Why is it so damn hard to get started reading in Russian?

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acorngalaxy
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Why is it so damn hard to get started reading in Russian?

Postby acorngalaxy » Sat Feb 26, 2022 2:32 pm

Here are 2 articles that I randomly chose : One in Romanian, the other in Russian. I have never learnt Romanian. On the other hand, I am starting to get back to Russian, but I have serious trouble reading the news.

I haven't translated the articles yet, but I can already guess the Romanian one: Basically, Romania has closed its airspace for Russia on Saturday at 3pm, the Civil Aviation Authority announced; closed for all regular flights for all airline operators registered in Russia (zborurile, I assume that's flight), except for humanitarian and urgent/emergency missions. And there's something about planes landing there (aterizare).

On the other hand, I cannot understand anything in the Russian text, other than the fact that American scientists announced something with a new and safer method.

I get that Romanian has similarities with Romance languages, but it also has Slavic influence, yet I can understand most of it.

I have already gone through frequency lists of words and verbs, yet I don't understand anything about the Russian text other than the small chunk. I really want to master the Russian language, but at the rate this is going, the chances look very slim. Where do I even start from if my first goal is to read Russian news with relative ease?
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Re: Why is it so damn hard to get started reading in Russian?

Postby luke » Sat Feb 26, 2022 2:42 pm

Russian is difficult for English speakers. Isn't Romanian closer to a Romance language than Russian? English speakers have a leg up on Romance languages.

There's also the alphabet.

Also, maybe one of the articles comes from a point of view you've heard several times, so it's more familiar.
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Re: Why is it so damn hard to get started reading in Russian?

Postby iguanamon » Sat Feb 26, 2022 4:25 pm

Giving advice on the forum is fraught with perils. Sometimes, the answer is more complicated than it seems on the surface. The OP is learning several languages simultaneously, might this having something to do with it? If I were to learn Russian, I'd learn Russian. I'd start off small with headlines and sentences instead of articles- with a couple of sentences instead of a paragraph. I'd be using a human made parallel text and a bilingual dictionary too. I'd be studying alongside this activity and I wouldn't be actively learning other languages. I wouldn't be trying to bite off more than I can chew.

So, part of this issue with reading Russian, may have to do with being overly ambitious at a low level in the language. Part of it may have to do with not devoting more time to a more difficult language. Also, as Zen Buddhist philosophy relates: it is our expectations that make us unhappy. I'm still learning Catalan despite having a high level in related languages... and I'm not trying to learn another language alongside it until I am ready to do so.

I realize this is probably not the advice that the OP wants to have. The issue is more complicated than the mere difficulty of the language. I'd probably start with short texts- a tweet; a stanza of a poem or a short piece of a song lyric. As I said, a sentence or two as I study a course and give more time for synergy to take effect... but, what do I know.

Let's look at this example from a headline of an article at GlobalVoices.org in Russian:
ru.GlobalVoices.org wrote:Агроэкология: ответ Непала на климатические изменения

en.GlobalVoices.org wrote:Agroecology, Nepal’s answer to climate change

So, we have just a few words; some cognates and I can parse it enough to get the gist.

If we move on to the first two sentences: "Я фермер и учитель, живу в Непале, но не принимал участия в диалоге в рамках саммита ООН по климату (COP26), который завершился в ноябре 2021 года в Глазго. Никто из нас не участвовал."
"As a farmer and educator living in Nepal, I was not part of the dialogue at the UN climate summit (COP26) that concluded in Glasgow in November 2021. None of us here were."
Just guessing from cognates here and general knowledge of Russian as a language-learner exposed to it, but "Я фермер и учитель" probably means "I (am a) farmer and teacher". "живу в Непале" probably means living inNepal". The word "диалоге" probably means "dialog". "саммита ООН по климату" (sammita UN po klimatu) probably means "UN climate summit". I assume that "ноябре" (Noyabre) means "November" and "Глазго" (Glazgo) means "Glasgow". The second sentence is more problematic for me except for the word "не" which is a negative.

If I were learning Russian, hopefully my study would introduce me to more simple words. The parallel text would help me greatly. After parsing the first two sentences I would probably wait another day, do another couple of lessons of study and move on to the next couple of sentences. Yes, this is slow... but the race doesn't always belong to the swift.

There's a phrase in Haitian Creole that's appropriate- "Piti piti, zwazo fè nich" translation: Little by little a bird makes a nest
That's enough when starting to read. It could take me a week or more to go through the whole article, a paragraph or two at a time... or it will take what it takes. Over the weeks and months I would be able to do more and more. I wouldn't expect more. I'd cut myself a lot of slack because I've never studied Russian, or a language as difficult as Russian for a native English-speaker. I would not have the expectation of being able to understand this article as well as I can in Spanish or Portuguese, or, even in a related language I don't speak like Italian or French. I would accept the situation and try to get better a little bit at a time. I can only speak as to what I would do. You can read more about my multi-track approach in my signature link below. Good luck!

*GlobalVoices.org is a good, but under-used, resource to make your own parallel texts in many languages using human made, not machine, translations. There are human-made translations/originals of many articles in multiple languages. The articles are topical and "newsy" but not straight-up news.
Last edited by iguanamon on Sat Feb 26, 2022 5:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Why is it so damn hard to get started reading in Russian?

Postby BeaP » Sat Feb 26, 2022 5:16 pm

Romanian doesn't have similarities with Romance languages, it IS a Romance language. Learning a Slavic language is much more difficult with your language knowledge. I'd recommend you to get hold of a good bilingual textbook that helps you get familiar with the structure of the language and the basic grammar patterns. Hopefully someone who studies Russian can help you.
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Re: Why is it so damn hard to get started reading in Russian?

Postby Eafonte » Sat Feb 26, 2022 6:20 pm

acorngalaxy,

The answer is simple.

As your native language is English, we can apply FSI classification of languages. According to FSI, Romanian is a cat I language (like for instance french, spanish and swedish) and Russian is a cat III language (like for instance albanian, finnish, hungarian and turkish). Therefore, the effort bar is much higher for Russian than for Romenian.

My advice (I am an avid learner of Russian, see my log "Russian by audiobooks with matching texts"): besides choosing a regular method/course you are already familiar with, get a frequency dictionary of Russian ( I used Nicholas J. Brown's dictionary) and study Russian wordbuilding, which will leverage your vocabulary. I can recommend you three books which helped me a lot in this regard:
1. Roots of the Russian Language by George Z. Patrick.
2. Russian Root List with a sketch of word formation by Charles E. Gribble
3. Workbook to Russian Root List by Gary L. Browning
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acorngalaxy
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Re: Why is it so damn hard to get started reading in Russian?

Postby acorngalaxy » Sun Feb 27, 2022 5:55 pm

Eafonte wrote:acorngalaxy,

The answer is simple.

As your native language is English, we can apply FSI classification of languages. According to FSI, Romanian is a cat I language (like for instance french, spanish and swedish) and Russian is a cat III language (like for instance albanian, finnish, hungarian and turkish). Therefore, the effort bar is much higher for Russian than for Romenian.

My advice (I am an avid learner of Russian, see my log "Russian by audiobooks with matching texts"): besides choosing a regular method/course you are already familiar with, get a frequency dictionary of Russian ( I used Nicholas J. Brown's dictionary) and study Russian wordbuilding, which will leverage your vocabulary. I can recommend you three books which helped me a lot in this regard:
1. Roots of the Russian Language by George Z. Patrick.
2. Russian Root List with a sketch of word formation by Charles E. Gribble
3. Workbook to Russian Root List by Gary L. Browning


I'll check them out, thanks, and thanks everyone! Muito obrigado :)
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aronald
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Re: Why is it so damn hard to get started reading in Russian?

Postby aronald » Thu Mar 17, 2022 4:50 pm

Roughly, how many words have you read in Russian? You'll need at least a 750k to make any sense of the news, and you'll need 2-3 million to read with ease. There are no shortcuts as you won't get many imported words to rely on like romances languages. Start simple and work your way up. I don't think there is another way.
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Russian 3M words read: 1400000 / 3000000
Spanish 2M words read: 820000 / 2000000
French 2M words read: 1400000 / 2000000
Arabic 2M words read: 30000 / 2000000

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Re: Why is it so damn hard to get started reading in Russian?

Postby Ogrim » Thu Mar 17, 2022 5:37 pm

aronald wrote:Roughly, how many words have you read in Russian? You'll need at least a 750k to make any sense of the news, and you'll need 2-3 million to read with ease. There are no shortcuts as you won't get many imported words to rely on like romances languages. Start simple and work your way up. I don't think there is another way.


You are exaggerating the numbers a lot. Most estimates I've seen put the numbers of unique words (not compounds) in Russian at less than 200.000, and in order to read a modern newspaper text you need much less than that, probably 2000-3000 to read proficiently.

To the OP I would just say: You have to learn Russian to read Russian. And you also have to learn Romanian to read Romanian with ease. Sure, if you know another Romance language you have a certain advantage which you will not have with Russian as Romanian has many cognates with Italian and French, as well as grammatical similarities, but if you move from short articles that this one to Romanian literature you will find that it is not so easy.
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Re: Why is it so damn hard to get started reading in Russian?

Postby aronald » Thu Mar 17, 2022 5:54 pm

Ogrim wrote:
aronald wrote:Roughly, how many words have you read in Russian? You'll need at least a 750k to make any sense of the news, and you'll need 2-3 million to read with ease. There are no shortcuts as you won't get many imported words to rely on like romances languages. Start simple and work your way up. I don't think there is another way.


You are exaggerating the numbers a lot. Most estimates I've seen put the numbers of unique words (not compounds) in Russian at less than 200.000, and in order to read a modern newspaper text you need much less than that, probably 2000-3000 to read proficiently.

To the OP I would just say: You have to learn Russian to read Russian. And you also have to learn Romanian to read Romanian with ease. Sure, if you know another Romance language you have a certain advantage which you will not have with Russian as Romanian has many cognates with Italian and French, as well as grammatical similarities, but if you move from short articles that this one to Romanian literature you will find that it is not so easy.


I was talking about total words read, not total words known.
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Russian 3M words read: 1400000 / 3000000
Spanish 2M words read: 820000 / 2000000
French 2M words read: 1400000 / 2000000
Arabic 2M words read: 30000 / 2000000

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Re: Why is it so damn hard to get started reading in Russian?

Postby Axon » Fri Mar 18, 2022 3:36 am

I tried an "experiment" a while ago to focus on reading news articles in Russian for short bursts of intense study every day. Here's the write-up link.

I think it's hard to get started reading Russian news specifically because there's a slightly higher number of non-transparent words that are semantically important in Russian writing. Long words in English are likely to be long and similar-looking words in Romance languages, and so the eye can use a familiar pattern when scanning. Although this is true for Russian's many loanwords, the Slavic word base is just as important in most sentences and hard to parse at first sight. Also, the script for me was an extra layer of complexity because there was an extra microsecond for each word before I became aware of whether it was a cognate or not.

Fortunately, if my results are anything to go by, you'll be able to read Russian news after a few weeks of focusing on it. There are also many more Russian resources with audio and transcript available now compared to when I wrote that thread, making it easier and more pleasant to naturally link word shape to sound.
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