History UsefulNotes / RussianLanguage

Ending consonants are often pronounced unvoiced; this, paired with the fact Russian does not have an 'ng' sound, results in words like "strong" being pronounced "stronk." There is also no "th" sound in Russian, a trait it shares with many other European languages, so they mispronounce "th" as "s" or "z" (rare options include "f", "v" or even "d"). Same thing with "w". Russians, like Germans, tend to pronounce it as "v" or sometimes "oo". And "h" is replaced by "kh" (sound closer to "ch" in "loch") or sometimes "g". In Russia, "Harry Potter" is known as "Gary Potter" ("Гарри" pronounced "Garree" being the Russian transliteration of the English name).

In reality, this is an [[LiesToChildren explanation for beginners.]] In fact, it's much more complicated. The above explanation isn't ''wrong'' (it's functional enough for simple sentences), but beyond simple sentences significantly more explanation is needed. It's quite possible for imperfective verbs to express meaning that has (to an English-speaker) a one-time character, and perfective verbs may be used in a way that suggests a process. Truthfully, Russian grammatical aspect does not have a nice one-to-one equivalent in English, and therefore evades simple explanations. Russians themselves are particularly bad at explaining it, as which aspect to use and when is something they feel instinctively.

In reality, this is an [[LiesToChildren explanation for beginners.]] In fact, it's much more complicated. The above explanation isn't ''wrong'' (it's functional enough for simple sentences), but beyond simple sentences significantly more explanation is needed. It's quite possible for imperfective verbs to express meaning that has (to an English-speaker) a one-time character, and perfective verbs may be used in a way that suggests a process. In reality, Russian grammatical aspect does not have a nice one-to-one equivalent in English, and therefore evades simple explanations. Russians themselves are particularly bad at explaining it, as which aspect to use and when is something they feel instinctively.

In reality, this is an [[LiesToChildren explanation for beginners.]] In fact, it's much more complicated. The above explanation isn't ''wrong'' (it's functional enough for simple sentences), but beyond simple sentences significantly more explanation is needed. It's quite possible for imperfective verbs to express meaning that has (to an English-speaker) a one-time character, and perfective verbs may be used in a way that suggests a process. In actuality, Russian grammatical aspect does not have a nice one-to-one equivalent in English, and therefore evades simple explanations. Russians themselves are particularly bad at explaining it, as which aspect to use and when is something they feel instinctively.

In reality, this is an [[LiesToChildren explanation for beginners.]] In fact, it's much more complicated, and the intricacies can sneak up on you. That's not to say the above explanation is wrong (it's functional enough for simple sentences), but beyond simple sentences significantly more explanation is needed. It's quite possible for imperfective verbs to express meaning that has (to an English-speaker) a one-time character, and perfective verbs may be used in a way that suggests a process. Simply put, Russian grammatical aspect does not have a nice one-to-one equivalent in English and therefore evades simple explanations. Russians themselves are particularly bad at explaining it, as which aspect to use and when is something they feel instinctively.

Even terms for inanimate objects are also often masculine ("nozh" -- a knife) and feminine ("vilka" -- a fork)[[note]]That's why Russian superstition says that if a knife falls on the floor, expect a man into your house, and if a fork -- a woman.[[/note]]. Most profession names except for "traditionally female" ones are forcing women to use masculine forms of adjectives. Notably, while there do exist ways to make feminine forms of some profession names, their usage is decreasing, and indeed women may find it derogatory and instead use the masculine forms, seen as more gender-neutral. [[note]]An even worse case exists with words "Машинист" and "Машинистка" (Mashinist and Mashinistka), which grammatically are male and female forms of the same word. The former means "a train operator/engineer" while the latter means "a typist"[[/note]]

It should also be pointed out that swearing (using ''mat'') in Russian is considered a much bigger deal than in English. When Russians translate English movies, "fuck" and "shit" are translated to the Russian equivalents of "darn" and "crap" - Russians don't consider them anywhere near as bad as their own words. This is also because the usage of ''mat'' in the media is an extreme taboo - it used to get bleeped out on TV even after watershed, and a new law prohibits it in media completely. There is even a law (albeit rarely enforced) that prohibits speaking mat in public. This isn't to say Russians don't swear a lot. They are just a lot more conscious of the company they are in when they do it. Males in particular, if they want to make any meaningful Russian friendships, will want to learn at least a little ''mat'',[[note]]Not too much though. Foreigners speaking a lot of ''mat'' is considered really weird.[[/note]] if only to understand what the fuck everyone around you is saying. Funnily enough, Russians are torn between being extremely proud of the richness and complexity of ''mat'', and denying that it is a part of Russian at all (claiming it's all foreign words that contaminated the "holy" Russian language). See the folder for more info.

You also have to look carefully at commas when reading Russian texts. Commas are used to distinct logic blocks in sentence and their moving may change the meaning of the sentence, even to the direct opposite one. The iconic example of this is the phrase "Казнить нельзя помиловать" (lit. "Execute cannot pardon"), where the comma can be put in two positions, radically changing the meaning ("Execute, cannot pardon" vs "Execute cannot, pardon"). Fortunately, Russian punctuation is strictly formalized in an iconic work of a famous linguist Dietmar Rosenthal. Unfortunately, not many Russians know even the basic set of rules nowadays.

The official language of the Russian Federation and, in the past, the Soviet Union[[note]]de jure in RF, but only de facto in USSR[[/note]], with it also being spoken in the Baltics, parts of Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Mongolia. And in fiction, often the language of the CommieLand. To an English speaker, its grammar is more alien than [[UsefulNotes/GermanLanguage German]], but, since it is still part of the Indo-European family, less alien than [[UsefulNotes/JapaneseLanguage Japanese]]. However, if you are used to the grammar of languages such as English, French, German, or Spanish, then it can come as a bit of a nasty shock. It can be highly logical and literal while simultaneously being esoteric and indirect. It will have more familiar features (such as genders, inflections, and some grammatical aspects) for [[UsefulNotes/LatinLanguage those who are familiar with Classical Latin]], as well as those who know other Slavic Languages.

Russian is notably a gender-specific language, and many Russians take it as the norm and label any criticism of the language's sexism "[[PoliticalCorrectnessGoneMad political correctness propaganda]]". For adjectives, the masculine gender is considered the "base form". While there are no gender- or age-specific first person pronouns like in Japanese (''я'' "I", like in English, [[TheAllConcealingI carries no connotations]] except "this person now speaking"), one cannot say a sentence in the past tense without revealing the subject's gender. On official forms, this results in all kinds of clumsy constructs involving parentheses for feminine constructs, like ''родился(ась)'' "was born". There are no gender-neutral third-person pronouns, and Russians don't normally bother even with the English-style cop-out "he or she" and just use "he" for people or animals of indefinite gender. Yes, animals too -- animals are "he" or "she", not "it", and some species names are grammatically always female (''белка'' "squirrel") or always male (''ястреб'' "hawk") with no way to form the opposite gender. The word for "person" (''человек'') is masculine as well. Note, however, it does not mean "man" as in a human male. There is another word for that (which confusingly has a feminine ending). Also interesting to note that Russian does not distinguish between "person" and "human." They are the same word.

In reality, this is an [[LiesToChildren explanation for beginners.]] In fact, it's much more complicated, and the intricacies can sneak up on you. That's not to say the above explanation is wrong (it's functional enough for simple sentences), but beyond simple sentences significantly more explanation is needed. It's quite possible for imperfective verbs to express meaning that has (to an English-speaker) a one-time character, and perfective verbs may be used in a way that suggests a process. Simply put, Russian grammatical aspect does not have a nice one-to-one equivalent in English and evades simple explanations. Russians themselves are particularly bad at explaining it, as which aspect to use and when is something they feel instinctively.

Russian ''loves'' inflections, and the rules governing them are not always straightforward. Inflection in this case doesn't mean a change in voice intonation (the sense in which it is most often used in English). Rather it means ''grammatical'' inflection: a word changing its form to express a grammatical function. Interestingly, many Russians don't see it as a drawback and refuse to see their language as anything other than absolutely perfect -- or, as unoriginal people repeat after Ivan Turgenev, "great and mighty" ("velikiy i moguchiy", великий и могучий). This is often used in ironic contexts, such as the short poem ending with the phrase "velik moguchim russkiy yazyka" (велик могучим русский языка), in which every word is inflected incorrectly but the meaning is preserved.

In reality, this is an [[LiesToChildren explanation for beginners.]] It's actually more complicated than that, and the intricacies of it can sneak up on you. It's not to say the above explanation is wrong (it's functional enough for simple sentences), but once you start getting into future and past tense, negation, imperative forms, things happening sequentially or simultaneously, adding prefixes etc., then it begins to fall apart. It's quite possible for imperfective verbs to express meaning that has (to an English speaker) a one-time character, and perfective verbs may be used in a way that suggests a process. For example, the perfective verb "Зачитал," can mean, "He started to read." The action is "complete," even though he is still reading. Another example: if you wanted to say, "I didn't read the book," you might decide to avoid the imperfective aspect (не читал) because you think that would mean, "I wasn't reading the book." So you choose the perfective aspect (не прочитал). Unfortunately, using the perfective aspect makes it sound like you ''started'' reading the book but didn't finish. If you wanted to say you haven't read the book ''at all,'' the imperfective aspect is the one you wanted after all.

Simply put: it's complicated, and evades simple explanations. Russians themselves are particularly bad at explaining it, as which to use and when is something they feel instinctively. Russian grammatical concepts such as tense, mood and aspect do not generally have nice one-to-one equivalents in English.

You will often hear Russian characters not using articles in sentences, for example: "large rocket ship blows up hotel with missile". This is because Russian does not have articles at all, unless you count the "to"/"ta" in local Northern dialects. "Large rocket ship" is a translation of Bol'shoy Raketny Korabl (BRK), an official Russian designation for a missile-carrying destroyer like the Project 956 Sarych "''Sovremennyy''" class.

Apart from article misuse, there are other characteristic traits of a Russian accent. Most of them come from the use of Russian pronunciation: 'R' in Russian is trilled and vowels in unstressed positions are usually 'reduced' to very short and more open-mouthed vowels. Some English vowels are indistinguishable to the Russian ear (for example, it is difficult for them to distinguish "man" and "men" or "bat" and "bet") [[note]]And unfortunately for them, "beach" and "bitch" and "sheet" and "shit" are also indistinguishable[[/note]]. Also, Russian does not have "long" vowels, so they do not distinct them from short ones neither hearing, nor pronouncing ones (and even those who do, usually stress long vowels too much, for Russian stress is performed via both length and tone).

Vowels also sound different depending on whether they are stressed or not. For example, the letter "o" sounds like "oh" and the letter "a" sounds like "ah" when stressed, but both reduce to "uh" when unstressed. There is a "stress mark" you can place above letters to show where the stress falls, but you will only see those in dictionaries. All this can result in massive levels of MyHovercraftIsFullOfEels among new learners. While it is possible to guess on which syllable the stress falls (Russian tends to favor the penultimate one), the stress jumps around enough to still be a major pain. Luckily if you fail, most of the time the worst that'll happen is you'll sound silly, but still be understood. Perilous words do exist, however. Placing the wrong stress on писать (pee-SAHT'), "to write," can make you end up saying писать (PEE-saht'), "to piss." Strangely, трусы (TRU-sy) means "cowards" while трусы (tru-SY) means, "underpants."

Vowels also sound different depending on whether they are stressed or not. For example, the letter "o" sounds like "oh" and the letter "a" sounds like "ah" when stressed, but both reduce to "uh" when unstressed. There is a "stress mark" you can place above letters to show where the stress falls, but you will only see those in dictionaries. All this can result in massive levels of MyHovercraftIsFullOfEels among new learners. While it is possible to guess on which syllable the stress falls (Russian tends to favor the penultimate one), the stress jumps around enough to still be a major pain. Luckily if you fail, most of the time the worst that'll happen is you'll sound silly, but still be understood. Perilous words do exist, however. Placing the wrong stress on писать (pee-SAHT'), "to write," can make you end up saying писать (PEE-saht'), "to piss." Strangely, трусы (TRU-sy) means, "cowards" while трусы (tru-SY) means, "underpants."