Thank you for that, I only dug out the HN discussion, having read the article back when it was on the front page. Weird that the link changed like that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-segregation

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Some Americans do grin all the time.

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.

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

> 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.

Well, Lithuanian is also a Proto-Indo-European language. But the one that somehow got sucked into a time warp from the past. And it even has a tonal pitch accent in addition to the stress pattern, just to make it more interesting.

You can throw stuff out or throw it away. They both mean the same.

The one that gets me as a native speaker is the difference between stand up and stand down. Or write up and write down.

Many phrasal verbs are fairly logical, and so don't require much attention.

English spelling is one of the hardest parts of the language to learn because the spelling represents ~16th century pronunciation. However what we gained is a common orthography for all the different dialects and accents of English. I can barely understand some people from Appalachia or Western England when they speak, but if they write it down it’s no problem.

The verbs in Russian can be complex, especially the verbs of motion and prepositions.

The state of English spelling has deteriorated a lot since the simpler minded started going online.

By the way, I far prefer Russian orthography to Polish which has me baffled a lot of the time.

> Writing Russuan is not that difficult

Never thought the difference mastering writing can be so significant. Just like to add what I understand regarding this. It's rather about not making any mistake writing by hand ca. 1-2 DIN A4 pages while someone reads a text (slow enough). I can't remember exactly but making only one (or two) mistake(s) and it is not anymore excellent (just good). Making 4-7 mistakes and it is not good (just sufficient). Making few more and it is bad which means failed. It's a long text with a very short path to fail.

Ukrainian is less difficult to write. There are claims that standardization/reform of Russian made it more artificial (far from natural people language) with overtaking too many words from Latin languages. When I read / listen to Belorussian I think they have even more luck with matching pronunciation/writing than Ukrainian. Which suggests this language is even closer to the common roots old language. (I'm not a linguist.)

> hundreds of millions of people who are against the war

Lie #1. If they were against the war there would be no war.

> That's not very bright of you, to put it mildly.

Lie #2. He tells facts.

> "just listen how silly Ukrainian sub-language sounds, lol".

Lie #3. This is not what Russian propaganda said. They said Ukraine will not allow to speak Russian and will punish for speaking it.

> Which is an argument every sane human being finds disgusting and stupid beyond all comprehension, of course.

The language itself is not guilty, of course. It's the speakers.

Learn British English, get an urge for a cup of tea.

So you gonna assign anyone who happen to have Russian passport as an enemy? Plenty of those are in the west and also have US/Canadian/etc passport

What the fuck is wrong with the world?

But by your own reasoning, you're also saying it's reasonable to learn Russian as a way to better understand Russia because your country happens to be opposed to them.

If you accept that this relatively obscure reason is a valid motivation (which I agree it can be) then you must also accept that there are all sorts of other motivations that are equally valid including "so I can speak to emigrants" or even just "because I find it fun".

Had to look that up:

"The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government."

So are you implying that I should start treating every foreigner as an enemy just because we as a humanity didn't, and maybe will never come up with a political system that will bring peace on Earth once and for all?

Allright then, I'll still regard most of you at least as non-enemies, if you so object being friends with me;

but you are free to continue considering me your enemy if your current political fartwinds turn your wind vane that way.

А в белом доме или в парламенте евросоюза с тобой согласны по всем вопросам?

Being able to read Stanisław Lem in original I'd consider possibly the biggest perk.

Do you believe that a significant proportion of native English speakers support the idea of imperialistic invasion and occupation, and the rape and torture of women and children?

Ah, the usual whataboutism that derails rational discussion. While the world isn't black and white, there are rare situations where things actually are totally black and white, and we are witnessing one of them right now.

I… don't think that's what I did?

trolling is really an art ^^^^

the references were about russian federation waging an imperialistic type of a war to conquer land when they have the most land already

When the russian military fired missiles and drones at my house, I should just accept it because some of my distant ancestors persecuted brown people. Is that your take?

Also, russia’s war against Ukraine enjoys popular support in russia today. Is your argument that the majority of UK and/or US citizens are eager for their respective countries to engage in war against former colonies today?

Fucking wild.

That works, but Russian doesn't have articles. You can, however, mostly get away by assuming that feminine nouns end with -а, -ь, and -я, neutral ones with -о, and all others are masculine.

I am starting to do this for Anglo-Saxon, instead of "Hūs", learn "þæt Hūs", instead of "Wer" learn "sē Wer", etc.

It didn't work for me in Mandarin though, where I can recall the sounds of words but not the tone.

The scale is two-dimensional and has three poles, like RGB color charts. Polish and Czech in the west, Russian in the east, and Southern Slavic (represented by Serbian) in the south. Hungarian and Romanian split them apart, while in turn having absorbed a huge amount of Slavic words in turn.

And then there's Bulgarian, with no cases and definite articles, to throw that scale off...

Russians don't actually speak foreign much, a Russian person who speaks four languages is considered very smart / having too much free time for their own good / both. Definitely not West Europe levels of language prowess.

I think it is generational. A hundred years ago, most Eastern Europeans would have learnt German, fifty years ago they would have learnt Russian and nowadays they all want to pick up American English.

The cases contain actual information that give the speaker more flexibility in structuring their sentences: a German phrase remains syntactically valid as long as you don't move the conjunctions or the verb, while the emphasis of the sentence shifts.

Of course, the German case system has been reduced so far that only the genitive (which is also on its way out) still modifies the noun. Articles have taken up the task of carrying the endings, with only pronouns still being fully declined.

Languages without case systems have other means to achieve this of course.

The parent comment is correct—the ich-laut isn't its own phoneme in English, but (at least in many dialects) it does exist as an allophone of /h/.

It very much does exist, and I chose those words on purpose as they're places where the realisation of /h/ is a voiceless palatal fricative (i.e., the German ich-laut) and not a voiceless glottal fricative. "ish" would be a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative.

I recommend you read up on English phonology, as a video for German learners really isn't a good source.

When I was in Japan all the street signs and train stations had a little transliteration in hiragana of the kanji name. Super useful to be able to read it

"Remembering the Kanji," by James Heisig, will set you up real good. I recommend this to anyone who starts in with the 3000+ character thing. It is fundamentally different from rote memorization that they would have you do at school, instead using mnemonics and stories.

What do you mean Mandarin is simpler in this regard? Japanese is partially kanji, while Mandarin is 100% HanZi (kanji).

But yes, grammar-wise Mandarin is definitely easier than both Japanese and Korean.

Admittedly I only know (a little) Japanese and no Korean, but I get the superficial impression that kana are generally much more phonetically faithful than Hangul (namely, because of the post-WWII spelling reform that updated all the kana spellings). Like, the fact that Wiktionary gives "phonetic Hangul" for each Korean entry, to more accurately represent the actual pronunciation, makes me really suspicious of the common internet claim that Hangul is the easiest script to learn.

However, Japanese also has allophony (the moraic nasal and devoicing both come to mind) and kana aren't entirely phonetic (e.g. ha/wa, he/e, ou/ō, ei/ē). I don't know enough about Korean to know if the "irregularities" are also this minor or not—can any Korean speakers/readers enlighten me?

Hangeul is at least an alphabet, in spite of appearances, and has hints as to the pronunciation built into the glyph shapes.

I found Croatian significantly easier than Czech, perhaps because of centuries (millenia?) of trans-Adriatic Italian influence?

Also compare the Polish 'chrząszcz' with its Cyrillic equivalent 'хрущ' (but take into account a difference in pronunciation).

At least some of that is the inevitable consequence of pronunciation changing over time ("rz" being the standout, which used to sound like the Czech soft-r, but lost its r-colouring) and others attempt to show an etymological relationship, which makes spelling a bit more difficult in some ways and easier in others.

Remember that English also suffers from digraphs.

e.g. ch, th, sh, wr, oo; etc

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English

That page lists 15 such over and above the doubled letters.

I have witnessed a child having learned it in one day.

That diagram is rather bad at what it tries to do. Those are also historically and phonetically the same: Λ Л Δ Д Κ К The first Cyrillic alphabet was using the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script , curiously created by Saint Cyril, but then people found it was too difficult, so someone in the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire mashed up Glagolitic, Greek and Latin to create the new Cyrillic (probably naming it as a sorry to Cyril for butchering his nice unique alphabet).

The diagram says that (Cyrillic ∩ Greek) - (Cyrillic ∩ Latin) is 3 letters, П Ф Г but as the sibling comment says, Λ/Л, Δ/Д and Κ/К are similar enough. That only leaves you with Θ/theta (th as in thin), Σ/sigma (s as in soft), Ξ/xi (x as in fox), Ψ/psi (ps as in lapse), and Ω/omega (o as in ore.) A lot of those are close enough that you can sort of guess, if you know the English names for the letters!

Many Cyrillic letters are Latin-looking, but actually have direct Greek analogues due to the history of the writing system. If you don't know Greek letters, you'd have a hard time guessing р made a 'r' sound. If you do, it's a natural guess.

Regarding culture I was unfortunate I had to briefly learn some russian history.

And why not useful?

Kinda obvious if you studied russia even basic via wikipedia. Russia has absolutely nothing to offer - neither to individuals nor to the world in general. The only thing they ever did are wars. And all inventions etc they copy/steal or those very few are result of research into weapons.

And the people is another story. Go to russia and see for yourslft.

Why would one learn language of this country if you can learn spanish/portuguese etc and get actual value from it or at least be able to communicate with nice people with come culture

She's saying that Ruzzian history and culture doesn't deserve neither recognition nor effort to learn them, at this period of time. It's fine if a person is already partially or fully embedded in those, you can't "unlearn" stuff. But I'm personally baffled at the people on reddit book subs who are clearly westerners and writing that they are actively trying to learn Ruzzian to read some Tolstoevsky. Yeah, I'm impressed, twice, both at the spectacularly low reward/effort ratio and the sheer tone deafness of it all. In 2025. Or 2024. Or 2023. Etc.

Millions of Ukrainians who use the language is not "barely anyone".

However that is true that many of Ukrainians are bilingual, due to decades of russian occupation and ethnic cleansing.

I started learning them for fun and didn't find it to be very difficult. I agree that a weekend might be a bit fast, I'd probably say a week to a month is enough time.

To practice I like going on r/EnglishCyrillic and trying to read some of the posts

Is that a joke? I’m eloquent in 3 languages and I don’t even consider myself to be particularly good at languages. Or maybe you have a really high standard for eloquence.

Actually brown in russian it's "bark-colored". bark = кора. Корица (cinnamon) is diminutive

You can also use "кофейный" (coffee-coloured) as synonym for "brown".

Take for example Russian коричневый (brown).

It stems from корица (cinnamon), which was first introduced to Russia in 16th century, and literally means "the color of cinnamon".

But before that they used бурый, from turkic bor/bur, meaning bay, as in horse color.

I guess there must be an older synonym for "color of coffee" in Georgian too.

No idea about Georgian but that's not unusual - for example English didn't have color for orange for a long time. That's why you say "red hair" even though the color is orange.

English didn't have the word "orange" until relatively recently (1500s) either. That's despite the word brown (which is the same colour in a different context) going back millenia.

Names change as language changes. It's hard to imagine Georgian didn't have a word for brown, but that would've been a completely different word that got displaced over time, like yellow-red was displaced by orange.

Given that this pattern appears in several Georgian colors (the color purple is also just "lilac-color": იასამნისფერი / იასამნის ფერი), I'm sure they just used a different brown thing before coffee was common.

There have been many authors who have claimed about various old languages that they lacked words for some colors, and "brown" is one of the most frequent colors about which such claims have been made.

I believe that most such claims, if not all, were wrong. The problem is that when reading an ancient text in which colors are mentioned it is very difficult to guess which is the color that is meant by some word and it frequently is difficult to even be sure that the word refers to a color and not to some other kind of property of an object.

There are very rare cases when the text says something like "this object is X like blood", so you can infer that X = "red", or "this object is Y like the sky", so you can infer that Y = "blue".

Brown is a color for which it is even rarer to find suitable comparisons in a text, from which the color can be inferred, than for colors like red, green or blue, which are typically compared to blood, grass and sky.

So when various authors have claimed that there was no word for "brown" in some old language, the truth was that they just were unable to find any word whose meaning could be determined with certainty to be "brown", in the preserved texts, even if there were plenty of words that most likely meant "brown".

Moreover, in nature there are many shades of brown, lighter or darker, more reddish or more yellowish, which is why in many languages there are multiple words for brown, which are derived from various things that have that particular shade of brown, e.g. words that mean coffee-brown, chestnut-brown, dry-earth brown, brown like the fur of certain animals, etc. Such words that identify a particular shade with reference to a familiar object have been renewed from time to time, in function of which objects have become more familiar or less familiar. After coffee became a very popular beverage, in many languages it has replaced whatever reference object was previously used for a dark brown.

As an example, many have claimed that Ancient Greek had no word for "brown". However, when reading Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, i.e. the oldest Greek texts except for the Mycenaean tablets, there already are a lot of places where there is no doubt that "brown" was meant by the word "aithono-". This is an adjective derived from the verb "to burn", and most dictionaries say that it means "burning". However, in the actual texts there are plenty of places where it does not mean "burning", but it means "burnt", more precisely "having the color of burnt wood", i.e. brown. This is not surprising. Another word used in the same way is "anthrakos", which can be used either for an object red like a burning ember (e.g. for red garnets or rubies) or for an object black like an extinguished ember (e.g. for charcoal or coal).

He might have been unusually color aware, as brown is a type of red.

Japanese has a word for green now 緑 (midori). Traffic lights use the word for blue for historical reasons

Celtic languages, and I believe Mayan, had a similar thing going on with blue and green. A lot of languages never distinguished orange from yellow really either.

> On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language.

This is one of the reasons why Latin is tought. You learn transferring a gramatically hard language into your own, having to learn the ins and out of your own language's grammar. No grammatically complex situation in your own language can fluster you afterwards.

I learned (an academic expression of) German grammar at university, in computational linguistics. There was a class „Syntax I“, and it had us break down phrases and sentences in a graphs, a (constituent) C structure and a (functional) F structure.

Best class I ever had!

Interesting. We had a lot of grammar parsing of Russian since the 2nd grade of school. Especially we analyzed parts of speech and constituents. For the latter, we'd underline words in sentences in different ways.

It's so widespread that today if you want to play word guessing with gestures, and you have several words, you just imitate that underline style, and everybody understands it. (Just remembered, we also did a lot of word analysis, marking up prefix, root, suffixes and ending, and everyone knows this markup too.)

>Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object.

This is only true in third person singular. For example, in first person singular: 'моя чашка' (my cup, 'cup' is feminine) vs. 'мой ключ' (my key, 'key' is masculine). Third person plural: 'ихнее дело' (their business, neuter) vs. 'ихняя забота' (their concern, feminine) although most educated Russian speakers would object to these pronouns as a bit too colloquial (although not as colloquial as 'евойная'). Same in second person singular: 'твой друг' (your friend, masculine) vs. 'твоя подруга' (your friend, feminine). In all of the examples above, the gender of the speaker/owner cannot even be determined (grammatically speaking).

No need to throw daggers at Wayne Rooney just like that!

I was surprised as well living in Hong Kong that many kids grow up never learning Cantonese being born there (Non Chinese heritage). Their parents spoke their native language, and they learned English in a private school.

You could live there until very late in life never needing to know more than a few sentences.

I don't think I've ever seen this in my life from a Russian. I do see a lot of Spanish and Chinese speaking immigrants with no interest in learning English though.

Hebrew was literally synthesised a century ago. Language designers really did great work on taking a core of a dead language and proposing a cleaner, more modern version of it.

Russian and English never had this "rearchitecture-and-cleanup" moment. In fact, English borrows heavily from different languages (old german, old danish, latin, old french...) adding even more complexity. Russian borrows from greek, old slavonic (bolgarian), among others. So an advanced speaker/reader of these languages has to understand the influences.

A couple of years ago I tried learning some minimal Ancient egyptian. A fascinating language in its diversity. Middle kingdom egyptian, old and new kingdom written dialects. Then, there's a simplified cursive script which almost feels like modern writing.

> Russian is seriously messed up language.

Some (most?) national languages, which developed chaotically, are very illogical, with weird constructions and some inexplicable features (Russian and English are examples of this). Artificial/planned languages such as Esperanto are a different matter -- they are very easy to learn and very pleasant to the ear.

I have just watched a video about Hebrew spelling which suggests it is a lot more complicated than people realise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_h541RkCTI

Because Hebrew has been revived artificially.

That's why we all say it is very important to think critically and think for yourself. Always test your ideas and be open to change.

Oh come on!

Every state has a long history of opressing others, I'm sure Russia did it too, but to be honest being from western Europe I have my own colonial history to come to terms with before looking at others'. What I know about XXth century Russia, though, is that at some point and in some places at least they went as far as inventing writing systems for local languages that had none so that teaching could be done in that language; so that exemple alone is enough to tell me that your viewpoint lacks nuance, to put it very mildly.

History of civilizations is certainly interresting but this is not even the point; the point was: why should the interrest of a text from Nabokov about the Russian language be seen through the lense of some modern episode of political violence? This is obvious nonsense, yet it appears to come up frequently, sometimes, with some people. Why? And what can be done to stop the contagion before mankind revert back to clan warfare? (because if we want to look for reasons to hate each others in past or modern politics, sure enough we will get there!)

This is false.

Colonization of eastern parts of russia involved forced conversion to christianity, violence, rape, mass murder, but not language extermination

Even culture extermination is an exaggeration, sure some areas got forcibly "converted" to christianity (if they were unlucky to be invaded before USSR) but you will see mosques/buddha statues/whatever is applicable and all the local traditions and beliefs mostly going like before

Actually in areas where local languages exist they kept schools teaching local languages and official signs are duplicated in both local and Russian all the way from USSR. I know this first hand;) but even the article you linked will tell you that.

So it was maybe not as good as support for indigenous languages in Canada but not extermination

Only since 2018 it is optional to teach local language in schools, previously there were at least some schools that teach it in every area like that. thank Putler for that too.

Exterminating languages is one way to put it, progress is another.

Languages have died throughout time, as long as the language is preserved in a book for scholarly reasons I see no issues.

It also depends on how it's done, politically or through violence.

> You're struggling to see how glorifying language, culture and ignoring context triggers people?

Yes, actually, I am. And not only that, I'm also wondering why you think the linked post is "glorifying" anything.

I don't think he suggested hating all the Russians.

But I agree that we shouldn't promote or glorify any aspect of the Russian culture, including the language, until they face the truth and start making amends for their history. Instead they are currently doubling down on the atrocities and russification.

So yes, this article is misplaced here.

Majority of Ukrainians want nothing to do with Russia, Russia culture, language etc. Given that a bulk of "shared culture" is Russian attempts to suppress anything Ukrainian over past few hundred years.

This is where interest of Ukrainians lay.

And I'll quote you a Russian journalist, that had to run away from Russia and later was assassinated by Russians in Ukraine. 10 years ago or so he wrote: west should dig a deep ditch around Russia and fill it with alligators.

There is also non-zero amount of actual russians that think that russian culture brings only misery and should be destroyed together with russia (state as we know it)

Is English commonly spoken by countries that aren't former British colonies? I am a Ukranian citizen, and if I can speak Russian, and not have that kind of prejudice, you should also be able to. In fact most Ukrainians speak Russian.

The propagation of English is due to the influence of America and Britain. If you look at the history of what those two have been up to all around the world, it's not pretty.

Because there is 0 logic in blaming the language.

I live in Baltics. It took 50 years and many dead people, but we got rid of them.

I honestly do take pity on russians but I also chose to not engage with russian culture to sanitize my own environment as it's just too ruined for any healthy engagement.

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