Yeah, that's the point - you shouldn't really smile, it's about relaxing your mouth

On a tangent - I've moved abroad to work in a multinational corporation, and I noticed that similar cultures cluster together. I spend most of my time with other Eastern Europeans.

These kinds of grammatical difficulties are typical for people who are learning only their second language after their native language.

After learning 3 or more languages that are not closely related, one is usually exposed to most grammatical features that can be encountered in the majority of the languages, so usually grammar no longer poses any challenges, but only memorizing the unfamiliar words and pronouncing sounds that do not exist in the native language.

Stress is a bit of a rarer aspect, most words can be disambiguated with any stress placement, except for a few exceptions, i.e. зáмок (castle) /замóк (lock).

Punctuation is secondary, just put commas, colons and semicolons where you feel they should go, most Russians don't know any better themselves.

Noun and verb inflections you will master with enough practice, yeah.

Maybe overall a more difficult language than English or German, but not in the same league as Chinese or Arabic, in my humble opinion.

Your experience as a native speaker is completely different from learning the language from scratch as an adult, to the point that it's almost irrelevant. Writing Russuan is not that difficult, it's just the only part that you had to actually do any work to learn

I think as a native speaker it's different to you.

Native English speakers make spelling mistakes quite often. But as a language learner I struggled with everything, except spelling - I always knew how to spell a word, even if I don't know how to pronounce it. It's the opposite of native speaker experience.

Define properly. As a native speaker who immigrated to the US decades ago, I don’t find writing proper Russian grammar that difficult.

Add baltic languages to the mix as well! Lithuanian is like a slavic language with all the inflection drama but with additional word types that are currently mostly gone from slavic languages.

Well, yes.

Your are getting downvoted, but polish writing system really is not great. There are both non-english characters (ą, ę, ś, ć, ź, ż) and digraphs (rz, sz, cz, dz, dż, dź, ch). Also there is done overlap here and some sounds can be written in more than one way (h ~= ch, ż ~= rz, ć == ci, ś == si, etc).

At least you can pretty much always tell how to read a word looking only at its spelling.

Related, I spent several formative years in Taiwan. Back then, my Taiwanese phone (way before smartphones) used bopomofo as the primary input method for typing Chinese, so I had to learn it.

Unfortunately, some of the 注音 symbols are remarkably similar to Japanese kana, and I found that my familiarity with hiragana and katakana actually caused me constant grief, as I kept mixing up the pronunciations.

Except there are many, many more symbols?

> Same thing with learning Japanese

Korean, too.

Almost nothing aside from children’s books is written exclusively in hiragana or katakana. You have to also memorize the variable readings of about 2000 kanji and many texts are nearly unintelligible without them. Pretty much everyone can memorize the former, but must struggle with the latter.

Both Korean and Mandarin are simpler in this regard (and the latter follows the same grammatical order as English).

You're honestly saying that Russia of all places has no history or culture?

Odd. According to this venn diagram, that would only give you 3 additional characters of Greek from what you would already know coming form English.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venn_diagram_showing...

Learned Greek alphabet on Duolingo in a month or two

You're saying the Russian cyrllic letters takes a weekend to learn? Maybe, that would be impressive, not for me. I think it would take me longer.

I know the Greek alphabet but only because I learned it in a frat from a YT song.

On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language. I mean, I used standard English intuitively, but couldn't have told you any of the technical terms. I agree with modern educators that explicit grammar instruction beyond a very, very basic level should not be a high priority. Exposure to and guided close reading of complex texts sharpens grammatical intuition, right alongside all of the other benefits of an advanced reading level. Knowing deep grammar does not so automatically improve textual interpretation.

This is speculation, but I wonder if the period of emphasizing explicit grammatical instruction wasn't an accidental interregnum. That is to say, back in the days when Latin and/or Greek were part of the ordinary curriculum students learned grammar much as I did, as a "natural" excelerant to interpreting a foreign tongue. Once those languages were dropped educators noticed students couldn't do grammar analysis anymore, and so tried teaching it directly, without fully considering when and why it might be useful. I don't know how well the dates line up, but it would be interesting to look into.

This. When I first started learning Russian, we immediately jumped into basic grammar rules. After two weeks of incredible frustration, I realized I did not have sufficient mastery of English grammar to be able to establish a framework for understanding Russian grammar. I often say that my first two months of learning Russian were spent learning English and it is not a joke.

in all countries where i lived, schools where I studied, there was heavy investment in grammar. (no, i didn't study in usa).

I won't really agree that mastering grammar of native language limits on how well you can learn other languages. Maybe it matters in the way how it taught in college, when you are older and approach to learning language is "more structured". But when I learned Georgian at age of 6 and Hebrew at 12 (through very deep immersion. Teachers spoke only Hebrew), English at 14 (I had 5 months of private lessons following by dial-up connection to mostly english internet), it didn't matter. At least not for me.

There was also this interesting phenomena, that immigrant when they went to local school, their scores in hebrew grammar classes were usually higher than those of native speakers.

> you don't have "brown", you have "coffee-color"

It's coffee-colour (kahverengi) in Turkish as well, but I don't find it interesting. The English word "orange" is after a fruit as well (which is also the same in Turkish: "portakal rengi", or "turuncu").

Sky-colour makes sense, but coffee drinking only goes back to the 15th century or so. Did Georgians not have a word for this colour before then?!

I believe polish is similar. They have “sky color” which is pretty cool!

> "coffee-color"

The Russian word for "brown" is literally "cinnamon-colored" ("коричневый"). And the Chinese language just uses the literal "coffee-colored" phrase (咖啡色).

There are several Hindi words for brown, my favourite is "Badami" - almond-like.

My grandfather used "laal" which is usually used for red. I used to wonder if he was colour blind.

Colours are fun in many languages.

For instance, Japanese and Vietnamese do not differentiate between blue and green and require context specific clarification, e.g «traffic light blue-green».

Yes. Although, Romance languages have more verb tenses, generally they're easier. BTW, I only learned that Russan's past tense is the same compound past, by learning Italian. Also, Old Russian dropped participles, but re-borrowed them from Church Slavonic (southern Slavic), so we know these things, and learn them at school. (Ukrainian has participle 2, but not 1, as far as I understand.)

Also, possessive pronouns are exactly like in English, concording in gender with the owner, not the object. Some people can't wrap their head around that it can be the other way around, e.g. Italian "sua madre/suo padre" can mean both his and her mother/father. In German, they must concord with both, sein Vater, seine Mutter, ihrer Vater, ihre Mutter. But Russian regional dialects do have the same feature, and if your teacher isn't a mad purist, they can easily give examples: евойная, еёйный.

Otherwise, indeed, there are less features. And in Indo-European, they're all the same: compound past tense, participles, compound past and future.

To give an example of another system: Turkic languages. 4 modal verbs (to run, to walk, to stand, to lay down), that must be applied to everything except the verb "to be", they indicate how much hurry you have doing what you're doing. It's a bit similar to Russian aspect (complete/incomplete), but way more complex. Plus you have noun cases, and everything is a suffix, and the verb is always the last. So, "I don't do X" will be something like "I <verb+ing> <stand>+me+not" (like those German prefixes that fall down in the end of the sentence.) My colleague, a Kazakh born in Russia, learns it as a foreign language, and he says it's hard.

Not really. At least not for me. The vast assortment of tenses was somewhat surprising.

About English there is a Russian saying: "in english you write Manchester but you read Liverpool"

It's ironic, seeing tons of exclusively russian-speaking immigrants not being able to learn the native language after decades living in the country.

But it's not about complexity really. I think it's more caused by the deeply ingrained superiority complex in most russians. And just in case, most russians != every russian.

Don't we all?

I have my own sample set as I presented.

Russian is seriously messed up language. Especially after learning Hebrew (which is simple and algorithmic) , I was able to look back in Russian and realize what a horrible mess of a language it is.