Russian Language System
Russian is the most widely spoken Slavic language in Russia and the surrounding countries including Belarus, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Estonia.
The Russian language is unique in its use of sounds. When you hear someone speak Russian it is often obvious that they are speaking Russian because of this. Hard and soft sounds sprinkled into consonants, and a particular stress on the pronunciation of vowel sounds. These intricacies make the Russian language both interesting and beautiful to listen to and to speak.
Russian is classified as a difficult language to learn for native English speaker. Ideally you need over seven hundred hours of language immersion to get to a medium working fluency.
The Russian language is part of the Indo-European family of languages. The Russian language has been influenced by many languages including Church Slavic and Finnish languages.
Russian itself has a number of derived languages spoken in many Slavic countries.
The Russian language is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet. The Russian alphabet includes 33 characters, each with an upper case and a lower case form. The Russian alphabet has gone through several transformations as words or characters have fallen out of use.
The Russian language contains five vowels. These vowels are written using different characters depending on the consonant that comes before it. The consonants are either hard (plain) or soft (palatalized). The standard Russian language as spoken in Moscow utilizes heavily stressed vowels and a lot of pitch changes. The Russian syllable structure is complicated. A syllable can include up to four sounds. Syllables that complicated are not very common however.
The Russian language employs singular and plural nouns, which obey gender rules, masculine, feminine, and neutral. These nouns can be nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional. Adjectives and personal pronouns follow the same rules including the rules for gender. Personal and demonstrative pronouns are a little more complicated with variances for politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult.
The Russian language system is vastly complicated and can take years to learn. Learning the Russian language can make you an asset to your country or your employer.
