Introduction
Russian is a Slavic language, the 7th most spoken language in the world by the total number of speakers, which, unfortunately, does not make the task of learning Russian much easier…
Russian is widely believed to be one of the most difficult languages to learn. This is mostly true if you have no knowledge of other Slavic languages (e.g. Bulgarian or Czech). The grammar rules in Russian are very complex and have numerous exceptions. In addition, many learners struggle with pronunciation – the stress in words is largely unpredictable and not marked in writing, while there are multiple homonyms. In the Russian language, you also need to distinguish between the so-called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sounds (consonant phonemes with and without palatal secondary articulation).
The need to learn the Russian alphabet serves as yet another obstacle for many people who would like to learn the language. They might be surprised to know that the Russian alphabet actually takes only about 10 hours to learn