As a native speaker, one thing I see people struggle with surprisingly often is that a) every noun has a gender, and b) every word grammatically related to a noun must always match its gender, case, and plurality. The second thing is the inflections themselves, yes.
But I suppose it also depends a lot on that person's native language — the people I most commonly hear speak Russian as a foreign language are migrant workers, whose native languages are usually Turkic. Those don't have grammatical genders. It feels like learning Russian would be easier for someone who is native in, for example, a Roman language (Spanish/French/Portuguese/Italian) or German.
The gender of a noun in the native language is sometimes the opposite in the other language, so it can be difficult in its own way as well. At least this was my experience when briefly learning german as a portuguese speaker. In this sense learning english was easier, although it happened kinda passively by just being on the internet too much.
I think it depends on how you approach learning genders. As a native English speaker, when learning Romance languages I don't think of words as being feminine or masculine. I think of "il pane" as being a single unit, and "la bottiglia" as being another single unit. I've then never struggled when looking at a new Romance language because I'm not thinking "this word used to be feminine and now it's masculine" - I'm just learning new units, as if the articles are part of the word itself.
This extends to other words that must agree. Instead of thinking "the noun is masculine so the adjective must be masculine as well", think "the article is 'il' therefore the adjective is 'buono' instead of 'buona'".
That works, but Russian doesn't have articles. You can, however, mostly get away by assuming that feminine nouns end with -а, -ь, and -я, neutral ones with -о, and all others are masculine.
That helps less than I'd like with the spoken language given that a trailing о or а are pronounced like а because it won't be stressed.
For non-Russian speakers, the two letters get the sound that you expect if stressed, and otherwise sound like а. This rule also applies to borrow words that were transliterated into Cyrillic. So the English computer becomes компью́тер, and the stress goes on ...пью́т... (the English ...put... bit of the word). As a result that first о became an а sound.
My wife's reassurances that Cyrillic is phonetic likewise didn't work out for me. You can't pronounce the written word correctly without knowing where the stress is. You can't write down the spoken word correctly without knowing which unstressed а sounds are written as о.
Of course this is far better than English spelling...
As a native English speaker who learned Russian years ago, the o/a thing never felt confusing to me, perhaps because it felt very similar to what English does. Syllables that aren't stressed tend to be pronounced faster with less of a hard sound, and that's just what the o -> a rule feels like to me.
I always felt like Russian was a pretty easy language to learn because it was so regular. Yes there are a lot of cases and declensions, but once you learn the rules, you can get like 95% of the way there, and then even the last 5% of exceptions are quite "regular exceptions", e.g. the "ogo" written -> "ova" pronounced rule.
That а/о thing is taught extensively in schools. There are formal rules for everything, but of course I don't remember any. What I do remember is these are called "безударные гласные" (unstressed vowels), and "проверочные слова" (test words?) are used to figure out whether it's о or а. The idea is iirc that you find a word with the same root in a different form where that syllable is stressed. Except sometimes there isn't one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Prepositions don't change based on gender but make the word itself change case (обсуждение -> в обсуждении). The pronouns though, those are gender-specific (он/она/оно, этот/эта/это), regardless of whether they refer to people or not.
Well, you can. But if you're just learning the language, you're going to struggle to find words that don't use a predictable one. And if you do stumble across one of those, and you use 个 instead, people may not even notice.
No one is out there watching to make fun of you if you count horses in 只 instead of 匹.
That is not something that will happen with measure words. Ignoring some grammar will limit you. This is not such a case. Ignoring semantics-free measure words will make you sound like a native speaker.
Chinese measure words are not something that happens on a noun-by-noun basis. Memorizing them as part of a noun is not a well-chosen approach. Most often this will saddle you with the burden of separately memorizing "pass" and "passed" as independent forms of the verb, while providing comparable benefits.
You might have noticed that my comment above suggested that
(a) the default measure word is 个;
(b) the default measure word for a horse is not 个.
> As a native speaker, one thing I see people struggle with surprisingly often is that a) every noun has a gender, and b) every word grammatically related to a noun must always match its gender, case, and plurality. The second thing is the inflections themselves, yes.
My experience differs:
In terms of vocabulary: the vocabulary in Russian often has little relationship to words in German, English or French, so you really have to learn very "foreign" words.
In terms of pronounciation, learning is made more difficult since many vowels are pronounced differently depending on whether the syllable is emphasized or not, and where the vowel is in the word. Additionally, some consonant clusters are pronounced differently from what you'd expect (simple example: the "в" in Здравствуйте is silent). Additionally, some consonant cluster don't exist in German or English, so you have to get used to them.
In terms of grammar, a difficulty with Russian as a beginner is rather that there exist lots of cases (6-7, depending on whether you consider locative case as a separate case from prepositional case or not), and you of course have to learn which preposition demands which case, and then you obviously have to use the properly declinated noun/adjective.
So, there is simply an insane amount of tables to cram.
I wouldn't claim that the latter is inherently difficult per se, but rather it's a huge amount of material that you have to get very certain in that slows your learning down.
EDIT: Another difficulty is the irregularity of emphasis in verb conjugation:
приходи́ть: e.g. мы прихо́дим
говори́ть: e.g. мы говори́м
i.e. a very different syllable is emphasized in the verb conjugation.
Even native Russian speakers couldn't explain why this is the case, and told me to simply cram the verb conjugation.
I don't see Russian as completely alien to English. There are a lot of loanwords from English, French, German, Greek and Latin which are identifiable. Some of the native words are similar to western ones — voda is obviously similar to water, brat to brother, tri is similar to three etc. Much easier than Hungarian vocabulary which has remarkably little to latch onto.
With some rarer ones (eg. slovene), you even have a special dual form (singular, dual, plural).
And then there are different declinations when eg counting:
eno pivo (1 beer)
dve pivi (2 beers, dual)
tri piva (3 beers, plural)
štiri piva (4 beers, plural)
pet piv (5 beers, plural, but now in genitive case for some reason, same for higher numbers, eg sto (100) piv)
On the other hand, knowing slovene and being able to read (usually the serbian form of) cyrillic makes you understand 2/3 of the russian texts out there, which is especially useful for dodgy forums with semi-legal knowledge not available anywhere else and which google can't/won't fully translate (unless you copy-paste the text into a translation window).
I like to imagine Slavic languages as a sort of scale, where Russian is at one end, Polish and Serbian are at the opposite end, and Ukrainian and Belarusian are somewhere in the middle.
The scale is two-dimensional and has three poles, like RGB color charts. Polish and Czech in the west, Russian in the east, and Southern Slavic (represented by Serbian) in the south. Hungarian and Romanian split them apart, while in turn having absorbed a huge amount of Slavic words in turn.
Finnish and Hungarian, despite being spread well apart from each other, are from the same Uralian language family.
Both (and other languages in the family) share one distinctive feature – an excessively large number of noun cases (by Indo-European language family standards).
However, these languages do not have prepositions, i.e. the 16-20 odd noun cases replace them, so it makes it somewhat easier for a new learner.
The noun cases can also be thought of as postpositions despite obviously not being them, but it is a good and simple mental model.
The real outlier is Icelandic, which has a notoriously irregular grammar, multiple noun declension and verb conjugation groups, prepositions and postpositions despite a small number of noun cases.
I used the word "split apart" to express that Hungarian is not a Slavic language. If it was a Slavic Language then there would be no split between its neighboring Slavic languages, but a dialect continuum instead.
The other reason being that Russian (and other non-English) speakers are usually picking up their third or fourth language, while for English speakers it's almost universally number two, and half-hearted at that... (I say that as a native English speaker whose Spanish is muy mal).
Russians don't actually speak foreign much, a Russian person who speaks four languages is considered very smart / having too much free time for their own good / both. Definitely not West Europe levels of language prowess.
Technically at least one foreign language is required as part of basic school education in Russia. For most people my age and younger it's English. Now the problem is, the quality and methods of this leave a lot to be desired. I myself learned English mostly by spending too much time on the internet and playing games that weren't translated. Other people are much more lazy.
Two years of a foreign language were required in my K-12 schooling; I took Spanish; estudio dos años, pero requerdo poco o nada. mi español es muy mal :-(
Eastern europeans speak multiple languages where russian was a second language due to everyone being in the union (occupation). Languages are different and span multiple language groups. IMO there is no strong correlation here not to mention the fact that english is more popular. German language and its presence in the curriculum has other reasons, like the fact that german economy is closer rather than say english or american, there was more incentive to learn german due to economical necessity. But nowadays everyone chooses english as it is a simpler, and considered the real business language.
AFAIK there is no evidence to suggest that the uptake of german is easier for people living in the eastern parts of europe
I think it is generational. A hundred years ago, most Eastern Europeans would have learnt German, fifty years ago they would have learnt Russian and nowadays they all want to pick up American English.
> German native speakers might better understand how cases work
As a native German speaker: cases mostly work like the type system of a programming language - they help you to immediately detect when there is something off. The "type" that the clause has in a sentence has to match the type that the predicate expects - otherwise the type checker will "reject" the sentence.
Yes, I would say that my thinking about the German language deeply influences my thinking about programming. I asked Russian native speakers who work as programmers whether this also holds for them for the Russian language, but they said the Russian language does not have a similar influence on their thinking about programming as I claim and explained about the German language for me.
The cases contain actual information that give the speaker more flexibility in structuring their sentences: a German phrase remains syntactically valid as long as you don't move the conjunctions or the verb, while the emphasis of the sentence shifts.
Of course, the German case system has been reduced so far that only the genitive (which is also on its way out) still modifies the noun. Articles have taken up the task of carrying the endings, with only pronouns still being fully declined.
Languages without case systems have other means to achieve this of course.
I’m learning Croatian as a native Portuguese speaker, and I find out while the grammar itself is easier to think coming from Portuguese, I prefer to deal with sentence construction as if thinking about it from English.
But I suppose it also depends a lot on that person's native language — the people I most commonly hear speak Russian as a foreign language are migrant workers, whose native languages are usually Turkic. Those don't have grammatical genders. It feels like learning Russian would be easier for someone who is native in, for example, a Roman language (Spanish/French/Portuguese/Italian) or German.