Yo, meta! I feel I just have to ask you - Would you rate Russian as a hard language to study/learn?
Hmmm, it's hard to say. Certainly, for English speakers, it's a harder language to learn than Spanish, French, Italian, and the other romance languages (it was definitely harder to learn than Latin, which is the only other language that I know used to know), and I've heard it's harder than German just because of the alphabet. If you want something a little numerical, my professor said that becoming decently proficient in speaking/writing/understanding Russian takes an average of 1800 hours of hard study (for English speakers - it's all relative to which languages you already know), while Chinese takes about 2100 hours of study.
So far, there are three things that were/are really hard to grasp, for me at least, and judging by my classmates only, they're generally some of the hardest things to understand when learning the language (keep in mind that I'm a second year Russian student, so I'm only semi-conversational)
-The alphabet. Don't get me wrong, I adore the Russian alphabet. Russian is an absolutely beautiful language, and my favorite thing about it is writing it out, but it can be tough to learn the letters at first (especially letters that don't function like "traditional" English letters - й (the vowel shortener), ь (soft sign), and the hard sign). There are letters that correspond to the English symbol and sound, letters that correspond to an English symbol but not its sound (the most difficult to learn in my opinion, because you kind of have to 'unlearn' the corresponding English sound), and the letters that don't look like English letters, but make sounds familiar to the English language. It took us a couple of months to get used to the alphabet, and even now when we read a lot of people still stumble over unfamiliar words when sounding them out. Learning the alphabet is the first hurdle of the Russian language, but it's also a lot of fun to learn.
-Imperfective vs. perfective verbs. Learning verbs in another language is tough, yeah? You have to memorize all the different types of endings for different numbers and persons (I, you, he, we, ya'll, them). But in Russian, you have to memorize two verbs for each English verb, because each verb has a perfective and imperfective form. The shortest way to describe them is that perfective implies the completion of that verb action, and imperfective focuses on the process, but that's an EXTREME oversimplification, because each form serves many other functions. The hardest part about this isn't memorizing the forms, it's knowing when to use them, because it's often pretty confusing to decide which fits each situation.
-Verbs of motion. Verbs, verbs, verbs! Russian is an extremely verbal language, as our professor put it - verbs are very specific to every situation imaginable, and motion is the most notable example of this. There's no one "to go" verb. Instead, there are hundreds of verbs that each need to be used when the situation calls for them - traveling to and from and being on one's way by car, plane, boat, foot, and looking for directions to a place or just stopping by and the list goes on and on...Ex) Я зайду - I'm currently on my way (on foot) to stop by a place for only ___ amount of time. Verbs of motion have been the focal point of our last year of learning, no joke.
But why did I point out this specific stuff just to answer the question "Would you rate Russian as a hard language to study/learn?" Because, other than these problems (and they're big, ever present problems), I don't think Russian was a hard language to learn, and I had a great time learning it. Granted, my school has one of the best Russian language programs in the country, and my professor has won multiple awards for her teaching abilities, so it may be harder (and less fun) to learn usually, but I think that I still would have enjoyed learning the language. Like I said, it's a beautiful language with a lot of really interesting aspects (especially the case system, how verbs work and all the things they can do, and what you can learn about the Russian worldview by studying the language). If you do decide to learn Russian, it will be very, very hard in the beginning (especially understanding spoken speech, because stress is also important in the language, or you'll get completely different words), but it becomes much easier over time (save for the latter two things mentioned above, which are very long learning processes that I'm still undergoing).
Obviously I'm no expert, so it'd be great if you could get other opinions if you're seriously thinking of learning it, but that's my two cents. Basically I think deciding to study Russian was one of the best choices I ever made, whether it becomes a part of my future career or not!
