This post is based on a presentation prepared by Tamara for her Spanish class.
Many people believe that Russian is a difficult language to learn. While it isn’t difficult for me, and shouldn’t be that difficult for speakers of any Indo-European language anyway, there are several important differences the Spanish (as well as English) speakers should be aware of. She also used some examples from Finnish, just to put things into perspective.
- Alphabet: it only looks alien
- Sounds: a few weird ones
- Declension: one word, many different endings
- Verbs: easier than you think
- Articles: even easier
а. Alphabet
Modern Russian uses a variant of Cyrillic alphabet with thirty-three letters. These include ten vowels, twenty one consonants, hard sign ъ and soft sign ь. It looks like this:
| А а | Б б | В в | Г г | Д д | Е е | Ё ё | Ж ж | З з | И и | Й й |
| К к | Л л | М м | Н н | О о | П п | Р р | С с | Т т | У у | Ф ф |
| Х х | Ц ц | Ч ч | Ш ш | Щ щ | Ъ ъ | Ы ы | Ь ь | Э э | Ю ю | Я я |
Even though it may appear a bit frightening, I recommend to learn the Cyrillic alphabet as soon as you start learning Russian. Reading Russian in transliteration will only confuse you. For example, the character y is often used instead of two rather different letters (and sounds): the vowel ы and the consonant й. It is also used to indicate the “softening” of consonants (see below). As a result, the words you pronounce won’t sound anything like Russian.
б. Sounds
Some sounds in Russian present a difficulty for Spanish and/or English speakers.
Vowels
- Е: after a consonant, pronounced as /e/ or /ɛ/; in all other cases (at the beginning of a word, after a vowel, after the hard and soft signs) pronounced as /je/ or /jɛ/ in Spanish yerba /ˈjeɾ.βa/ or English yes /jɛs/.
- Ё: after a consonant, pronounced as /ö/, like in German mögen; in all other cases pronounced as /jo/, as in Spanish cuyo /ˈku.jo/ or English yolk /joʊk/.
- Ы /ɨ/. There’s nothing like this sound in either Spanish or English. Just listen: 🔊. A commonly suggested trick to reproduce the sound of ы is to bite a (clean) pencil or pen so to spread the corners of your mouth while saying /iː/, as in cheese /tʃiːz/.
- Э: /ɛ/ like in English pen /pɛn/.
- Ю: after a consonant, pronounced /ü/; in all other cases pronounced /ju/ as in Spanish yuca /ˈju.ka/ or in English yoo-hoo /ˈjuːˌhuː/.
- Я: after a consonant, pronounced /æ/; in all other cases pronounced /ja/, as in Spanish cuya /ˈku.ja/ or English yard /jɑːd/.
- Spanish has only five vowels, /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ and /u/, which always sound the same, stressed or not. There are more vowels in Finnish but they also always pronounced the same way, irrespectively of stress. As for English, they do not even know how many vowels there are, let alone which ones to use. The only thing everybody seems to agree is that most unstressed vowels in English are reduced to schwa /ə/. Vowel-wise, Russian is somewhere in between these two extremes. The stressed vowels always sound as expected. Unstressed а and о are usually pronounced as something between /a/ and /o/; unstressed е, и, э and я, between /e/ and /i/; unstressed у and ю, between /o/ and /u/. The good news is that even if you pronounce all vowels Spanish (or Finnish) way, you still will be understood.
Consonants
- Б and В: /b/ and /v/, respectively. Unlike Spanish, there is always a clear distinction between these two sounds.
- Г: normal /ɡ/ as in Spanish guerra /ˈɡera/ or in English get /ɡɛt/; in Southern Russian dialects, often pronounced /ɣ/ as in Spanish lago /ˈla.ɣo/.
- Ж /ʐ/, similar to /ʒ/ in Portuguese janeiro /ʒaˈnejru/, French jour /ʒuʀ/ or English measure /ˈmɛʒə(r)/.
- З /z/, same as /z/ in English zoo /zuː/ but not Spanish zurdo.
- Р /r/ (rolled r), same as /r/ in Spanish perro /ˈpero/.
- Х /x/, same as /x/ in Spanish ojo /ˈoxo/ or in Scottish loch /lɔx/.
- Ц /t͡s/, as /ts/ in English nuts /nʌts/ or in Italian pizza /ˈpit.tsa/. This sound is not normally found in Spanish.
- Ш /ʂ/, similar to /ʃ/ in Portuguese caixa /ˈkajʃa/, French chic /ʃik/ or English sheep /ʃiːp/.
- Щ /ɕɕ/, which is not a combination of ш and ч in spite of being often transliterated as shch. It is similar to /ʃˈʃ/ in Italian uscita /uʃˈʃita/.
з shouldn’t be a problem for English speakers, ditto р and х for Spanish speakers.
- Most Russian consonants come in two variants, “hard” and “soft”. The “softening” of Russian consonants before vowels е, ё, ю, я is often transliterated in English with letters y or i, which makes learners to pronounce, say, a phrase “Юля, я тебя люблю” (“Julia, I love you”) as /ˈjulja ja tiˈbja ljubˈlju/ instead of /ˈjulæ ja tiˈbæ lübˈlü/. The “softening” achieved with the soft sign ь alone is practically impossible to transliterate. You just have to listen and speak!
- The consonants ж, ц and ш are always hard (even if followed by soft sign), й, ч and щ are always soft.
On the other hand, Russian does not have /ð/ and /θ/ sounds so common in English and in Peninsular Spanish, as in Madrid /maˈðɾi(θ)/. And there is no /w/ sound, so when transliterating English names, one has to decide whether to use в or у. For example, “Watson” could be transliterated as either Ва́тсон or Уо́тсон.
в. Declension
- Modern Russian has six grammatical cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional. This sounds like a lot, as neither Spanish nor English have cases. But this is only two more cases compared with German (with which Russian shares four cases) and same number as Latin. Compare that with Finnish (15 cases), Hungarian (18) or Tsez (64) and stop complaining.
Here’s how the word дом (house) will change in all six cases:
And here’s what Finnish can do with their house (I didn’t bother with the case names):case singular plural Nominative дом дома́ Genitive до́ма домо́в Dative до́му дома́м Accusative дом дома́ Instrumental до́мом дома́ми Prepositional до́ме дома́х talo house talon of (a) house talona as a house taloa house (as an object) taloksi to a house talossa in (a) house talosta from (a) house taloon into (a) house talolla at (a) house talolta from (a) house talolle to (a) house talotta without (a) house taloineni with my house(s) taloin with (a) house - Russian has three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Cf. Spanish (masculine and feminine), and English (traces of).
- Russian nouns, pronouns, adjectives, present and past participles, and numerals are subject to declension: they change their endings to indicate number, gender and case.
- In Russian, there are three noun declensions conveniently named “first”, “second” and “third”.
- Adjectives, present and past participles, and ordinal numerals have to agree (in number, gender and case) with nouns and pronouns.
- Russian cardinal numerals два (two), три (three) and четыре (four) make the count noun to change differently compared to plural, as if they were “not quite” plural:
singular один дом one house “few” два до́ма two houses “few” три до́ма three houses “few” четы́ре до́ма four houses plural пять домо́в five houses
г. Verbs
- In Russian, there are only three tenses: past, present and future. (Some linguists go even further and say that Russian has only two grammatical tenses: present-future and past).
- In the present and future tenses (or present-future), there are two conjugations; like in Spanish, each has six different forms: 1st singular, 2nd singular, 3rd singular, 1st plural, 2nd plural, 3rd plural.
- In the past tense, there is no difference between 1st, 2nd and 3rd, but the verbs are number- and gender-specific.
- There are no such things as perfect, imperfect or pluperfect tense. Instead, most verbs come in two flavours, imperfective (несовершенный вид) and perfective (совершенный вид).
- There is only one type of verb “to be”: быть (unlike Spanish ser and estar). This verb is hardly ever used in present tense, so some apparently complete sentences do not contain a verb, for example «Я — русский», “I (am) Russian”.
д. Articles
- That’s easy: Russian does not use articles. (Nor does Finnish.)
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