A mother in a suburb north of Denver has done the research many parents in her situation have undertaken, and in most of what she's found, it's stated that Russian ranks among the harder languages for an English speaker to learn. At eleven years old, her son Mark spends his entire day in English, and the handful of Russian words he remembers are those used at the dinner table. She's contemplating whether it makes sense for a child whose thinking has already solidified in English to take on a language that most guides classify as difficult. It can be said that Russian is hard to learn, yet its reputation is more intimidating than the reality warrants, because the majority of the difficulty lies in the initial phase of study and doesn't remain at the same level in the years that follow.
The honest difficulty of learning Russian for English speakers
A useful starting point is provided by the Foreign Service Institute, the organization that trains American diplomats in foreign languages. The institute rates each language based on the approximate number of classroom hours an English speaker needs to achieve professional working proficiency. Russian falls into the harder of the middle tiers, requiring close to 1,100 hours, which is equivalent to about 44 weeks of full-time study. (The label for this tier can vary between sources, as an older five-part system still found online numbers the categories differently, so the hours are a more reliable figure than the category name.) Compared to the roughly 600 to 750 hours needed for Spanish or French, Russian demands significantly more. However, it requires far less time than Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean, for which around 2,200 hours are estimated.
One caution is worth keeping in mind when the question of how hard it is to learn Russian is raised in these terms. The figure of 1,100 hours is widely misread because it counts intensive classroom hours of motivated adults studying the language all day under professional instruction, and it describes a very high level of mastery that few learners need. The amount of Russian a family needs to talk together and keep a grandparent within reach is achieved long before that point.
The Cyrillic alphabet is the part of the Russian language that is feared the most and demands the least.
At the very start of the study, the first obstacle a learner encounters is the Cyrillic alphabet, which is considered the most daunting feature of the Russian language from the outside and is, at the same time, found to require the least effort of all. It contains 33 letters.
The real difficulty in learning Russian is its grammar
The part of the Russian language that earns its reputation is the grammar, and within the grammar two features account for most of the difficulty that is reported by English speakers. The first of them is the case system, by which the ending of a Russian noun is changed in accordance with the job that is being done by it within the sentence, across six cases, in such a way that a single word is met in several forms in advance of the moment at which its pattern is understood. English marks almost none of this, which is the reason that the case endings seem so foreign at the beginning. The second is verb aspect, the distinction that is drawn in Russian between an action that is viewed as complete and the same action that is viewed as ongoing or repeated, a distinction for which English carries no single matching device.
The advantage children have in learning Russian
This is the foundation on which our school's work is based. The groups are kept small, a couple of meetings are held each week, and the hour is run as time spent *in* the Russian language rather than as a lecture *about* it. This is the setting in which a child encounters a case ending or a verb pair without the difficulty presented by the same material on the page. The door is opened by two free lessons, one after the other. A methodologist meets with the child first to determine their current level. After that, a full lesson is conducted with a group and a teacher. This allows a parent, in the position of Mark's mother, to see how the difficulties described in the guides manifest in a classroom setting with their own child.
Questions commonly asked by parents about learning Russian
01 Is Russian one of the hardest languages for an English speaker to learn?
It is one of the harder languages, but not the hardest, sitting in a middle tier. The Foreign Service Institute places it well above Spanish and French in the hours that are required, and well below Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean.
02 How soon can my child hold a conversation in Russian?
The point at which ordinary conversation is moved along without effort is generally arrived at after a figure of somewhere between 400 and 600 hours of steady work, which, in the case of a child by whom regular lessons are attended and by whom Russian is also heard at home, is reached within a period of one to two years. The full professional level that the well known 1,100 hour figure describes sits much further out and is more than most kids will ever have reason to need.
03 Is the Cyrillic alphabet the hardest part of learning Russian?
The alphabet looks like the hardest part, though it is the part that is cleared most quickly. The 33 letters are usually learned within a couple of weeks, and children tend to take to them faster than the adults who worry on their behalf. The grammar, in particular the six cases and the verb system, is where the lasting work is found, while the script is behind a learner within weeks.
04 Is my child too old to start Russian, or to pick it back up?
A four-year-old learner and a fifteen-year-old learner are both brought there by different routes, which is the reason our groups span the entire range from four to seventeen. A child who has let the Russian language slide is regularly brought back to it without needing to start from scratch.
