Is Russian hard?

So what’s involved if you want to learn Russian… and is it hard?!

• Russian is an Indo-European language, distantly related to English. This means that some of the basic vocabulary will seem quite familiar.
• To learn the basics of Russian is probably not much harder than learning the basics of, say, French or German.
• Although it is hard to get an authentic Russian accent, it is not that hard to pronounce Russian words tolerably well; most of the sounds of Russian also occur in English.
• Russian has borrowed a lot of English or other “international” words; many words will be familiar and easy to learn. If you want to say “climate” or “match” or “park” in Russian, just take the English word and give it a Russian flavour!
• The Russian alphabet (Cyrillic) may look off-putting, but in fact it is not difficult to learn; you can get the basic idea in an hour. Some of the letters, like “a”, “k”, “m” and “o”, are the same as in English. And the alphabet works well for the Russian language: you can predict which sound each letter will represent very accurately.
• At a higher level, Russian grammar is tricky: there are a lot of case endings on nouns and adjectives, and the verb forms are also complex. Learning the vocabulary can take quite a bit of effort as well. But then you may not be aspiring to read “War and Peace” in the original!

Under Euroasia style, we have more information about our approach to teaching. If you’re ready to enrol, our Russian timetable has details of the next Russian classes with Euroasia! Otherwise, see course options to find out about the types of Russian courses which we offer. Course outlines might also be useful.