As an Arabic speaker I enjoyed learning Russian because we share verbless sentences, and you could just put the words together in any order and you get your idea across and you could be spot on too. So 'what is the time?'(Kotoryy chas) is 2 words as in Arabic for asking the time and other questions in conversation. And some Russian words have lovely music to my ears, as with ice cream and of-course, мороженое и, конечно.

> Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement

The difficulty is that the stress pattern is not fixed and needs to be memorized, and it often changes the inflection of the word. E.g. "домá" means "houses", while "дóма" means "at home". Another tripping point is that the stress placement is almost always different in Russian when compared to English.

I'm volunteering as an English teacher for Ukrainian refugees, and one of my rules of thumb is: "If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable". It works surprisingly well.

Stress pattern in russian is not just different from English, it's also different from Ukrainian half the time.

>If an English word looks similar to a Russian word, then the stress is likely on a _different_ syllable

Most of these are Latin and French loanwords where Russian (same as e.g. German) carried the accentuation over from the source language. English is the odd one out as it insists on putting the primary stress on either of the first two syllables, except in some recent loans (and those still get a secondary stress). With nouns the preference is for the first syllable. Russian surnames get similarly butchered, including notably Nabokov, which could have been adopted unchanged.

You may find this interesting: https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages

It seems like an extremely coarse classification. Category 3 contains languages with very different degrees of difficulty, while Bulgarian and Russian are both Slavic they are nothing alike in terms of difficulty since Bulgarian is the most analytic of Slavic languages (has the less inflection). That makes it extremely easy to learn compared to Russian.

What is also interesting is how written Russian was heavily influenced by old Bulgarian. In fact, written russian includes a lot of older written bulgarian vocabulary.

This results in a weird paradox: for literate Russians it is easy enough to read written bulgarian but almost impossible to understand the spoken language.

This happens in other languages too - danish and Norwegian are almost the same written, such that most products just combine the two on the packaging. But spoken it can be very difficult to comprehend

So... codified written languages are similar but real spoken ones have diverged? Is this only in the way things are pronouced or the differemce is deeper?

I speak Russian and some Bulgarian as third/forth languages, and while I agree that Russian is more difficult, I wouldn't say Bulgarian is "extremely easy" in comparison. It's maybe ~20% easier at best.

I think Bulgarian is considered the easiest Slavic language in terms of grammar because it has a simplified case system similar to how English dropped its cases over time.

On a superficial level that seems like a roughly correct ranking in my experience. On the other hand, I picked up one of the category 3 languages pretty easily. I think some of these are more "weird" to a native English speaker than "hard" per se.

The aspects that make languages difficult for a native English speaker vary quite a bit with the language. I would expect individual experiences with the languages to have high variance as a consequence.

As others hsve pointed out, it's a very coarse (and rather arbitrary) categorization.

E.g. both Turkish and Russian are in Category 3, but Turkish is trivial compared to Russian.

Turkish grammar is extremely regular, and follows easily defined rules that fit about two pages of easily digestible tables.

In comparison, Russian is a separate class tought in Russian schools for four years to native Russian speakers. And you still get people who can't properly inflect numerals, for example.

Turkish has a completely different vocabulary (loanwords aside) and a completely different grammar.

"I want to swim" in Russian is "ja hoću plavatj", "I" + "want" + "to swim". The only difficulties are the conjugation of "want" and the aspect of "to swim". In Turkish it's "yüzmek istiyorum", where "-mek" is "to" and "-um" is "I". Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.

> Even if the system itself is straightforward, it's still alien to a native English speaker.

As a native Russian speaker who speaks English and Turkish:

The question isn't about alienness. It's about difficulty. Turkish is trivial compared to Russian. You can learn all the grammar rules you'd ever need in a week or so (though most study materials make it harder than necessary). The rest is just learning vocabulary. Which is just as alien to an English speaker as Russian.

As for the example...

Here's a valid three word sentence in Russian: Ya idu domoj (I'm going home).

Depending on context, mood, feel, etc. any permutation of those words is a valid sentence: ya domoj idu, idu ya domoj, idu domoj ya, domoj ya idu, domoj ya idu.

And that's before we get into inflections, conjugations, gender etc. that neither English nor Turkish have. Or somewhat arbitrary pronunciation rules (korova is pronounced kahrohva) whereas in Turkish every word is pronounced exactly as written (with very few quite regular contractions in regular speech like yapacağım -> yapıcam) etc.

> The question isn't about alienness. It's about difficulty.

The original link is specifically about difficulty to native English speakers, which is certainly linked to its alienness.

Turkish is regular, has well specified rules you can learn in a week, is extremeley easy to read (pronounce as written, there's no floating/jumping/changing stress). Oh, and the alphabet is latin-based.

Russian: extremely complicated grammar using concepts entirely alien to English (declensions, inflections, conjugates, grammatical cases, genders, transgressives, and even plurals are weird), has free-form-not-really sentence structure, jumping stress. Oh, and a completely different alphabet to boot.

"the alphabet is Latin based"

Yes, phonetic spelling but you won't be able to read anything much before WW1.

As if that is a required criteria for learning Turkish, or for assessing its difficulty.

Note: 99.9% of Turks are not able to read much of anything before WW1.

Exactly. Historical amnesia which is partly what Kemal Atatürk was after. Year Zero.

Isn't English also a separate class taught in English schools to native English speakers?

Not always well. One of the problems is that English speakers do not get taught the proper parts of speech. I learnt far more about English from learning other languages than I ever did in English class. We would get told off for bad spelling and grammar, but very little on the actual mechanics.

English classes (at least at my high school) were largely about literature, less the language itself. Though I did take one elective class on grammar.

Yes.

All through middle and high school, so for 7 years from around 10 to 16. It did become one eventually in primary school, so probably the last 2 or 3 years there.

Not for four years, for all eleven years...

Difficulty scale looks about right.

> except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock).

Only because we're in a language thread: i.e. is "that is" (id est) e.g. is "example given" (exempli gratia)

I find Mandarin Chinese a lot easier than Russian.

I have been generally successful at learning Russian as an adult, but tonal languages are something that I just struggle with on a fundamental level. I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.

It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue. To their ear it must sound entirely different, yet to a non-tonal ear it sounds like you're saying everything 'almost' exactly correct.

> I want to express meaning and connotation with tones, rather than denotation. On the other hand I've never been terribly motivated to learn a tonal language, so it probably could be overcome, but it's something that would take an immense amount of training to overwrite that tone=connotation/emotion/question instinct.

Why would you want to? Pitch also provides connotations / emotions in Mandarin.

> It is also quite frustrating when a native speaker is completely unable to understand something you say because of a tonal issue.

That will never happen. Your bad pronunciation can aggravate other problems, but if your sentence is otherwise good, ignoring the tones will still leave it fully intelligible.

(I once asked a student in a Chinese school whether a particular class wasn't occurring, and he responded "poss". After some confusion, he was frustrated that the pronunciation difference between "poss" and "pause" should make such a difference in communicating with an English speaker.

But of course, it doesn't. If "pause" were a valid way to respond to "is chemistry class happening today", I would have had no difficulty understanding "poss". His problem was in bad knowledge of the language, not bad pronunciation.

You appear to be making the same mistake here. If you try to communicate, and fail, that is not evidence that you are qualified to diagnose what the problem was.)

Right but those Mandarin tones are pretty easy for an native english speaker to learn to say, they roll off the mouth easily.

Likewise, learning to speak the tone is just another grammar dimension, memorization.

Listening for tone is the hard part, but once you know enough grammar AND know the context of the sentence, it falls into place.

YMMV, also Cantonese is more difficult here (IMO).

I find Cantonese a lot easier on the ear. Unfortunately, nearly all the Cantonese I know is rude.

I find those Cantonese words ending in -p, -t, -k harsher than mellifluous Mandarin.

I'm not a great fan of the sibilant sounds in Mandarin. Which to be fair is pretty rich coming from an English speaker.

Only somewhat related: I was surprised by how simple and sound vietnamese grammar is when read through the latin alphabet. Tones are only a problem when speaking but it's increadibly easy to start understanding signs and labels in the country. Slavic and baltic languages i can read are MUCH harder to start with.

So i kind of suspect it might also be the case for chinese: tones and the alphabet are obscuring a clean grammar.

Conveying what I've heard from a few Vietnamese that also speak Chinese, so not any kind of firsthand experience since I speak neither: Vietnamese is more difficult to speak but is a simpler (less expressive) language.

I agree that written Vietnamese is relatively straightforward. It isn't that difficult to read to the eyes of someone used to latin script.

So Vietnamese is the “Danish” of East Asia it seems

Or the Golang of East Asia.

Personally I find Vietnamese and Chinese to be about the same difficulty overall, just not on the same areas.

Vietnamese is massively harder to pronounce with way less room for mistakes whereas reading is easier.

Fiendish logographic writing system (Chinese) vs fiendish grammar (Russian). I'm not a fan of Pinyin transliteration aesthetically.

Russian has a lot of words I can recognise in it. Not just loanwords either but words such as brat, dva, kot (brother, two (twa), cat). The other problem is the tonal system although Mandarin balances that out with simple grammar. Mandarin strikes me as mostly vowels and Russian as strings of consonants.