After Chinese, easier to learn languages?

[Scoobyqueen]

I am going to go for Russian. My employer has agreed to sponsor a course in Russian as it is considered important for our sector. I will be easy to practice since we already have several Russian speakers at work. Looking quite forward to it. You can do a lot with intonation apparently or so my Russian colleagues tell me. Sounds a bit like it might be like the French use intonation if they want to be particularly arrogant ;-) (sorry couldnt resist that. This is just how it came across on occasion when I worked there)

[ilovelanguage]

apart from Chinese, Japanese, I also learn Tamil now. I reckon you can try. It's a southern Indian language and its origin can be from sanskrit - one of the oldest language in human history.

I've read some of the info and if anyone have time, you may also check these:

http://scholar.googl...%2C5&as_sdtp=on

Also guess what, after doing the Japanese and Tamil, I found them more related to each other.

e.g. Samy - God, illai - no/negative meaning in BOTH language - how amazing!!

some reference can be :

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20080706rp.html

http://arutkural.tripod.com/tolcampus/jap-tamil.htm

Good luck for your language studies!

[knadolny]

I studied Japanese for three years after I had a handle on Chinese

I am in the midst of learning Japanese. Having a solid foundation in Chinese definitely helps. I love being able to read and understand emails, newspapers, etc. Even if I can't read in Japanese I can figure out the meaning. That helps a lot with self-study.

However, you are going for Russian. Good luck!!

[Scoobyqueen]

I have started my course in Russian and I can confirm it is a lot easier than Chinese.

It is a lot easier to remember vocabulary and I dont just mean the vocabulary that has the same root as Germanic languages. It is also possible to have a conversation a lot quicker than it was at this stage with Mandarin. I am a bit surprised that this is the case. The grammar is a bit tricky but if you have done German and Latin grammar, it is just a matter of memorisation, not necessarily a question of derstanding grammar concepts.

Also one thing I have noticed is that the Russian teachers don't put as much pressure on you to learn as Chinese teachers do. The lessons are shorter too. There is some homework but you can get away with less preparation for a lesson than with Chinese.

I have opted for skype lessons and a one week course in Russia.

[Meng Lelan]

I'm really surprised at your impression of Russian. Russian was the first language I opted for in college and it was a nightmare, I dropped out and tried Chinese and so here I am.

[Scoobyqueen]

What was a nightmare about it? I have had 40 one-to-one lessons so far. Maybe the worst is still to come? I seem to be able to communicate the neccesary stuff (with errors granted) but they can understand what I say.

(however and adding, I did do a course in Russian when I was about 13. This was free and was just one hour a week and we did not take it seriously - no homework. I was unable to remember anything from that course apart from" my name i"s and" goodbye". I dont count that. I am now wondering if something did stick. I have had to relearn everything but I have had moments where I have thought that I was not surprised if that makes sense).

[Meng Lelan]

Well, have you got to the verbs yet? The gender specific conjugation? And you have to memorize where the stress goes onto each syllable. It was thousands, thousands times harder than Chinese. Not only that if I wanted language practice the campus had hundreds of really nice Chinese back then, but only about 40 or so Russians and they were not friendly at all.

[Scoobyqueen]

I have started that. The memorisation of the stress is a pain I agree. However in Chinese I found it very hard to remember words just from the sounds. They all sounded the same and I would not remember which hanzi was first or second if it was a two syllable word. That was very hard to memorise.

We have a big event in November and I will have to welcome Russian media. Let's see how I fare in "real life": I will report back.

Russians are a lot friendlier in Russia for some strange reason.

[Meng Lelan]

Russians are a lot friendlier in Russia for some strange reason.

I wonder why. The ones in the US, well, I don't think I want to talk about it. Have fun with your Russian media welcome in November hopefully you can send us a vid of the event.

[atitarev]

Kudos for saying some nice words about Russian and Russians As for learnability, it does, indeed, require much less time for English speakers to master Russian than Chinese. I'm native Russian. Studied German (used to be quite fluent in German) and some French. Chinese, Japanese and Arabic have been my focus in the last 6 years or so, Arabic being the latest addition.

[MYRNIST]

I am a native speaker of English but can speak Russian fluently, after 4+ years of college courses + studying abroad + using it professionally.

In my humble opinion they (Russian and Chinese) are about the same difficulty in the beginning - that is, totally incomprehensible and terrifying. Chinese has the tones and characters and homonyms, Russian has extremely synthetic grammar (very different than English) and gender and unpredictable word stress. And the Cyrillic alphabet to boot.

But, once you get past the first three years or so and develop a "feel", Russian becomes a lot easier. It has an alphabet (means you can sound out words), it is extremely standard (aka no insane regional variations*** like in Chinese), there is a significant amount of cognate vocab with English, etc.

I can't offer any comment on how Mandarin is at the advanced level, since I am still at the "terrified noob" stage.

***the worst it gets is a Ukrainian accent (що ти ховоришь?), and that is not too bad

[Loriquero]

I wonder why russian doesn´t have crazy dialects since is so widespoken... I haven´t heard of any other language like that.

[MYRNIST]

Because of the Soviet Union.

One, when the Communists took power over the former Russian Empire they made some massive orthographical reforms and standardizations, specifically designed to iron out variation in the language. There were a bunch of old characters and constructions that got thrown out the window, making a for more streamlined language. Censorship also accelerated this process, since to get cleared for publication you had to write in politically acceptable (i.e. standardized) language.

Second, because of the centralized Soviet education system. You had one central body in Moscow deciding how Russian was going to be taught in schools across the entire Communist bloc (and consequently, how it would be spoken by people for the rest of their lives). Universal education meant that everyone in the Soviet Union received the same language training, regardless of whether they were in Vladivostok or Minsk. It is actually pretty mind-blowing: I know Georgians, Russians, Kazakhs, native Siberians, Uzbeks, Ukrainians, and more, and they all speak pretty much the same.

Third, because Russian people haven't been living in far-flung locations across the huge empire long enough to develop regional languages, ala China. You have Cantonese and Hakka and Szechuanhua because people have been living there, far away from the standard Beijing Chinese, for thousands of years, developing their own culture and language. The Russian Empire (the basis for the Soviet Union and modern Russia) really only got big a few hundred years ago, which is relatively speaking quite a short time.

[Loriquero]

Interesting... thank you for the answer.

[atitarev]

The dialects were not present even before the 1917 revolution, so it's not a very valid answer. Although, media and centralisation and standardisation always made a difference. Russia was spreading rather quickly from West to East, as Russians built towns and villages with houses from wood. There was no restriction on wood in Russia unlike the rest of Europe. Scarecely populated areas in Siberia and the Far East didn't resist the Russian expansions and most just integrated with Russians.

In my humble opinion they (Russian and Chinese) are about the same difficulty in the beginning - that is, totally incomprehensible and terrifying.

Complexity - Russian is only level II and Mandarin is level IV and requires 3 times less to master than Mandarin.

And the Cyrillic alphabet to boot.

Cyrillic is the easiest foreign script for a person who just knows Roman letters, even easier than Greek (capitals and small letters look similarly). If you think Cyrillic is hard, you're lazy.

***the worst it gets is a Ukrainian accent (що ти ховоришь?), and that is not too bad

The phrase "what are you saying?"

In Russian: "что ты говоришь?" (što ty govoríš?)

In Ukrainian: "що ти говориш?" (ščo ty hovóryš?)

Russian is largely mutually comprehensible with Ukrainian and Belarusian and mastering any other Slavic language is easy. There are as a minimum over 60% of common roots.

[MYRNIST]

I disagree re: pre-Soviet dialects, but okay.

The bit about different "language levels" is pseudo-science. From a linguistisc perspective the distance of L2 is from L1 is what matters, in terms of difficulty and time learning L2. If your first language is Cantonese (and hence quite close to Mandarin), it certainly will not take you 3 times as long to learn Mandarin as it would Russian. For English speakers, I agree that Russian is probably easier to learn than Mandarin, but that's purely because Russian is considerably closer to English (both Indo-European languages) than it is to Chinese (a Sino-Altaic language.)

I agree that Cyrillic is quite easy to learn, just saying it's another barrier to scare off people in the beginning stages.

Yes, obviously Russian and Ukrainian (along with many other Slavic languages) are close to mutually intelligible, I was just trying to phonetically represent how someone with a strong Ukrainian accent sounds when speaking Russian.