Re: the last ask about how long you were learning Klingon before you created this blog.
If you have more to say I'd love to hear you elaborate on how Russian being your native language gives you an advantage in learning Klingon. Is it just about the pronunciation or does Klingon have actual Russian grammar elements or some other features that are reminiscent of Russian?
I know Klingon was created to sound very "harsh" and "foreign" to the ears of the anglophone audience and if I'm not mistaken the creator looked at Russian for inspiration, but I'm unsure if that's reflected anywhere but in the phonology?
A couple years ago I did briefly try to study Klingon through Duolingo, but my general dislike of Duolingo and its methods quickly put anend to that. Way before that I also taught myself how to read Cyrillic and then spent a couple of semesters studying Russian in a language class at my university. I forgot a lot of it but I'll definitely recognize aspects I learned, so if it's up to me you can actually go quite a bit into detail here :)
Just don't expect me to be able to have an actual discussion or contribute to it in any way. Спасибо)
It's about the pronounciation, and also a bit about the grammar too
The first thing I noticed when I started learning Klingon is that I had absolutely no problem with the Object-Verb-Subject sentence structure of Klingon (unlike the English-only speakers, who weren't used to it because English is Subject-Verb-Object), and that's because Russian doesn't require any sentence structure (because whether a word is a subject or an object is expressed through inflection), so Object-Verb-Subject didn't seem weird to be because I could speak in Object-Verb-Subject in Russian if I wanted to (I've actually noticed that after learning Klingon, I was more likely to say the object of the sentence first when speaking Russian!)
Knowing Russian does make pronouncing Klingon easier too, because Russian and Klingon share the rolled R sound, and because both Russian and Klingon vowels don't do the funny dipthong thing that English sometimes does (eg. English O sometimes sounds like eowh, while Russian and Klingon are just a flat O). Some of the sounds in Russian aren't completely identical to Klingon, but they still allowed me to sound good until I was able to pronounce everything properly (eg. I (capital i) sounds close enough to ы, S sounds close enough to щ and tlh sounds close enough to кь).
Also, I just think that having your first language be as painful as Russian makes you cracked at learning languages in general :P
One thing that I did find that makse Klingon more difficult for Russian speakers are the aspect suffixes. In English, aspect is the difference between something like "I saw it" (no aspect), "I had seen it" (perfective aspect) and "I was seeing it" (continuous aspect). In Klingon, aspect is expressed with suffixes (I saw it = vIlegh, I had seen it = vIleghpu', I was seeing it = vIleghtaH), and you don't have to have aspect if it's not necessary. In Russian, aspect is always built into every verb, so the continuous version of a verb, and the perfective version of a verb, are two entirely different verbs. Because aspect is automatically built in to Russian verbs, there's no such thing as a "no aspect" verb, which makes it really difficult to explain to a Russian speaker when to use or not to use (for example) the -taH suffix, because everything in Russian already has the -taH suffix (or -pu' for perfective), all the time! So I actually don't know how to explain aspect (or lack of aspect!) to a Russian speaker XD. The only reason why I know what it is, is because English is my other native language!
Also, Marc Okrand (creator of Klingon) specifically didn't use any Earth language as inspiration for Klingon, because he wanted Klingon to sound as alien as possible. Any resemblance to Earth languages is entirely coincidental! :P
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