Introduction:

Russian is the primary language of the overwhelming majority of people in Russia and is also used as a second language in other former republics of the Soviet Union. Russian was also taught extensively in those countries lying within the Soviet sphere of influence, especially in Eastern Europe, in the second half of the 20th century.

Russian is the largest native language in Europe and the most geographically widespread language in Eurasia. It is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, with over 258 million total speakers worldwide. Russian is the seventh-most spoken language in the world by a number of native speakers and the eighth-most spoken language in the world by a total number of speakers. The language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second-most widespread language on the Internet, after English.

Yes, Russian is a tough language to learn. You won’t pick up some textbooks, listen to some music, go to Russia for a week and you’ll speak Russian fluently. But it’s also not crazy difficult. And if you take your learning day by day, you’ll surprise yourself with the progress you can make in a couple of weeks/months.

Is Russian hard to learn?

As you read above, Russian is a difficult language to learn. This is because it differs a lot from English (and I assume you’ll speak English. Otherwise, what are you doing here? ;)). Here are some of the reasons why Russian is difficult:

• Complete new alphabet – before you can learn Russian, you have to learn the Cyrillic alphabet.
• New sounds – even though every language has a couple of different sounds (or pronounce a letter differently), to learn Russian you have to master 10-15 complete new vowel sounds.
• Barely any cognates – a cognate is a word that is the same in 2 languages. For example ‘situation’ and ‘ситуация’ (situation). Unfortunately this is where it ends for Russian- English. Although there are a couple 100 more words, you will have to learn virtually every new word by heart.
• Case system – Russian word order is very flexible. That’s a great thing. But it comes at a cost. Each noun changes its ending based on its function in the sentence. This is by far one of the most difficult aspects of learning Russian.

These are the 4 things that will most likely be the most difficult for you. (they were/are for me). Luckily, there are also a couple of easy things about the Russian language.

Easy things in Russian

• No articles – that’s right. Forget about ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘an’. Russians simply don’t have them in their language. Compare that to a language like French, where every word has a random assigned ‘le’ or ‘la’.
• Only 3 tenses – the Russian has past, present, and future. The past is extremely easy to use (drop the ending and add an ‘L’ sound + gender ending). And the future and present are virtually the same. Although you have to learn a different verb for each. This is a lot easier than trying to learn the past continuous and past perfect etc.
• Word order is extremely flexible – it basically doesn’t matter which word is where. This is because the noun endings (cases) indicate the function of the word. For you as a learner, it means you have one less thing to worry about as you’re speaking since you can just add words at the end of your sentence.

Russian vs Spanish (and other Romance languages)

One of the most learned languages for English speakers is Spanish (or French). I’ve learned some Spanish too, so I’ll make a short comparison between these 2 languages from the perspective of an English speaker. I’m Dutch from origin, but English and Dutch are from the same language family, so the experience is the same.

Spanish is an easy language for English speakers. That is because all the difficult Spanish words are basically the same in both languages. That is because English is a mix of germanic languages and romance languages. A couple of centuries ago the Brits took a lot of French words into their vocabulary and many of these words remain there this day. Those are cognates.

But if you’re learning Russian you don’t have this luxury. You have to learn every word by heart. And this can take a long time. I’d say that learning the grammar for both languages is the same difficult. But the main thing that takes a long time is getting your vocabulary up to a couple of thousand words.

Millions of people all over the world speak Russian as their first or second language. So why shouldn’t you?

It all depends where you come from

One thing we didn’t touch upon is that the question ‘is Russian hard to learn?’ has a different answer for each person. If you’re from Poland and speak Polish, Russian will be easier for you than for an English speaker. But on the other hand, if you’re a native Spanish speaker, but you’ve already learned Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Bulgarian – Russian will be a piece of cake for you.

There are 2 components to the answer. Do you already know any other Slavic languages? (and if so, at what level?). And how fast can you learn a new language? If Russian is the first language (after your native) that you’re trying to learn. Then it will be difficult. But so would any other language be.

The difficulty of Russian for native English speakers

I haven’t learned any languages such as Japanese, Chinese or Thai, so this is all information I got from other people who do. But Russian is considered to be a medium-difficult language for English speakers.

Yes, it’s difficult. But not as tough as learning the Asian languages – or Arabic. But it’s more difficult than learning a language that is related in some way to English (Dutch, German, Swedish, Romance languages).

Expect to put in around 1000 hours to become fluent in Russian. Sounds like a long time? It is. But you’ll see a lot of progress along the way. And with the right program, you’ll be able to start having conversations right from the bat.