Is Russian difficult?
Is Russian difficult? A common worry of a learner at the beginning of Russian language is that Russian is a difficult language. An honest opinion of an experienced Russian teacher: it is, and it isn’t.
Grammar: Russian is a fully synthetic language, so verbs conjugate, nouns decline, and everything is sensitive to gender, number and case. One of the best things about Russian, which is a very standardized language, so you will not have to adjust your ear to anything but the standard Russian that you have been learning. While Russian does not have tons of verb tenses like English does, it has a complicated system of cases for adjectives and nouns depending on what prepositions you use/what meaning you are trying to entail. The German language uses cases as well, 4 cases of them, to be precise (Nominativ, Akkusativ, Dativ, Genitiv), and Russian has 6, so this concept might not be entirely new for all Westerners. However, it gets quite complicated when it comes to different classifications of verbs which impact meaning and spelling (perfective and imperfective verbs, different forms of conjugation, etc).
Alphabet: The alphabet is difficult in the first few lessons, easy all the way after that. One letter corresponds to one sound. Most of it is phonetic with a few exceptions. But even if you forget what the exceptions are and read everything exactly the way it’s written, Russians will still understand you perfectly well, because everyone knows the spellings. The alphabet is far from the hardest part, and doesn’t really take long to grasp at all.
Spelling: Also, the spelling in Russian is quite regular, so generally speaking, if you can hear the sound of the word in your head (or you’re asked to transcribe it from audio), you can also spell it!
Hard part: Two things I do find difficult are cases and aspects. Russian is an complex language and learning it without a big effort and a lot of help from native speakers is almost impossible. So many declensions, so many rules.
On the other hand, if you are passionate you can learn anything! Nowadays there are so many opportunities to learn foreign languages. It can be for you just fun to learn it. All in all, while Russian is not the most difficult language in the world, certain aspects of it might make it look intimidating to learners.