Is Russian easier to UNDERSTAND than French?

[leosmith]

I want to know if I might have simular obstacles like I'm having with French.

It's difficult to answer this without knowing your languages. Do you mind filling out that part of your profile? Anyway, this should probably go under the advice section.

In my case, I didn't have the "blending" issue you described with Russian, but there were several other reasons why French was overall easier to understand.

[issemiyaki]

@leosmith - I'm a native English speaker (been speaking Spanish, at a highly fluent level for more than 15 years), been working on French for about 3 and half years.

@Lavengro - I loved your comment. That was so funny. Thanks for your insight.

@sillygoose1 - I know that sometimes we miss things, but the case I'm referring to was a woman speaking with an extremely clear French accent. The audio was superb and she wasn't even speaking that fast. And for some reason, I just didn't catch what she was saying.

But I've been doing some research, and apparently Russian IS, in large part, pronounced the way it is spelled. So, if you can read it, you should be able to UNDERSTAND It.

So, guess I'll be shelling out a bit of money to my trusty Assimil salesman.

[lavengro]

In case it may be of interest, while I have never tried Assimil, I found the Sputnik learning materials to be very helpful at least on pronunciation issues (and handwriting) when I was tinkering in the past. Excerpt from one of my logs:

Recently, I picked up some additional learning materials - Sputnik: an Introductory Russian Language Course . Developed by a Russian educator who currently teaches at a Canadian university. Lots of work (explanatory and audio drills) up front re: sound changes between stressed and unstressed syllables, which I have found very helpful. Really enjoying the спутник materials - far easier to start with than my Living Language Russian materials and felt like I was making some progress finally.

https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_ ... C6KQ2FCPB2

Nice audio companion materials available on-line
https://sputniktextbook.org/

[David1917]

I think the question is more like:

Once one has begun to learn Russian is it easier to parse spoken language than in French? I would say emphatically yes. Russian is phonetic and spoken very clearly. French is the opposite of those two things. I always felt reassured in the early stages of Russian when I would watch a movie/serial, listen to speeches, speak with people, etc., because of how easy it was to pluck out words and constructions that I knew. Very rarely, if ever, will you have the chances / chansons issue you're describing.

[David1917]

So, guess I'll be shelling out a bit of money to my trusty Assimil salesman.

I'd shell out some money to an Amazon re-seller for a copy of Russian Without Toil. If your comprehension of written French is high, try for the 2nd edition of Le Russe Sans Peine by Bratous and Balakhonov. The first roughly 50% of these 2 mirror each other, though Without Toil I think was written only by Cherel, so a lot of the speech was "cleaned up" by the Russian speakers from U of Leningrad. Since they're likely to be cheap, you could even get both, so you'd have English grammar explanations, some slight variety in the dialogues, and better recordings from the 2nd edition. The similarities could extend well beyond the halfway mark, I just haven't looked through the 2 side by side past about that point.

[Xmmm]

apparently Russian IS, in large part, pronounced the way it is spelled. So, if you can read it, you should be able to UNDERSTAND It.

So

1. Everyone agrees Russian is harder for an English speaker than French
2. Everyone agrees that Russian is phonetic, and French is not

Given those two facts, can you look again at your sentence above and guess where the problem might lie? (note: I've added a little subtle color coding to help out).

If I had a C2 vocabulary, I would have no difficulty understanding what Russian actors say -- apart from occasional eccentric characters who have affected styles of speech, so yes if you can read it you can understand it.

[Arnaud]

No, it isn't

[MamaPata]

Echoing David1917, I don't think you'll have the same problem with linkages that you're having in French. Russian words/speakers don't seem to slur into the next words as much as French does.

However, it would be a bit of an overstatement to say that it's completely phonetic. The stress changes the sound of several letters, so unless you learn the stress pattern and pronunciation of a word when you encounter it, you could well be expecting it to sound very different. But that's more of a problem for speech than listening.

I wouldn't let either of these things sway you though tbh. There are always going to be challenges, you will surpass the French comprehension problems with time. Do have a browse through the Russian Study Group, there might be some useful posts or resources shared there.

[rdearman]

Abstract
A number of previous research studies into the effects of simultaneous presentation of speech and text (bi-modal input) on second language (L2) listening have lacked test construct validity, thus rendering the results of their experiments contentious.
The results of this month-long experiment reveal that participants in the bi-modal group improved more than the controls in their ability to segment speech. This included utterances from programmes and speakers to which they had not been exposed, thus suggesting the generalisation of learning.

Ok. But what did they do that helped them improve more than the controls?

[smallwhite]

... the woman said: "ça peut être une," as in that could be A possibility. But I heard, "ça peut êtrune."

... someone said: "Les chance sont bons," and I heard: "Les chansons bons."

Apart from the intonation, you actually heard correctly. You only parsed incorrectly. For a language to be easier to understand in this situation, I think it needs to have fewer homophones. I think Russian would be easier in this regard because its words are longer, and also because more of its words are inflected and you're likely to recognise the inflection endings which would work as word boundary markers.