WHY should one learn Russian? What is the advantage of studying this language, which is said to be difficult at first sight?
What are the opportunities that will come if you learn it?
Generally, there are five misconceptions about the Russian language.
FIRST, the Cyrillic alphabet is hard to read. But this is wrong. The Russian alphabet resembles the Latin and Greek alphabet. It's quite familiar, and many letters are similar. The Cyrillic alphabet can be learnt within a few hours.
SECOND, Russian grammar is very difficult. Wrong again. French has more verbal tenses. English has more prepositions. Latin has more declinations. German has more irregular verbs.
THIRD, declinations are impossible to remember. Not true. They are no more difficult than in Latin or German. Once you start practising them, it becomes automatic and you don't need to think about it.
FOURTH, pronunciation is very complex. Not so. The only difficulties are the "zh" like in English "pleasure" and the "hard i". But if you make a mistake, Russian people will still understand you.
FIFTH, Russian is spoken only in Russia. Also wrong. Russian is spoken by 250 million people, 100 million of whom are outside Russian borders. From Ukraine to Armenia, through Latvia, Kazakhstan, in all the former Soviet Republics, Russian is a "lingua franca".
I, therefore, put forward that there are 11 good reasons to learn Russian.
RUSSIAN is spoken in Europe and Asia with an estimated 250 million speakers.
RUSSIAN is a great cultural language. When you speak Russian, you can read Anton Chekhov's plays, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels and certainly vibrant and exciting poems by Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Aleksander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak and Iosif Brodsky, which in translation lost their beauty, and understand Vladimir Visotsky's, Vitas's or Philip Kirkorov's songs and clips, some of which were filmed in Malaysia.
RUSSIA sits on the Council of Europe, even though it's not a member of the European Union.
RUSSIA is one of the great economic players in the contemporary world.
MORE Russian tourists and businessmen travel to Asia, including Malaysia. This is true before the pandemic and surely will be when countries eventually open their boarders.
THE knowledge of Russian is a good asset for an international career.
WHEN you speak a Slavic language like Russian, you can easily learn other languages from the same family (Bulgarian, Polish, Czech, etc).
RUSSIAN is a working language in international institutions.
RUSSIA is a member of the United Nations Security Council.
RUSSIAN is spoken in space. Did you know that Russian was the first language in space and Malaysian astronauts learnt it in order to fly there in the Russian rocket?
LASTLY, Russian is a very beautiful language. Despite a certain hyperbolism, the opinion of the great Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-1765), the first author of Russian grammar on the qualities of this language, is shared by many Russians.
"The Holy Roman Emperor Carl the Fifth used to say that one should speak Spanish with God, French with one's friends, German with one's enemies and Italian with the fair sex.
"But had he been skilled in Russian, he would, of course, have added that it would be appropriate to speak with all of these (advantages) in it, for he would have found in it the greatness of Spanish, the liveliness of French, the force of German, the tenderness of Italian and, in addition, the richness and strong terse descriptiveness of Greek and Latin."
The writer, writing from Russia, is a former lecturer of Universiti Malaya