (Like “to be” in English, it’s the common words that keep their irregularities. :rolleyes: ) In any case, you have to memorize at least two, and occasionally many, different verbs for the same concept. My college course taught us this right away. While it was a lot of work learning two words for every single verb, at least we did not start second semester getting this particular bomb dropped on us. Which is how our textbook was written! :eek:
Verbs of motion are a bear also. Not a nice teddy bear, but an angry, hungry, cold, bear looking to make you supper, after slapping you around a bit. I mentioned that Russian treats “plural” as a gender. Well it seems that encoded in the DNA of Russian is the concept of “a few”. So for verbs of motion - one top of the perfective aspect I just vented about - there are separate verbs for:
- Moving once
- Moving a few times
- Moving indefinitely
A friend of mine read a story in her Russian class about Yuri Gagarin. Russian has one verb for “making a single orbit of the planet” and another verb for “orbiting the planet more than once”. All of the verbs of motion are like this!
As I recall there are even more complications with verbs of motion, but let’s move on to numbers.
That’s right, numbers. The basic concepts of counting. The way I finally figured it out is that numbers in Russian behave like prepositions. Since Russian is a highly inflected language, prepositions (including numbers!) change the case of the phrases they modify. True prepositions change the case of their subjects in one particular way. Numbers change the case of their subjects differently depending the number of subjects - case “A” for one subject, case “B” for a few subjects, and case “C” for many subjects.
Oh, and the numbers are themselves declinable, if they are in prepositional phrases. So you’ll see things like “1987-obo” in a Russian sentence like “Ivan has worked here since 1987.”
Honestly, how the Russian built their world-class scientific and engineering establishments with that language is beyond my ken. I think they secretly all speak Latin or Sanskrit, and just made up this pretend language so we foreigners would leave them alone and stop invading their country.
And if you’re assigned to translate “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch”, just go ahead and buy an English translation to work from. Prison slang is not in your typical Russko-Angliskii Slovar, and Solzhenitsyn is known for “making his own Russian”. :smack:
My passing grade in Russian 4 was a pure act of charity.
And after breaking my puny human brain on Russian for four semseter, the first scientific paper I had to read in a foreign language was in … drumroll please … French! The French have done many great things, but they have not contributed many words to the vocabulary of physics. “Angle de Bragg” is not too hard to translate.
Good luck to you!
