Представляете, он пытался сравнить русский язык с английским!
...или как объяснить на английском австрийскому другу, говорящему нативно по-немецки, ЧТО такое РУССКИЙ язык со всей его мощью и необъятностью!
Отрывок из письма.
/*заранее прошу прощения у всех, кто не знает инглиша, но перевода нет. Если оооочень интересен перевод - говорите.*/
Speaking about languages. I've studied German a little bit and I have an idea about it (and I'm going to learn this language some day). I know that English is so much easier then German even though it's the one group of languages.
But Russian is even more complicated. It's a statistic that Russian is one of the most difficult languages in the world. No, I'm not going to cause any holy war about it! :) It's because I really love languages and I'm sure it's the thing which worth spending time to learn and to give you an idea about one of my native languages.
To explain about Russian i can give you some of the brightest examples which are the pain in the neck for those who try to learn Russian.
1) it has terrible grammar with lots of exceptions (unpredictable ones as well!)
2) it has a huge vocabulary. It was a problem for me to translate that text in English because I couldn't find any english analogues for some words which express the lightest shade of emotion I wanted to show. For me English is a pretty "formal" language in comparison with Russian.
And I really admire those ones who can write beautiful and emotionally rich texts in English (I've read some amount of books in English - I know what I'm speaking about). It's impossible to show you what I mean because I cant translate my example in English :)
3) We have a set of impossibly wide sublanguages. One of them you know is slang. And, for example, we have a real "culture" of "bad" words! Why do i call it the "culture"? It's because some people speak this
language every day. You can use only one of these bad words in different forms to express your main idea! Personally, I dont like this part BUT I cant just leave it out because it's something really amazing in some extent.
4) So far as I've been learning English for these 8 months I've got tired to learn idioms and phrases. But the level of quoting and using idioms in Russian is SO HIGH you cant imagine! In my opinion it's kind of our specific feature (I mean all russian speaking natives). No one foreigner understands this "quoting" without living among us for some time. And it's useless to try to learn it :)
To give you an example what I mean speaking about quoting. I'm sure you remember this famous "I'll be back" :) It's what I call "quoting".
5) And the most complicated thing in my opinion. The flexibility! We dont have strict rules for creating sentences like in English or German. The weirdest thing is it's absolutely normal to have only verbs in your sentence :) For example:
* "Вечерело" - it's the sentence with the only verb. It's quite usual for Russian. The approximate translations are: "the night was falling" or "Day was turning into night".
* "Пойду схожу куплю поесть" - only 4 verbs in one complete sentence as well :) This case is colloquial, the commonest one!
Пойду = I'm going (the future tense)
схожу = I'll go (the future tense)
куплю = I'll buy (the future tense as well)
поесть = to eat.
Looks weird right? The translation is
"I'm going to go to buy something to eat" :)
* and the last one - i promise :) This is the common answer for the "yes/no" question when you aren't sure and tend to say "no" rather than "yes".
"Ты собираешься идти на вечеринку к Тане?"
"Are you going to Tania’s party?"
"Да нет, наверное" - "Yes no probably/may be"
How is it? :)
6) Hope you've had a fun :) Here's the last thing which is a problem for me personally. In Russian it's quite polite to say in a soft voice:
"Give me a cup of coffee". You don't have to use "would you like, if
it isn't a problem" and other cliches. "Please" could be good but it isn't necessary (it's necessary for formal requests).
Here is Russian. Great and mighty.
Отрывок из письма.
/*заранее прошу прощения у всех, кто не знает инглиша, но перевода нет. Если оооочень интересен перевод - говорите.*/
Speaking about languages. I've studied German a little bit and I have an idea about it (and I'm going to learn this language some day). I know that English is so much easier then German even though it's the one group of languages.
But Russian is even more complicated. It's a statistic that Russian is one of the most difficult languages in the world. No, I'm not going to cause any holy war about it! :) It's because I really love languages and I'm sure it's the thing which worth spending time to learn and to give you an idea about one of my native languages.
To explain about Russian i can give you some of the brightest examples which are the pain in the neck for those who try to learn Russian.
1) it has terrible grammar with lots of exceptions (unpredictable ones as well!)
2) it has a huge vocabulary. It was a problem for me to translate that text in English because I couldn't find any english analogues for some words which express the lightest shade of emotion I wanted to show. For me English is a pretty "formal" language in comparison with Russian.
And I really admire those ones who can write beautiful and emotionally rich texts in English (I've read some amount of books in English - I know what I'm speaking about). It's impossible to show you what I mean because I cant translate my example in English :)
3) We have a set of impossibly wide sublanguages. One of them you know is slang. And, for example, we have a real "culture" of "bad" words! Why do i call it the "culture"? It's because some people speak this
language every day. You can use only one of these bad words in different forms to express your main idea! Personally, I dont like this part BUT I cant just leave it out because it's something really amazing in some extent.
4) So far as I've been learning English for these 8 months I've got tired to learn idioms and phrases. But the level of quoting and using idioms in Russian is SO HIGH you cant imagine! In my opinion it's kind of our specific feature (I mean all russian speaking natives). No one foreigner understands this "quoting" without living among us for some time. And it's useless to try to learn it :)
To give you an example what I mean speaking about quoting. I'm sure you remember this famous "I'll be back" :) It's what I call "quoting".
5) And the most complicated thing in my opinion. The flexibility! We dont have strict rules for creating sentences like in English or German. The weirdest thing is it's absolutely normal to have only verbs in your sentence :) For example:
* "Вечерело" - it's the sentence with the only verb. It's quite usual for Russian. The approximate translations are: "the night was falling" or "Day was turning into night".
* "Пойду схожу куплю поесть" - only 4 verbs in one complete sentence as well :) This case is colloquial, the commonest one!
Пойду = I'm going (the future tense)
схожу = I'll go (the future tense)
куплю = I'll buy (the future tense as well)
поесть = to eat.
Looks weird right? The translation is
"I'm going to go to buy something to eat" :)
* and the last one - i promise :) This is the common answer for the "yes/no" question when you aren't sure and tend to say "no" rather than "yes".
"Ты собираешься идти на вечеринку к Тане?"
"Are you going to Tania’s party?"
"Да нет, наверное" - "Yes no probably/may be"
How is it? :)
6) Hope you've had a fun :) Here's the last thing which is a problem for me personally. In Russian it's quite polite to say in a soft voice:
"Give me a cup of coffee". You don't have to use "would you like, if
it isn't a problem" and other cliches. "Please" could be good but it isn't necessary (it's necessary for formal requests).
Here is Russian. Great and mighty.