The thought popped into my head that I could study Russian whenever I wanted, and since I couldn't think of a good reason not to, I started learning it. It's been on my list of languages to learn for a long time but I have never spent a significant amount of time on it.
But, I think this is a good time for me to study Russian. Since it's available on my favorite casual resources (Duolingo, Pimsleur, and Assimil), I can grind through it without relying much on motivation. And since it's Indo-European and spoken in Europe, it's related to the languages I know best (English, French, and German) linguistically and culturally, but it's not so similar that I'll get bored.
Russian is highly inflected, but I don't think there is anything that will be that new to me:
- Gender – Seems easier than German; it has the same three genders, but gender seems more consistently guessable from word endings than in German.
- Cases – There are only two extra cases on top of what German has, and one of them (instrumental) is also in Inuktitut. Declension will probably be a bit harder than German because the words themselves change, not articles (article? what is article?).
- Aspect – The aspect system seems a bit intense but compared to Inuktitut and Navajo it's practically Esperanto. French also makes a distinction between perfective and imperfective, but only in the past tense and the verb root doesn't change.
I have gone through about two weeks of Pimsleur Russian in the past. I redid the first lesson today (it's free through the app) and I think I'm going to give their subscription service a try. I really like how you can see the full vocabulary list for each lesson. With the CDs I would have to guess the spelling based on pronunciation and try my best to look up words after my commute.
I'm in the process of learning the Russian keyboard layout. I have learned the home row so far. It shouldn't take me more than another day or two to learn the rest of the layout and be able to type slowly but accurately. Until then I'm only doing Duolingo on my phone.
Russian checks off a lot of boxes for me:
- There is plenty of top-notch classical music in Russian, as well as classic literature and short stories in particular
- The Cyrillic alphabet is super cool!
- The hard/soft consonant system is very similar to the broad/slender system of Irish. Irish pronunciation has always been very challenging for me, but after spending significant time on Russian it should be much easier.
- It's the second most used language on the internet, eighth largest language in the world by number of native speakers, and one of the six official UN languages.
- Without a Balto-Slavic language in my repertoire I'm missing one of the three major branches of Western Indo-European languages
- Access to learning resources for languages spoken in and around the former USSR, including Tuvan.