Language Profile Russian
Russian (русский язык ) is the largest native language, and most widely spoken language in Europe. In total there are around 300-350 million speakers worldwide. Russian is a Slavic Language in the Indo-Eurpean family. From the point of view of the spoken form , its closest relatives are Ukranian and Belarussian , the other two national languages in the East Slavic group. In many places in eastern Ukraine and Belarus, these languages are spoken interchangeably, and in certain areas traditional bilingualism resulted in language mixture, e.g. Surzhyk in eastern Ukraine and Trasianka in Belarus. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, which became extinct during the fifteenth or sixteenth century, is sometimes considered to have played a significant role in formation of the modern Russian language.
Writing: Russian is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet, comprising a total of 33 letters.
Reasons to learn Russian:
Russian is widely used outside Russia. Over a quarter of the world's scientific literature is published in Russian for example. It is also applied as a means of coding and storage of universal knowledge — 60–70% of all world information is published in English and Russian languages. Russian also is a necessary accessory of world communications systems (broadcasts, air- and space communication, etc). Due to the status of the Soviet Union as a superpower, Russian had great political importance in the 20th century. Hence, the language is one of the official languages of the United Nations, ( along with Arabic, Chinese, English, French, and Spanish;)
Learning Russian is easy because:
When speaking Russian the unstressed vowel sounds are reduced in a similar way to English, this aids picking up Russian pronunciation quickly!
Learning Russian is challenging because:
Russian is considered a difficult target language for English speakers due to pronunciation and the differences with the written Alphabet. In fact the Defense Language Institute in the US considers it to be level 3 difficulty, (but take heart, the British Foreign Office considers it to be a little easier!)
Russian with Cactus:
Cactus provides Russian language training as 1:1 programs, closed groups for in-house company training, full-immersion courses, online courses, self-study, and on public evening courses.