> On 6 Jan 2021, at 15:13, Boris Liberman <[email protected]> wrote: > > Well, Bob. > > [...] > Beside learning Russian alphabet - did you go further? When we met, 15 > years ago, I don't recall you trying to say anything in Russian. Not in our > presence, at least.
I did about 3 months of study at beginner level. I was about twenty years old at the time so by the time we met I had forgotten almost everything - I would have embarrassed myself if I’d tried to say anything. I learned it because I was working at the British Library and they needed people to work in the Russian scientific and technical section so they trawled their records for linguistics and found me. I was happy to do it because my girlfriend was half Russian (half Georgian to be precise), but they didn’t want to teach us much beyond the basics, and I left fairly soon anyway. > > Boris > >> On Sun, Jan 3, 2021 at 7:14 PM Bob Pdml <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >>>> On 3 Jan 2021, at 16:26, Boris Liberman <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> Normans (who spoke Old French) almost killed English. I think it was >> late >>> Old English or something. >>> >>> But indeed many words in modern English that seem to be of Latin origin, >>> actually came via French speaking Normans. >>> >>> I still struggle with the fact that my native Russian is based on >>> inflections, and for some reason, your ancient predecessors, Bob, >>> determined that wasn't their way :-). >>> >>> And man, do I hate articles :-). >> >> Latin is an inflected language - I learned that from age 11 to 18. >> Functionally English achieves the same thing with word order and >> prepositions. >> >> I mentioned before that I’ve recently started to learn modern Greek, which >> is also inflected, though less so than Ancient Greek and Latin. I’m very >> glad that I learned an inflected language when I was quite young, and also >> a different alphabet (Russian) when I was about twenty as I think it must >> be exceptionally difficult for an adult English speaker to learn something >> like Greek or Russian as their first foreign language as you have so many >> new concepts to learn before you can really get on with learning the >> language itself. >> >> Greek uses its articles more than English does...! >> >> >> -- >> PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List >> [email protected] >> http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net >> to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and >> follow the directions. >> > > > -- > Boris > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
