i feel like you've mentioned it before, but what's the difference between writing in english vs your native language? 🤔
ough, tbh i haven't written anything substantial in russian (my native language) for so long... only short pieces here and there. the last long fic was abandoned 4 years ago because i started writing guess what... the ever-changing... lol...
well, the first and rather obvious thing is that the meaning of what i write doesn't need to be double-checked lol. i do think i'm not really terrible at english, and most mistakes come from my inattentiveness (can't win against my adhd sometimes), but there have been a lot of cases when i use a word/phrase i'm not certain about (at some point of learning a new language it becomes more preferable to guess the meaning of words based on the context it was used in, not open a vocabulary every time; bad habit, but still), and it turns out i misunderstood what it meant lol.
the second thing, phrasing is a bit different. it comes both with that all russian prose (fanfiction included) has a... vibe, idk, which is different from the prose written in english. like, my own texts/fics feel different, even if i've written them at the roughly same time (within a month, for example).
punctuation plays a major role here (it sucks that em dashes are now strongly associated with AI, because i love using them in both languages, same with colons and semicolons: they set a certain rhythm to my writing, which is very important to me). it has a very, very strict and unquestionably set rules to it, nowhere near the ambiguity of the oxford comma. it is really important, and it helps to understand a written text so, so much easier, because of them there almost never a doubt what an author said—and, of course, commas also create a certain rhythm!
participles (the two different kinds of them: one closer to adjective, and the second one closer to adverb) and participial phrases which can make a sentence harder to digest or make it more dare i say "poetic", or flowy (or pretentious). not that english can't be poetic, but it's more... curt? sometimes i really miss case suffixes and suffixes in verbs (and other kinds of suffixes: for example, in english we say "little box" when in russian a "box"/"korobka" is transformed into "korobochka" which is cuter imo. and we still can say it with an adjective too! and with an adjective AND a suffix for extra emphasis! flexibility!).
in short, everything which makes russian a difficult language to learn is also making it a more flexible language in writing, easier to experiment with. (though english still can't hold back my uhh metaphor-based writing. i love writing weird sentences, and i'll make it work. though in russian, it's so, so much simpler... sigh)
the third thing, russian is easier to make more "simple". there helps having no preestablished sentence structure. of course, there is still the ground for experimenting in english, but most of written/spoken text tends to follow "subject (noun) + predicate (verb) + adjective + object (noun) + adverb". we don't have any kind of a set structure in russian. why does it make a language simpler and not more difficult? having much more freedom to make a text "sound" with a particular rhythm, and, let's say, a unique soul, carry your distinct style of writing. but maybe i'm not that well-versed in english literature written in its mother tongue lol.
(also, we don't have grammatical articles, which are STILL, 20 years of learning english, a pain to me. i get the concept of course, but man, sometimes it is really hard to figure out which one should i use and if i need to use it at all. adds up to overthinking and additional editing—which is always exhausting.)
uhh, i guess, that's all? i think i said more about the grammatical side of things, lol, but it all comes down to languages "sounding" different, to say it simple. take a paragraph from the ever-changing where i tried too hard and imagine it being even more pretentious and metaphorical (and with less glaring mistakes), and here you go, that's how i write in my native language :3
thank you for the question and being interested in my writing, as always ❤️
amandla
discoholicmusic
dailybridgerton
