alt Hacker NewsNabokov's guide to foreigners learning Russian
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A link to the book - https://archive.org/details/lecturesonlitera0000nabo_z7a4 and on Smellazon https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/0156027763
> You can, and should, speak Russian with a permanent broad smile
Funnily enough, I was told the exact same thing about English when I was learning it as a Russian native.
Face it. You have grown up thinking that all teachers should be as kind as your kindergarten teacher and the amount of details about verbs should not exceed the your gaming console instructions.
Very funny and snobbish too, nothing less expected from Nabokov.
Russian grammar is inflectional, yes, but that's about the only difficult part of the language. It is not that different from German in this matter.
It’s a bit weird to see the English transliteration of Russian words for example, govoritz instead of говорить.
For anyone looking to study Russian, I highly recommend spending a few days familiarizing yourself with Cyrillic first. Toss it into an Anki deck (or download one) and use FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler).
It’s phonetic and consists of only 33 letters, I memorized it on a ~12-hour flight to Moscow many years ago.
I could do the speaking but the letters are crazy. I was trying to learn it in college to impress this Russian chick. All I got was kak dela privjet.
I think it's crazy so many other countries learn English, I mean lucky us who are ignorant here in the states and don't even speak a second language.
After russian, other languages - georgian, hebrew, english seem reasonable. Especially hebrew.
Saying this as a native Russian speaker
I always found Russian to be the nasties sounding slavic language. It's just unpleasant to the ears. Probably because it makes you either sound aggressive or like you're asking or begging for another bowl of porridge. I guess watching Soviet world war II movies when I was a child had an impact.
Everything he says here also applies to german. For example, to actually say "ich" properly you need to have a wide kind of smile that feels incredibly strange to an english native speaker.