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French and Russian undergraduate student, trying my hand at the real world.

Friday 26 October 2012

In answer to an oft-posed question...

"You don't know what it's like! You – neither of you – you've never had to face him, have you? You think it's just memorizing a bunch of spells and throwing them at him, like you're in class or something?"
Harry Potter on fighting Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. (Rowling, JK, Bloomsbury publishing, 2003)

This what I would equate to speaking Russian. It is like no other language that I have ever experienced. People ask me what it is like to speak Russian as I do not think we get nearly enough exposure to it in England, presumably as a result of their political situation over the years. (Let's not go into that just now).

For those to whom Russian is unfamiliar, I am going to give you a brief insight to why I have such a love/hate relationship with it. 

We will ignore the issue of there being a different alphabet for now. Let us not run before we can walk. We must remember that Russian is NOT English but in Cyrillic. If you're surrounded by English but in Cyrillic, you're probably looking at an advert.

Firstly, in Russian, you have to know exactly what you are talking about and how each word fits into the sentence. You cannot just memorise a load of words and bandy them around as we do rather shamelessly in English.

Who does what to whom? Where do they do it? How do they do it? When did they do it? For those of you familiar with Latin and German, you will understand what I mean by the 'case' system. For those of you unfamiliar, it is the answer to each of those questions. In English, we would use prepositions (on/under/to/across/up etc) and word order to convey the meaning of the sentence. You'd add a verb to state when and what was done. You'd maybe add an adjective but those are just mere frivolities. (I jest)

For example. (I should credit the Russian textbook from which I learned this in my first year of University - Brian Kemple's Essential Russian Grammar. Fantastically simple text, I owe that man a lot):
Peter throws the ball to Paul. Fine. The order of the words states that Paul is the recipient of the ball, which is thrown to him by Peter. The preposition states that Paul is the indirect object, whereas the ball is the object - in this case, the object being thrown. Peter is the subject, as he is the one doing the action.

In Russian, there would be no preposition.
Transliterated into Russian, the sentence would be "Pyotr brosaet myach Pavlu".

Got that? Good. 


In Russian, there are six cases.

The Nominative - the name of something, refers to the subject of a sentence (in the above context, Peter)

The Accusative - the direct object (in the above context, the ball)

The Genitive - refers to possession, quantity and seemingly miscellaneous other things. My Russian friend lives by the motto of "When in doubt, use the Genitive case". Wise words.

The Dative - refers to the indirect object, the person to whom something is done. In the above context, this is Paul.

The Instrumental - refers to the way in which things are carried out, usually accompanies the word with. ie. "How do you eat soup? With a spoon"

The Prepositional - refers to the place in which things happen. For example, we can expand the above sentence to say "In the park..." In Russian this would be in the prepositional case. As the name would suggest, this verb can only be used with a preposition.



A point of interest for you all: There were seven cases originally, the seventh being the Vocative case, which was used solely for addressing God. These days, it exists only in the phrase "Bozhe moy!" which is rather ironic, as it means "Oh my God!".



Rather like German, Russian has 3 genders - Masculine, Feminine, Neuter and then plural. Each of these genders declines differently when used in each of these cases and there are different rules which apply to each - so it means quite a bit of learning by rote to get them firmly lodged into your head.


Russian has quite a simple tense system - especially compared with English and French. There are 3 tenses, past, present and future. The trickiness comes in when you learn that each verb is one of a pair and the verbs within it are not interchangeable. In the pair, one verb will be the imperfective variant and the other will be the perfective variant. Imperfective refers to an incomplete action and is therefore used in the present tense, or the incomplete past of an action. Perfective refers to a complete action and is used in the future tense or refers to a completed past action. The concept is not complicated - but it means you have twice as much to remember when speaking!

Russian is therefore a very precise language with very subtle nuances. Where we would have a different verb to express each the following, Russians would use a prefix on one verb.
To note down, to take note from, to subscribe to, to sign, to correspond with, to write up to a certain point, to rewrite. The logic is arguably simple - all of these verbs involve writing, so a prefix is enough to change the meaning (in Russian logic anyway). To an English person though, all of this seems rather pedantic and frustrating - especially when faced with a long list of words that all look EXACTLY THE SAME.

This pedantry has its worst manifestation in the system of verbs of motion. Russian students the world over are all now cringing as I mention the 3 dreaded words. There are 14 pairs of verbs of motion. The rules of perfective/imperfective only apply when the verb is prefixed, otherwise each part of the pair refers to a multidirectional or unidirectional motion. There is actually a Soviet joke about this which is essentially a one liner. "Ivan shol v magazin". John went to the shop (and in the nuanced meaning: and didn't come back - ie he was arrested). It's more funny if you get the full context of it, but an analysis of the Russian national humour is for another day and another post! Each of these verbs has any number of prefixes which again change the nuance of the verb as well as the tense. It's taken me the best part of 2 years to actually get my head around verbs of motion, they are a complete mind-frier! Put simply, Russian people never 'go' anywhere!

Oh, and a final note about the alphabet as I know that for most people it is the biggest obstacle when starting off. There are two Russian alphabets, just to put you off even further, printed and cursive. It took me a week to properly get to grips with printed and a little longer to get used to cursive. I will confess my own Russian cursive still mixes some elements of printed with the letter "zh" in particular, but no one's told me off for it yet!

In spite of all this, I feel immensely cool when I can speak correct Russian to a Russian person and they can a) understand me, and b) come up with an appropriate response that c) I can understand. Still working on that impeccable St Petersburg accent though ;) I picked Russian up when I started University 2 years ago so have a long way to go yet, but it's a work in progress. 

4 comments:

  1. I love that my catchphrase about the genitive case lives on. ;D Great blog, Fliss! xx

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  2. Ehm...
    "Ivan shol v magazin" - it's continued action, describing the process of how Ivan moved to the store.
    "Ivan ushol v magszin" - completed action - to describe the fact that Ivan has left this place.

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  3. There is old joke about "падежи" ;)

    День был Именительный,
    Вечер был Творительный,
    Я ей Предложный,
    Она мне Дательный,
    Теперь я не Винительный,
    Что она Родительный!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Russian cursive :)

    http://img1.liveinternet.ru/images/attach/c/1//49/315/49315347_48987072_1180698930110.jpg

    ReplyDelete