Comments:

1. 

    

   Patty H:

   Maria, I enjoy your posts. My grandparents emigrated from Belarus before WWI, and I grew up listening to them speak to my father in Russian. I studied it myself at Kent State in Ohio. I enjoyed your husband’s post on visiting Belarus and Russia.

   • 

      

     Maria:

     @Patty H Thanks, Patty. Ha, I taught at Kent State while I was doing my master’s there.
     It is actually Jenya, my-co-blogger, whose husband went to Belarus and Russia, but my husband is fascinated by Russian culture, too (especially the silly parts like superstitions). Come visit again!

2. 

    

   David Roberts:

   Good to know they have these problems! It’s usually the case in any language that the difference between native speakers and very good non-native speakers is that the former make “native” mistakes and the latter make ‘foreigner” mistakes.

   Interesting about numbers. The second language in the UK is Welsh, a Celtic language. The number system is a bit more complicated – for one thing they tend to count in twenties rather than tens (French quatre vingts for 80 comes from this principle). But most Welsh speakers can’t be bothered, and since they’re all bilingual, they normally just use the English numbers.

   Here’s a slightly related question. How good are native russians at knowing where a foreigner speaking not very good Russian comes from? For example, would they be able to tell whether I’m American or British (or Italian or Spanish for that matter?). And how good are they at distinguishing between speakers of the other slavic languages, eg do Bulgarians and Poles speak Russian with characteristic and different accents?

   • 

      

     Maria:

     @David Roberts David, I like the part where Welsh speakers “can’t be bothered.” This reminds me of Russians, who can’t be bothered to decline numbers and pretty much say them in the nominative.
     As for your question, that would depend on how much exposure the native speaker has had to the different accents and on how the foreigner learned Russian. I, for one, can tell if someone learned Russian at the Defense Language Institute in the US because they are fluent, but their Rs and Us are totally US-English-sounding (guvvuh-roo). 🙂 (Dear DLI folks, not everyone is like that; and I met people who surpassed their initial limitations.) I would say, your average Russian off the street probably couldn’t tell a British person from an American, but they would probably be able to tell you’re an English speaker if you retained the English R. Same goes for learners of other language backgrounds.
     What Russians are somewhat better at is detecting accents from the neighboring countries (Ukraine, Georgia, etc.), probably thanks to greater exposure.

3. 

    

   j:

   My issue with this post begins with the picture. Is that girl learning/studying Russian?(she clearly is not) and ends with how completely unhelpful this post is. Russian is hard. Teaching Russian (if you have a classroom and 12 or more weeks) may work to explain nominative, prepositional, and genitive case, but the Russian language contains more exceptions to rules than rules dictate And that is only talking about formal/literary language excluding every other (and lets be honest) more useful cases and language.

4. 

    

   samonen:

   I don’t know if I can point out any “errors” made by native speakers of Russian, but sometimes I get a nagging feeling they might have misplaced the stress in a word. Or who am I to tell if it is right or wrong; it is just something that puzzles or disturbes me and makes me peruse dictionaries and what not. For example, I was once pretty sure I heard a wrong placement of stress in the verb морщить, which I believe I learned reading Dostoyevsky and specifically found out about the stress, memorizing that it is on the first syllable. So I was struck when I heard this verb pronounced “the wrong way”. Which of course sent me perusing some more in my books only to find out that, indeed, this word can have the stress on the latter vowel as well but in that case it refers to clothes only. *SIGH* I’m not sure if I got it right…

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     Maria:

     @samonen Samonen, very good point. A lot of Russians just read certain words, especially in classics, and never hear them said aloud. That was the case with me and давеча /the other day, lately/, which I used to stress on the second syllable (the correct stress is the first syllable).

5. 

    

   mike:

   Thanks, Maria, for ‘collocation’. Even after decades of studying languages I’d never run across the term.

   I’m loving these discussions of mistakes.

6. 

    

   Alexandra Leontieva:

   In written Russian: -тся / -ться. Looks really bad, and is known to have caused numerous online wars. For more suggestions, check out “Расстрельный список” at Lurkmore

7. 

    

   Maria:

   Alexandra, that’s a good addition. In terms of spelling, yes, there are many things Russians get confused about: о vs ё in suffixes, for example (like девчонка). I just concentrated on the spoken language in this post.

8. 

    

   Cheryl in TX:

   I am so glad to see no. 4, about natives’ difficulty with number declensiins! I used to just despair of ever getting comfortable with those. 🙂

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     Maria:

     @Cheryl in TX Cheryl, you bet! Most people just gave up, to the chagrin of language elitists.

9. 

    

   Dandi:

   Nice post! Спасибо Мария!