>>24003 I don't think it's that hard to learn with some dedication. I only know enough to get by/make some small talk, but the alphabet is easy enough to get to grips with so you'll be able to sound things out pretty quickly. For me personally though it's the grammar that gets tricky, but I've found that with any language.
>>24003 A Russian reporting in, gentlemen. As far as I can say, our pronunciation is fairly simple, yet not completely devoid of complications (e. g. vowel and consosnant reduction are quite a handful). The spelling is much more fucked up. Ironically, even we, native speakers, sometimes find it challenging to spell Russian words, especially when it comes to the negative prefix/particle, some of the adjectival and/or participal suffixes and traditional spellings. There are bloody huge lists of rules which cover most of the spelling, but there is a vast number of exceptions nonetheless. The real fun comes when we look at Russian grammar. The verb is quite simple, and so is the adverb, but nouns, pronouns, numerals, adjectives and some of the participles impose a serious problem. The thing is, in these parts of speech of the Russian language, the archaic grammatical category of case is preserved. There are, arguably, 2 cases in English, the nominal one and the possessive one, and they apply only to nouns and pronouns. In Russian, there are 6 cases, and they apply to all the aforementioned parts of speech. Each of those parts of speech has got its own unique type of declension and each case expresses a specific grammatical meaning. Declension types of adjectives, participles and ordinal numerals are similar, though. Also, there are 3 separate declension subtypes for the nouns. As to syntax, there are formal rules that describe direct and inverted word order as well as their use, but in fact it's not that simple. Even though direct word order is generally appreciated in most situations, there are literally lots of ellyptical constructions and inverted word order constructuons, especially in spoken Russian. Generally, sentences are built in the way it is convenient to pronounce (as to spoken Russian) or read them (as to written Russian), so rules are more of a reference than of a strict set of instructions. Also, questions hardly ever have any effect on the word order and in most cases are expressed only by question marks in written Russian and by intonation in spoken Russian.
In a nutshell: 1. Russian is quite difficult. 2. The worst things about the Russian language are the grammatical category of case and the spelling. 3. As to comparisson, it is most obviously simpler/easier to learn than something like Chinese/Japanese, it is much more complicted/difficult to learn than English and probably a bit more complicated/difficult to learn than German.
>>24009 Hi Trotsky. Nice English you've got there.
May I ask, are you really all bastards? No offence, but whenever there's a horrible selfish bastard on the Internet, they tend to be Russian. Do you find your countrymen to be bastards? Is it a cultural thing? Are 'black hat hacker', 'griefer' and 'racist troll' taught as career options in your schools or something?
>>24010 Thank you, sir! I'm really glad to see your appreciation. This is actually my first post on this board, but I've been here on and off for half a year in read-only mode. And I have to say I love this board already. 2ch and 4chan are so full of retardation that this board is indeed a relief for me. >>24011 > Nice English you've got there. Thank you! It is an honour to recieve such a compliment from a native speaker. > May I ask, are you really all bastards? Well, not literally all of us, but still quite many. > No offence, but whenever there's a horrible selfish bastard on the Internet, they tend to be Russian. First of all, no offence taken. Now, to the topic. Your observation is true to some extent, as our main imageboard 2ch is packed with aggressive, xenophibic, ill-mannered, retarded or simply delusional kind of folk. Nevertheless, I can say that 4chan is not dramatically different: there is comparatively less aggression there, but as to manners and retardation it is even worse than 2ch. My point is: not only Russians behave like "horrible selfish bastards" online, and we are probably not the biggest ethnic group of "bastards" of that sort, but our misbehaviour might just be most utter and obvious. > Do you find your countrymen to be bastards? This is a huge topic to dwell upon, so my short answer is: no, I don't, because the question is too general and I understand being a bastard in a different way. There are three aspects that describe my attitude to my countrymen, which are as follows: 1. Being a bastard does not directly correlate with one's ethnic background. Whether one becomes a bastard or not depends mostly on their education and the upbringing, i. e. the effort one's parents put into helping their child to become a decent and mentally healthy human being. Therefore, being a bastard has a lot to do with one's personality, so I do not consider all my countrymen to be bastards. 2. It seems to me that screwing around and causing trouble online is not the worst of my countrymen's sins. I use the term "sin" metaphorically, of course. The worst sins of theirs are indeed their lack of open-mindedness and being susceptible to living by stereotypes instead of logic and common sense, as well as reluctance to accept progressive ideas. Here I refer to them with the 3rd person pronoun, because I am proud to be devoid of those characteristics. Sadly, these characteristics are very often to be found in the minds of my countrymen, and the situation is getting worse year by year, mainly thanks to the industrious work of our mass media. The good thing is not every Russian is like that. There still are decent, rational, open-mided people, and I am happy to have a couple of friends among them. 3. As it derives from the previous point, my understanding of being a bastard is a reactionery and narrow-minded person who fiercely defends their point of view, however obsolete and/or irrational it may be. Sadly, a great many of my countrymen fit this description, and so I do consider them to be bastards. However, there are Russians that are devoid of those lacks; alas, they are not so numerous. I try to make friends with the latter and never refer to them as bastards. > Is it a cultural thing? To some extent it is true. Unlike Britons, we have never had a massive cult of human mind, historically prefering to live by some vague spiritual/moral values, which is a good way to make people share reactionery views. Our history helped that too. You may read the following articles, it should give you the overall impression: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Rus%27#Influence_on_Rus.27_society https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Novgorod Nevertheless, I do believe that cultural/historical influence can and should be outdone and overcome by upbringing and education. Ironically, I am the living proof that it's possible. I attribute my not-being a bastard to my parents' and my teachers' effort. >Are 'black hat hacker', 'griefer' and 'racist troll' taught as career options in your schools or something? First and foremost, I do appreciate that you are treating this matter in a humorous manner! Well, I cannot say anything about hacking as I have little information about how popular it is among Russians. IT is not by any chance my area of expertise, but I have heard about those massive scandals involving Russian hackers. As a person that has got no idea of the scale of the problem, I can say that those scandals do not inevitably mean that hacking is a common hobby in our country. As to griefers, the problem is that in Russia a lot of people who play video games are ill-mannered minors. Once again, it is a problem of proper upbringing. Their groefers' parents are most probably bastards, and their children most naturally copy their behaviour. And finally, racism is an issue in Russia, both online and offline, and it seems to me that it is just part and parcel of the reactionery mindset that our majority perpetuates.
>>24012 Well, as far as I know one and the same Chinese character can be read in 4 different ways, and its meaning depends on the way it is read, let alone the fact that using characters (most of which have got a very comlex graphical structure) instead of letters is a serious problem for a person who has been using letters for his whole life. It does not seem easy at all, if you ask me.
Spoken Mandarin Chinese is fairly easy. The grammar is very straightforward and the pronunciation is easy once you've got past the issue of tonality.
Hanzi characters are a pain in the arse, because you need to memorise thousands of them just to achieve basic literacy. In alphabetical languages, you can usually guess at the pronunciation or spelling of an unfamiliar word. With Hanzi, either you know the character or you don't.
Computers have made life easier, because of the input system used to type Hanzi. You just type the word phonetically in the Latin alphabet, then the computer shows you a menu of characters matching that pronunciation, a bit like predictive texting. As long as you can recognise the character, you don't need to remember exactly how it's drawn.
Back in the bad old days, you needed to memorise both the character and the exact order in which the strokes were drawn, because that's how alphabetisation works with Hanzi. If you couldn't remember the stroke order, you couldn't look up a word in the dictionary or a name in the phone book.
>>24014 You'te thinking of Japanese, which has the On'yomi and Kun'yomi system. Since Japanese kanji are are imported Chinese hanzi (characters), there are multiple readings (which actually help us to reconstruct older Chinese dialects).
These are equivalent to a 'sound' reading, and a 'sight' reading. On'yomi is the 'sound' reading - how the word sounded in Chinese when the character was imported and what it sounded like to Japanese people.
Kun'yomi is the sight reading - the actual meaning of the character.
Each kanji can have more than one of each reading.
For example, 通。
In Chinese, this means to pass through or to lead.
>>24015 > Spoken Mandarin Chinese is fairly easy. The grammar is very straightforward Well, you appear to be learning Mandarin Chinese at the moment, and I'm not stusying Chinese, so I shall not debate this statement. > the pronunciation is easy once you've got past the issue of tonality. > Hanzi characters are a pain in the arse, because you need to memorise thousands of them just to achieve basic literacy. These statements are proving my point, not yours, aren't they? > Computers have made life easier, because of the input system used to type Hanzi. You just type the word phonetically in the Latin alphabet, then the computer shows you a menu of characters matching that pronunciation, a bit like predictive texting. As long as you can recognise the character, you don't need to remember exactly how it's drawn. That's a nice invention that does make life easier, no doubt about that. But one is probably not going to bring a laptop with themselves everywher, because it is normally heavy and doesn't fit in conventional bags. Is this character input method available for smartphones? If not, it is useful only if one is indoors. Also, what if you have to, shall we say, leave a short hand-written note to your Chinese-speaking colleague? Then one still has to draw the characters themselves, don't they? And that brings back the notorious pain in the arse, my point being that handwriting is still not completeley obsolete and ousted from our lives despite of the great advancement in IT. > Back in the bad old days, you needed to memorise both the character and the exact order in which the strokes were drawn, because that's how alphabetisation works with Hanzi. If you couldn't remember the stroke order, you couldn't look up a word in the dictionary or a name in the phone book. And this proves my statement once again.
So all in all, I am not convinced that Chinese is easier than Russian for a person whose mother tongue is an alphabetic language and hasn't got tonality. However, it might be easier for you to study Chinese than Russian if your mother tongue uses characters instead of an alphabet.
>>24016 Actually, I meant to refer to the phenomenon of tonality in Chinese by my comment, the "4 ways" of pronunciation being the 4 tones that are used in Chinese. I just didn't happen to know the appropriate English term for that, because I used to read about Chinese and Japanese in Russian and it was comparatively long ago. Sorry for misleading wording. By the way, I appreciate your contribution regarding the Japanese system of reading the characters. I used to think there were only 2 readings of each Kanji character in Japanese, now I see there are actually 4 of them. Still, there is no tonality in Japanese as opposed to Chinese, and then there are Katakana and Hiragana, and even Romaji, so you can find your way around writing and saying things even at early stages of learning.
If you're taught well, tones really aren't all that difficult. Mandarin only has four tones and they're easy to recognise. It's a hurdle in the early stages, but it's more than made up for by the immense simplicity of spoken Chinese. There are only a few hundred syllables and the texts for learners are written entirely phonetically, so pronunciation is piss-easy. The grammar is simple and regular with no tenses, cases or genders. It's very easy to build up a large and useful vocabulary.
The written language is a pain in the arse, but it's a lot less of a pain in the arse thanks to technology. Pinyin input (the phonetic system based on the Latin alphabet) is available on smartphones, so you're not tied to a computer. My preferred dictionary app has optical character recognition, so I can point my phone at a newspaper or a road sign and instantly see both a transliteration and a translation. If I'm faced with an unfamiliar character, it takes me literally three seconds to find its meaning and pronunciation.
Handwriting is very close to being obsolete, especially in China. English people occasionally complain that young people are so dependent on computers that they're forgetting how to write, but in China that is literally true. A lot of younger Chinese people can't write fluently with a pen, because they do it so rarely. It's perfectly normal for native speakers to completely forget how to write common characters. If you're required to hand-write a brief note to a colleague, writing it in Pinyin would be slightly gauche but perfectly legible.
Chinese is still a difficult language, but technology has taken a lot of the sting out of the more difficult aspects. I'd estimate that technology has saved me several hundred hours of study compared to older methods. I learned handwriting to pass my HSK exams, but I probably wouldn't have bothered otherwise, which would have saved me another couple of hundred hours.
>>24019 >The grammar is simple and regular with no tenses, cases or genders.
Sort of but not quite. In much the same way that we no longer decline nouns for case but rely on pronouns and prepositions, Mandarin does the same thing for tense. There's no conjugation, but instead you add a particle to describe the "aspect", which includes tense but also negation, completion and subjectivity. It's tense, but not as we know it.
Aspects are vastly simpler than tenses. You need to know a handful of characters and a few simple rules, rather than the complicated and inconsistent structures of most European languages. Conjugation is a nightmare and can massively impede vocab acquisition. Compare the twenty-odd forms of "manger" in French with the pleasingly simple "吃".
