Russian Made Simple

Having been a super power for so many decades, Russia has been able to popularize its language and culture and make it familiar to the rest of the world. Russia has also held a pivotal role in influencing world politics over many decades...

Among the Eurasian languages in the world, Russian is probably the most wide spread compared to the rest in the region. Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian are three of the most popular East Slavik languages that remain to this day. Russian is not only spoken in Russia, but also in many regions outside of its borders. Russia is a dominant force in the realm of science and technology. Therefore, the country comes out with a huge amount of scientific papers on a wide variety of scientific topics. The output from Russia is so great that it is estimated that almost one-fourth of the scientific literature of the whole world is written and documented in the Russian language. United Nations has also considered Russian as an official language among five other languages, which further highlights the importance of Russian in the world scenario.

Having been a super power for so many decades, Russia has been able to popularize its language and culture and make it familiar to the rest of the world. Russia has also held a pivotal role in influencing world politics over many decades. Its technological progress in the realm of space and electronics has helped it to spearhead innovation in many areas and also keep pace with other leading nations in other areas. The relevance of the Russian language to the rest of the world is an important factor in many respects. There are so many companies from various other countries that do business with companies and government organizations in Russia. The knowledge of Russian is extremely essential for those people in order to communicate well with people in Russia. There are also a number of students that come to Russia to do their higher studies. Since the medium of instruction is mostly Russian in many of the educational institutions, it is extremely important for those students to learn Russian for their academic pursuits.

Russian has many similarities with many of the dialects that are spoken in regions around the nation. For instance, people in East Ukraine who speak Surzhyk can easily understand Russian because of its various similarities. Likewise, those in Belarus who speak Trasianka would also find Russian extremely easy to understand. Most of these dialects have their roots in the Russian language, from which each of them have sprung up and diversified independently. Therefore, a lot of people around Russia would also find Russian quite easy to speak because of the similarities in dialects. In fact, before the Soviet Union was dismantled and a number of small countries were a part of the USSR, the strongest unifying factor was the fact that all these nations spoke some form of a dialect of Russian and could therefore understand each other without much of a problem. Although the popularity and use of the Russian language declined from its previous level after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the language still has a strong influence on the culture and life of people in neighboring countries around Russia. Russian is still the language of choice for any kind of discourse given in the region.

According to the Defense Language Institute, which is situated in California in the US, Russian is a level 3 language in terms of difficulty. This has sometimes deterred people from attempting to learn Russian. Just the thought of tackling a level 3 language seems to put people off. The dissimilarity of Russian from other European and western languages also has been an influencing factor against people who have wanted to learn Russian.

A number of countries around Russia have however continued to speak Russian. For instance, almost 67% of the people in Estonia speak Russian. Even in Latvia, almost one-third of the people speak Russian. This has led to the debate whether the country should still use Latvia as an official language when so many people speak the Russian language. It should be noted that so many people would not be using Russian if it were a difficult language to deal with. The very fact that so many countries still speak Russian despite their own native tongue being different testifies to the fact that the Russian language is indeed not very difficult to learn. It also highlights the fact that Russian is a beautiful language with its richness and variety.