It"s a useless language.

 

I learned it for a year during lockdown and now I can read ~70% of all the russian youtube comments but that really is the only benefit.

How did you learn

by being smart

 

i learned the cyrillic alphabet in a few hours and started to learn some basic words, basic grammar. i also did a few lessons of an old east german russian text book of my mum and ans few weeks later i started to read some simple russian texts.

 

i also did a few duolingo lessons as their grammar explanations for the russian tree were written quite well its not a meme, CHECK THEM OUT

 

i listened to some obvious russian songs like закрой за мной дверь я ухожу or твои глаза and ofc some communist ones too, learned some on my guitar and remembered the lyrics and I also played LoL with some russians who joined my discord and picked up some words there and a girl of them once sent me 3 russian manga books because i always asked her for russian manga (pic1) sites and torrents. she and her friends also taught me some russian social rules like always writing someones name with an initial capital letter because not doing it is considered rude.

 

the last step of my journey was playing some fan translations of old GBA games such as zelda the minish cap and pokémon smaragd on my phone. (pic2) the reason why I chose GBA games is that due to the low resolution display, long and complex sentences with hard words are 404 because it would require an entire one of the two text lines on the screen for a single long word. I looked up all the unknown words i found in the games dialogues and the ones I encountered multiple times I wrote on a vocabulary book and memorised them. (pic3)

 

all this taught me quite how to read russian, I can read more than half of what is written on /ru/ which I consider to be a nice achievement for 1 year of learning.

 

however, be aware that this method of learning will not teach you how to speak or even understand spoken russian at all - instead you only learn how to read and write in a way of how us euros learned latin at school.

 

reading/writing was exactly what i needed though so i did all this on purpose. i never really planned to talk to russians, i decided to learn their language merely to be able to browse the russian internet.

 

being able to navigate easily through rutracker, having a nice decoding minigame everytime I encounter a russian meme and decoding random YouTube comments are probably the biggest benefits i gained of learning russian, it probably also was a nice exercise for my brain i guess?

 

not being able to understand russian WEBMs is the biggest con of this method, but also the only one i found so far, so be aware of that.

 

 

 

 

You should only do it if you have a good reason for doing so.

 

It is a beautiful language with many cool things to discover like cute words as малина (malina) or tongue twisters like взрослые (vzroslyye). Sometimes it indeed does sound a bit like a cave man language for me because of the missing articles.

what language do you think is useful?

roosian is imo unironically the most useful language (even more so than english) if you live in europe

you just have to think ahead to see it

how come? russia is offering almost nothing to foreigners. no new cultural artifacts that worth reading in it's native language are coming and old ones are already translated into other language without killing it's s-o-u-l

 

yes I don't live in euro but still, from my perspective there's nothing useful about learning russian. pls eggsplain

He is a drug dealer/criminal

It is not about the "cultural artifacts", it's about business.

There are also skills Russia lacks in own population and maybe you can offer Russia something.

But most importantly:

this. If you want to make dealings with Russia, you need to know how to make dealings with oligarhks, person to person. This requires knowledge of Russian.

The problem with Russian is that it is so irrelevant in my every day life.

Apart from in the internet, I rarely use it as a code language when talking to best bro because he has Russian roots and speaks it.

 

I invested my time into Russsian because I have a fetish for languages and I always wanted to know how slavic languages feel and work.

 

For a german:

 

1) English

2) Arabic

3) French (i come from south/west germany)

 

You hear Arabic every day on the street at least once in Marburg so knowing this language definitely will have an impact on every day life, so the next time I have some free months to study I might as well learn some more Arabic, I already know how to read their worm script.

I wish my dad was an oligarch and I could live my days as a stoner playing guitar

I work lol

this is a joke, right?

no

You work the streets?

im a code monkey (i watch youtube)

I wish I could code monkey but I can't control my internet addiction.