While a significant portion of Russians have studied a foreign language (often English or German in school), the percentage who can speak it fluently is much lower, with older surveys suggesting around 15% know a language (often with limited skill) and only a small fraction (around 5%) speak English fluently, though Moscow shows higher rates. A 2008 poll noted 33% in Moscow vs. 7% in villages, highlighting big city/rural divides, with skills varying by age and education.
About 80% of Russia's population consists of ethnic Russians, who are Slavic people, making them the dominant majority in this multiethnic country, though other large groups include Tatars, Ukrainians, and Bashkirs, with a significant portion of the population living in the European part of Russia.
Languages with 1,000,000 or more speakers
In 2010, there were 259.8 million speakers of Russian in the world: in Russia – 137.5 million, in the CIS and Baltic countries – 93.7 million, in Eastern Europe – 12.9 million, Western Europe – 7.3 million, Asia – 2.7 million, in the Middle East and North Africa – 1.3 million, Sub-Saharan Africa – 0.1 million, Latin ...
Russian, English, Tatar, German and Chechen are the most widely spoken languages in Russia, according to the 2022 census. While Mandarin is spoken far less, it has been growing swiftly in popularity in recent years as a foreign language.
🌍 Only about 25% of its land lies in Europe, but this small portion holds nearly 75% of Russia's population, including major cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
There's no single "hardest" language, but Mandarin Chinese is consistently ranked #1 for English speakers due to its tonal nature (four tones change word meanings) and complex logographic writing system requiring thousands of characters. Other top contenders often cited include Arabic (right-to-left script, complex sounds, grammar) and Japanese (multiple writing systems like Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, plus honorifics). The difficulty depends heavily on your native language, with languages like Tibetan, Estonian, and Polish also challenging learners with unique grammar or cases.
Language family
Then there is a branching off: Russian belongs to the Slavic group and English to the West Germanic group. Course, this branching has led to serious differences, but Russian has more similarities with English than, for example, with Chinese, due to the common ancestry.
To say 1-8 in Russian, you say один (odin), два (dva), три (tri), четыре (chetyre), пять (pyat'), шесть (shest'), семь (sem'), восемь (vosem'), with pronunciations like "ah-DEEN," "DVAH," "TREE," "chye-TYRY," "PYAT," "SHYEST," "SYEM," and "VOH-syem," respectively.
More recent Chinese presences have developed in Europe, where they number well over 1 million, and in Russia, they number over 200,000, concentrated in the Russian Far East.
Russian grammar is notoriously difficult, mostly due to factors such as the case system and perfective and imperfective verbs. If you attempt to start learning Russian by tackling grammar first, you'll get nowhere fast. There's simply too many things to memorize all at once.
Most Russians derive from the Eastern Slavic family of peoples, with Turkic (8.4%), Caucasian (3.3%), Uralic (1.9%) and other minorities. Birth rate: 13.1 births/1,000 population (2010 est.) Death rate: 13.9 deaths/1,000 population (2010 est.)
The short answer is yes, but as with any major life decision like relocating to a different country, especially one with a vastly different culture and political landscape, there are a few things to consider before you pack your bags and shout “Za Rodinu!” (For the Motherland!).
The word 'sorok' is connected to the Old Rus fur trade. It referred to a bundle of 40 sable skins – exactly the number needed to make one fur coat. The word 'sorok' then replaced the name 'chetyre desyate' ('four tens') for being more convenient in speech. This word exists only in Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian.
The Russian language is very similar to Ukrainian and Belarusian, and a little bit Poland.
The 7-letter Russian spelling rule states that after the consonants г, к, х, ж, ч, ш, щ, you never write the vowel Ы, but instead use И, even if the sound is hard (like in жизнь - life). This also applies to other vowels: after these seven letters, never write Ю, use У (e.g., чуть), and never write Я, use А (e.g., часто), a principle often extended to include the letter Ц in broader rules. This rule ensures consistency with phonetic shifts after these specific "hard" or "hissing" consonants, helping learners avoid common mistakes in endings.
Once you know the alphabet, you can read any Russian word, even if pronouncing it correctly is another challenge. Chinese writing is a different beast. To be literate, you need to know around 3,000 unique characters, each with its own pronunciation and meaning.
There's no single "number one" easiest language, as it depends on your native tongue, but for English speakers, Norwegian, Dutch, Afrikaans, Spanish, and Italian are consistently ranked as very easy due to similar Germanic roots (Norwegian, Dutch, Afrikaans) or shared Latin vocabulary (Spanish, Italian) with English, plus simple grammar and pronunciation. The truly easiest language is the one you're most motivated to learn and find engaging content in, as personal interest drives acquisition.
English is the number one international language (lingua franca), boasting around 1.5 billion total speakers, making it dominant in global business, technology, and tourism, even though Mandarin Chinese has more native speakers. While Mandarin is the largest by native speakers, English's vast number of second-language users cements its role as the primary global communication tool, followed by Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish in overall speaker numbers.
Of all the European languages a native English speaker can learn, Russian is among the most difficult. The Germanic and Romance languages have a lot of the same core because they both have roots in Latin. Russian is from a completely different language branch called the Slavonic branch, which includes Czech and Polish.
Rublyovka, as the most prestigious residential area for the wealthy in Russia, has a history that dates back to the Tsarist era.
Most émigrés initially fled from Southern Russia and Ukraine to Turkey and then moved to other Slavic countries in Europe (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland). A large number also fled to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Iran, Germany and France.