Why Russian and Ukrainian Nouns Change their Spelling

[MineralMan]

You might encounter Ukraine as spelled in the Cyrillic alphabet. If you do, you'll notice that the spelling of the end of the word changes. As the subject of a sentence, it is spelled Ukraina, and pronounced oo-cry-ee-na. But, the ending of the word changes, depending on how it is used in a sentence. It is universally mispronounced by English speakers.

Both Russian and Ukrainian are highly inflected languages, with different word forms for nouns, adjectives, and verbs, depending on their usage in sentences. If you studied Latin in school, you'll recognize this phenomenon.

For nouns, they are declined depending on their case, number, assigned gender, and other factors. There are six cases in regular use, with a couple of others that only apply to a few words. It's complicated, to say the least, and for English speakers the highly inflected Slavic languages present a real challenge when learning them.

Adjectives are also declined similarly and change depending on usage.

For information on noun cases in Russian and Ukrainian, see this link:

http://masterrussian.com/aa071600a.shtml

Verbs in Russian are also complex. Verb conjugation gives verbs different spellings and pronunciation, depending on usage and tense. English has that, too, but it's far more complicated in Russian. Even worse, Russian and Ukrainian use a long list of verb prefixes to change the meaning of the verb. For example, the verb that translates to "To go" has maybe 30 to 40 possible prefixes available. Learning all of those is another challenge.

Finally, both languages use no definite articles, such as "a, an, and the," and no helper verbs like is, are, was, and were. All of those things are handled differently than in English.

[WA-03 Democrat]

1. Thanks MM

Good overview!

[DarthDem]

2. Yes

Declension of nouns and adjectives is typically the reason why people claim that German and Russian are harder than French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. I tend to agree as to all but French because the French do not hew to conventional word order - whereas German and Russian largely do and the other romance languages almost exclusively do - in either spoken or written French.

Moreover, French has more very commonly used idiomatic expressions than any of the other romance languages and probably more than German or Russian as well. French might be easier to "learn" than German or Russian, but sounding like a native French speaker is just as hard if not harder than doing so in German and Russian for all of the above reasons.

[MineralMan]

3. Oh, Russian is chock-full of idiomatic expressions.

I have a huge dictionary (in Russian) of them. Most are meaningless to English learners, even if the expressions are translated. They have cultural, place, and other origins that make no sense until you learn them.

[DarthDem]

4. Trust Me - French Has Them Too

I have a similar book. It's probably larger than the Russian one.