Also, what should be said: most of Slavic nations experienced severe censorship quite recently - we all needed to become quite smart how to use a language and not get banned.
Russian Linguistic Chauvanism is as insufferable as their political and historical lunacy. Just so unselfaware. They mistake their own ignorance for our languages poverty.
Alex Friedman is smart, ""deep"" only against the background of Americans who know nothing about Russia. But actually a very shallow person. He always turns things out very strangely. And somewhere he will tell the truth and at the same time add to the total pile of shit.
as a native Russian speaker, I can say that English is very economical and concise. I feel more comfortable when discussing politics, philosophy or science in English.
Bro after learning some Russian and speaking with natives this is so accurate, they all are so well spoke and well mannered it’s so surprising. And even when they speak it’s so eloquent over the simplest of things Russia is beautiful
I find russian language very lego-like. Anything can be transformed into anything: verbs into nouns, adjectives and back. Same with curses. Amazing outlet for complex emotions!!
English is efficient. If Russian is mugged in the street he needs to yell four syllables to get help - PO-MO-GEE-TEH. American just yells 1 syllable: "Help"
I can sum it up like this: I grew up bilingual, German and Russian. For me Russian is for emotions, expressing feelings, talk about philosophy, the meaning of life, the deeper kind of conversations, if you know what I mean. German is more scientific, to discuss the news for example, or certain historical factual events. English is for ordering pizza on the phone and small talking about how your day was.
Well, Russian is my first language, but I have no idea what this guy is talking about. Since when does English have any problem with expressing emotions? And were the rest of the world just having the best time of their lives during the 20th century?
Just some words to say "a dog" Собака - dog Собачка - cute/little dog Собачонка - little, weak dog Сука - female dog Кобель - male dog Пёс - male dog Псина - bad/big dog Пёсик - little/cute male dog Дворняга - stray dog
A veey interesting take, but I have to respectively disagree. I believe English is much better and much more precise when used to describe feelings or a state of mind. Russian is much more vague. I might be lynched for this, though I believe English is really a richer language than Russian. Generally speaking. P.S. I am a native Russian speaker, a naturalized Dutch. Thus, I speak Russian, English and Dutch. Russian and Dutch are comparable to eahc other in their ability to describe feelings, thoughts etc. Engish is on a higher lave in this regardl than both Russian and Dutch.
So tired with this vodka bullshit... Pretty much no one except alcoholics drink vodka in Russia. We love beer, we love wine, champagne, we love cocktails, we love wiski and cognac. Most people in Russia just don't drink vodka.
I'm Russian and I speak English. I write fiction in English, so I understand the challenge. Honestly, I can't stand it when Russian-speaking people cry the blues while talking to the people abroad. ‘The Russian language is expressive because of the suffering of the Russian people.’ No, it is expressive because of its absolutely incredible word-building, because of prefixes, roots and suffixes, which can be used as blocks to build words; one prefix or suffix can fundamentally change the meaning of a word. For example, ‘бежать’ means ‘to run’. ‘ЗА_бежать’ means that a person rushed to a place where they stayed for a short period of time before leaving, while 'ПРИ_бежать' means the same thing, but the person stayed in the place instead of leaving shortly after they arrived. ‘У_бежать’ means 'to ran away'. At the same time, ‘ОТ_бежать’ means that the person ran a short distance away and stopped. The Russian language is richer because of word formation and the freedom of the word order in a sentence. This makes the language very flexible, in a way that a small change in the word or the word order can bring a whole new tone to a sentence. It has nothing to do with suffering. One can describe eloquently and with colours both joy and yearning in Russian, as well as, idk, the process of pouring milk into a glass. All thanks to the structural features of the language.
diferent level of swearing not in multitude of ways to say "fcuk". It's is possible in russian to swear and yet not offend anyone. As for language itself, there are words to describe weather or time of day occuring that would need 4-6 words in english.
Ok here we go. Those who think English is simplistic clearly had too much Russian classical literature and almost none of English. They both, and pretty much all the languages during their evolution have had enormous depth and sophistication that have flattened out as we got mostly focused on technology. Swearing in Russian or Slavic is not an art form just because one can butcher words and twist them into cuss-based adjectives, adverbs and verbs from a noun with a bunch of extra suffixes and prefixes. It's just. Linguistic. Flexibility. Nothing art-formly. To the generalization: (Why are there people speaking for entire nations btw?) The fact that a great portion of post-Soviet population uses cuss words in normal emotionally neutral speech vs venting a frustration is a very very sad indicator of hillbilly proportion in each country. Nothing linguistic to be proud of, only general culture and lifestyle issues. Sad. Junior highschool educational load-yes, super reading -oriented schools. But not that dramatic "expected excellence" and "fear" all over, that's just your childhood, cadet-wannabe, sorry. However, if you take English-speakers and care to assess the correctness of speech (esp written) vs Slavic, I'm sure you'll notice that the PRESENT day English-speakers make fewer errors even on an average highschool graduate level. The infamous Soviet education may have been stricter and more heavy but the following generations have been cultivated to become so so so much dumber and repulsively ignorant on a far greater scale. Not only do people struggle to spell, they also have a much broader range of speaking mistakes, from homeless to successful individuals. Very rich language? Or maybe overdramatic and sloppy? Side note: having read all the school required books from both backgrounds, I can stand by my assurance that the Russian language is capable of and actively has been conveying just as much joy, love, awe, etc. as your "suffering" mentioned. These were biased labels the guest tried to sell to masses. Very irresponsible, given the impressionable and influential host...Too bad.
This is some very weird mystical approach to languages. As a Russian who speaks English, both languages can be as poetic and curt as the situation calls for it. Russian modifies the words themselves, so you can make a deeper and short sentence, I guess, where in English you'd need more separate words. This whole spiel about "oh 20th century and tragedy" is such bullshit. English, as a language, existed long before America. Russian, also existed long before the 20th century... both nations had wars, including a civil war... So he's just pulling stuff out his ass.
learning English for Russians is very complex. in English you have a special order of words in sentences to differ for example a question from a statement. But in Russian we don't have it we link words in sentences with changing the end part of it and we differ questions from statements by intonation. We have only 3 tenses: past, simple and future. If you need "perfect" tense you just need to add "yet or already" in the sentence without changing the verb. Articles - we don't understand it at all until we speak with natives and get used to them. Also in Russian we have much more words to explain ourselves. it's very hard for me to understand how someone could call the same word a time in the year, a tiny river and squishy spiral thing... Last spring I was walking along the running transparent spring with pure water and found a suspension spring. in terms of tone the way English people speak with their head voice in Russia we use this tone when we try to annoy someone😂 Mostly we speak with a chest voice. And you always seem too excited when you speak about something.
He is talking about the simplicity of American English, not English itself. There are a lot of poetics written in English, mostly British though, that are just way ahead of Russian poetics in terms of expressing feelings and picturing the world around you. Aurora Leight is one canonical example of the richness of the English language. But of course, linguistically speaking, it is not right to compare a language with a vocabulary of 800k words to one with just above 200k.
In the far future, there is will be only 1 nation - Human. We will use the only 1 language which is easy to get and express lots of fealing like in russian one. Unification is unevitalbe. My thoughts about it, language will mostly based on english with another form of grammatic sentence and contains different words from other nations depends on inventions.
I find that the opposite is true honestly. When speaking English you don't have to know very far in advance what you're gonna say, you can just throw out broad concept after broad concept and narrow it down to what you're trying to convey. In Russian, because it packs so much particularity into every word, it's gonna come out awkward if you're a bit scatter-brained like me :')
Being russian and professional linguists, I can say that this man, in the video, consciously or not, invest too much significance in modern Russian language. Without any doubts, our language is dramatically more complex by grammar, and extremely sophisticated system of prefixes and suffixes alltogether with cases and declinations make russian language incredibly flexible, a competitive comparison with german languages (English language is a german language) is erroneous. Everything merely depends on an individual level of a particular language: a native English language speaker can have rather poor vocabulary, and narrowed world-awareness what prevents such a person from their linguo-sophistication, BUT it only depends on a person, NOT ON a language. Here, in Russia, we also have upsetting quantity of people whose daily usage of the native language is restrained and they also suffer from communication problems.
I am also Russian, but I speak English well, because I studied completely in English at the university. At some point, I started inserting English words into speech in Russian, because it's hard for the brain to switch and remember all words even in my native language. Btw, it seems to me that Russian is well suited for expressing emotions, English words appear in my speech when I need to explain or analyze something. Russians do not hesitate to express their emotions with voice, gestures or facial expressions. When I have any emotions, I speak purely in Russian. We can always burst out laughing or make a scary or suspicious face, this is a big plus, we seem to sincerely express what we really feel. Less hypocrisy I would say. Sorry, my thought was chaotic, but I think you get it :)
I find it so strange that many people in the comments call Russian more philosophical, as it is much, much easier to read philosophical works in English: Russian does not have anything similar to “ to be” word/concept ingrained in the language to play with - try reading, say, Heidegger in Russian translation - it’s impenetrable, whilst in English it reads logical and fine. I would say Russian is a more mystical language, better suited to discuss the unknown, uncertain, elusive things. The great thing about English is its surgical precision with a million of dictionary words, but when something is yet to be sorted I find Russian - language and mindset that goes with it - to be more intuitive. But again, even for bilingual people one language is usually more native, so to speak, and am a mere learned C2 in English.
I have to disagree. I've listened to soo many songs from all over the world, my mother is russian so i know all russian songs, also Im learning english since primary school and i know most of songs that exist. One single rapper changed my mind - Bladee from draingang. He is from Sweden and yet he chose to sing/rap in english but his choices of words, his voice and melodies he creates changes whole english, trust me. It's so emotional that i cant think of one russian song that catches it. Or I actualy can image someone - Yuri Shatunov, he was the russian holy kid, best russian singer but that's because he grew up without parents and had a voice of an angel. But listen to any bladees album if you haven't, please. Ofcourse, you have to strongly relate to his emotional state, at the moment you listen to him, like I did, and every album he dropped i felt like he did, it's almost like a magic. But I didn't have to relate to any of his songs, because when he was singing i felt like i'm him.
