Getting technical.

Disclaimer: If you are not interested in linguistics and grammar you might want to skip this post.

So, what type of language is Russian? In short, it in an Indo-European, slavic language, distantly related to the germanic and latin languaes. For a learner, that means that there are quite a few words that are similar to ours, but not at all as many as is the case between for example Swedish and German, or English and French.

What are the problems then? The obvious one is the alphabet; even when you know every letter in the alphabet, spelling your way through a word is a somewhat slow process, at least initially.

Then there is the pronunciation. Russian words are not all consonants, although it does feel like that sometimes. The actual sounds are not that bad, but the combinations, especially consonant clusters, can sometimes be more than a mouthful. Also, there are quite a few cases where letters are not pronounced as you would expect. MOCKBA, for example, looks like it should be pronounced "moskva", but it should in fact be "maskva", since unstressed "o" becomes "a". (The Russian language is full of such examples). Why they don't just write "a" from the start, I do not know. Probably just a conspiracy to make my life harder.

Well, 'nuff whining. Next post tomorrow, assuming  feel like it.