Neiv

Hello everyone! I'm a 23-year old female from Estonia and in English/German/anything non-cyrrilic I usually introduce myself as Ana. I will probably write only a little bit in the starting post, because I've been interested in foreign languages since preschool and it has been my most important hobby for many years, so it would be difficult for me to write everything into the first post. But I really want to reflect on my interest in linguistics more, so I will try to fill my topic regularly. To start with: I am native in Russian, fluent in German, English and semi-fluent in Estonian. I've been learning French, Spanish and a bit of Japanese at different times in my life. And I'm currently most interested in Ukrainian and Japanese. ...and yet I can still add quite a few more languages that have caught my interest by far more than once.

I'm only thinking of possibly learning it, but my reasons are: I'm being driven by greed (you can earn x4 there, than you can earn here in Estonia doing the same work pretty much) and curiosity (I'm semi-fluent in Estonian, actually getting better and better in it and I always get really curious about how similar or unlike to each other those languages are.)

I have some experience with that, or so I could say. My girlfriend is from Kharkiv, Ukraine and she started learning Polish a week and a half ago or so. Well, she studies it at intensive courses in a translation agency bureau and she isn't in the first group (by far not) hosted there, it actually seems they are doing these kind of courses very often. The teacher ONLY speaks Polish with the students, with many of them (including her) having never read or seen a word in Polish before. The teacher speaks Ukrainian only to explain something about grammar and yet no one has a problem understanding everything she says. So, I think it does come easily to learn Polish for people native in Ukrainian language. Girlfriend also already wrote a small essay in it.

And her I come from the topic where the TS explained Russian pronunciation being easy, haha. And I agreed with her. And yet I feel compelled to agree with posters on this topic too. I can't pinpoint exactly what is the MOST difficult thing in Russian, but my friends and acquaintances who are not native to the Russian language frequently complained about them having difficulties with listening to Russian, one of them even said that all she could hear from a video of a Russian artist singing that I sent to her was 'r-r-r-r-r-r-r!'. Must be all the bears we frequently eat breakfast together with...

I'm so used to the concept of Russian being utterly difficult, that when I saw the word 'easy' in the title I almost jumped. Well, I digress. I actually wanted to say something more useful and slightly less subjective that I noticed because of this post. It (your post) made me notice the similarities between Estonian and Russian, well, I'm not exactly sure if I can call these things similarities, but Estonian also has a large number of cases of declension (yay, my vocabulary just grew a bit), 14, to be precise and has rather simple pronunciation rules. I actually think it is more simple because it does not have the difficult to pronounce sounds like Ч and Щ (it does have Ш, though) and you literally just spell out what you read. Once you've learned the umlauts (or adjusted to their differences if you speak, for example, German) you can just blabber the written word likes it's no tomorrow.