Russians speak good English due to strong school requirements, immersion via media (games, Netflix), increased travel, and career needs in IT/business, though fluency varies greatly; many learn grammar but struggle with speaking practice, while urban youth often reach higher levels thanks to access to English content, even as official attitudes sometimes shift, as noted by Quora users and Quora users.
Despite a growing interest in foreign languages across Russian-speaking countries, still only about 5.5 percent of Russian speakers are able to speak English as either a first or second language.
Perhaps the most versatile Russian curse word, blyat' functions similarly to the English F-word as an intensifier or exclamation. It's used to express everything from mild annoyance to extreme anger and can be inserted almost anywhere in a sentence for emphasis.
'Prawn', 'spawn' and anything with 'AW'
Or those vowel combinations! You've probably already got that it's Russians' main weak spot. Instead of an open ɔː sound in such words as 'prawn' or 'spawn' Russians pronounce a clear 'ao' or even 'au': [spaun] and [praon].
Russian's reputation for difficulty comes from the cumulative effect of a different script, phonemic palatalization and vowel reduction, a dense inflectional system including cases and aspect, and substantial lexical/pragmatic distance from English and many Western European languages.
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.
The 7-Letter Russian Spelling Rule dictates that after the consonants г, к, х, ж, ч, ш, щ, you must write и (not ы) and у (not ю), even though the sounds might seem to call for the other vowel, due to these consonants being 'hard' or 'unpaired'. This rule ensures consistent spelling in endings, like using -и for plural nouns (книги - books) or -и in adjectives (русский - Russian), preventing common errors for learners.
me and my friends usually say чзх - че за хуйня, че за - what the or че/что блять. or you can say втф which is basically wtf abbreviation.
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.
10 of the hardest English words to pronounce
Я тебя люблю
This phrase is the most common way to say "I love you" in Russian, and it's used in the same way as the English expression. You can swap the words around in different ways without losing the meaning, such as Я люблю тебя (I love you), Люблю тебя (love you), and Тебя люблю (love you).
Russia: Creative Cursing
One famous Russian curse word, “блядь” (blyad'), is equivalent to the English f-word and is used with caution.
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.
🌍 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.
The Russian language is very similar to Ukrainian and Belarusian, and a little bit Poland.
Frisian is the closest language to English
The closest language to English is Frisian. This Germanic language is spoken by about 400,000 people in an area historically known as Frisia—now within the modern regions of Netherlands and Germany.
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.
Finally, a Nordic language on our list: Icelandic is the hardest of them all! It takes on the “classics” of northern Germanic languages, with a (serious) dose of archaisms stemming from its long geographical isolation.
Hugs, backslapping, kisses on the cheeks and other expansive gestures are common among friends or acquaintances and between members of the same sex. Russians stand close when talking. Putting your thumb through your index and middle fingers or making the "OK" sign are considered very rude gestures in Russia.
In Russian, "paka" (пока) is an informal way to say "bye" or "bye-bye," often used with friends, family, or young people, similar to English casual farewells, and saying it twice ("paka paka") just makes it more informal and friendly, like "bye-bye". It's a shortened form of "poka," which literally means "while," but in farewells, it means "until [we meet]" or "bye".
In Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, oy (ой) is often used as an expression of various degrees of surprise, like "Whoops" or "Oh". In the Scandinavian languages, Oi! or the Swedish variant, Oj!, is commonly used as an exclamation of surprise, like "Oh" or "Whoops".
Russian has two different rolled-R sounds. One is a trilled rolled R, but the more common rolled-R sound is a lightly rolled R that you might use in the Russian word “ruble.”
The Cyrillic alphabet is closely based on the Greek alphabet, with about a dozen additional letters invented to represent Slavic sounds not found in Greek.