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Mnementh said:
Lumikki said:
Mnementh said:
NewGuy said:
2) How hard is it to learn the language? From a speaking perspective and from a writing perspective. I know there are the rules for "feminine" and "masculine" (and also neutral) objects like in french, spanish, and portuguese. Anything else besides that? How is the grammar? Lots of verb conjugation? Any tricks to pronunciation?

And привет :)

I can answer that, as I learned russina in school. In my opinion it is pretty hard - because the grammar is more complicated than most european languages (and they are often not easy). In my opinion only Japanese is harder (even more ridiculous grammar) and even chinese is a bit easier, because of grammar. Writing cyrillic letters is not hard. That's the only thing I still can, I forgot most russian words after school.

I also learnt Russian in school and I think it's not the easiest, but in the same time it's the hardest language. For example I think German was much much more trickier than Russian. There's lots of irregularity in grammar and not always the words are pronounced as written (o is sometimes pronounced as a etc). I could say that if you learn the cyrillic alphabet you will notice that Russian has borrowed lots of loan words from German/English/Swedish/French and it easies the learning a lot if you are familiar with those languages. I haven't either used Russian for a long time and starting forgetting.....

As I'm german, I have no problems with it. But I agree, most foreigners I know claim german is very hard to learn.

@pezus: I can't Icelandic, is it really that hard?


It all comes down to who is teaching you the language I think.  I'm american, but took german in high school and I found it very easy and natural to pick up.  However, my teacher was actually nationally recongnized as one the best in the country too...