# Russia



## Angelfire (Oct 14, 2013)

What's your overall opinion of the country?


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## DeniseAfterAll (Jul 28, 2012)

I was born in Russia . It's a boring country with rude people , cold weather ... and colourless streets . Useless , fake men ... ... hot , promiscuous girls .

Some people like it , but then .. .. each to their own .


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## slothex (May 24, 2011)

I don't want to categorize 140million people. Not a big fan of Putin though, he's like a real life bond villain whose been playing a dangerous game.


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## Alas Babylon (Aug 28, 2012)

I wouldn't call Russia 'boring' :lol 

One of the most "interesting" countries around.


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## JamesM2 (Aug 29, 2012)

It intrigues me.


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## Sacrieur (Jan 14, 2013)

It needs to stop being so bloody irritating.


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## komorikun (Jan 11, 2009)

One of my least favorite nationalities. I don't like the Chinese either.


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## SPC (May 14, 2011)

komorikun said:


> I don't like the Chinese either.


:|


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## komorikun (Jan 11, 2009)

SPC said:


> :|


In general. Some people are okay.


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## SPC (May 14, 2011)

komorikun said:


> In general. Some people are okay.


i guess if you mean culturally then i kind of get it. modern chinese culture is morally bankrupt.

anyway, my impression of russia and the russian people is kind of similiar to how i view mainland chinese people. they seem to be very ends-justify-means oriented.


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## cmed (Oct 17, 2009)

Can you give me a ride to space?


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## sad vlad (Nov 9, 2013)

I have reasons to be highly skeptical about Russia's actions as a country(it's the same for US and China on certain occasions) but I have nothing against its people. I don't like the cyrillic alphabet.


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## Alas Babylon (Aug 28, 2012)

komorikun said:


> One of my least favorite nationalities. I don't like the Chinese either.


Why?

It just seems odd. Does that mean you dislike their governments? Or the people of that nationality?

In my experience, Chinese people are very friendly. At least in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, in Shanghai they're a bit more elitist I feel.


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## TicklemeRingo (Jan 11, 2013)

Hot. Would bang.


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## Diacetylmorphine (Mar 9, 2011)

A good friend of mine is originally from Russia, he tells us he doesn't like his home country much.


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## LydeaCharlotteGirl (Aug 27, 2013)

sad vlad said:


> I have reasons to be highly skeptical about Russia's actions as a country(it's the same for US and China on certain occasions) but I have nothing against its people. I don't like the cyrillic alphabet.


Yes, exactly. What's wrong with cyrillic though, of course it's
more difficult?


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## Amphoteric (Sep 11, 2011)

Definitely an interesting country, both in its current state and historically.
Finland has a long and a somewhat tense relationship with Russia. 
Though you can still find, for example, a statue of Alexander II at one of the main squares in Helsinki. 
And Medvedev gave our previous president a cat :lol
St.Petersburg is a 3,5h train ride away, so will most likely end up visiting the country some day.


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## Alas Babylon (Aug 28, 2012)

> Yes, exactly. What's wrong with cyrillic though, of course it's
> more difficult?


Cyrillic is fine. It's not more difficult. At least because Russian has far less examples of irregular spelling than English. You can practically sound out most Russian words from how they're written.

In my lackluster language learning experience, Cyrillic is the easiest alphabet to learn. You can teach it to yourself in an hour or two and you'll never forget it. It's far easier than Arabic or Devanagari.

You want a really difficult alphabet to learn though? Hanzi or Kanji. East Asian languages have no mercy.


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## TicklemeRingo (Jan 11, 2013)

Amphoteric said:


> And Medvedev gave our previous president a cat :lol


 I'd check that cat for listening devices if I were you.


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## sad vlad (Nov 9, 2013)

LotteTortoise said:


> What's wrong with cyrillic though, of course it's more difficult?


Just my opinion. I have only used the latin alphabet. But at some point I had a reason to try to learn a bit of russian. I learned a few words from someone but that was nothing, so I thought I should start with the alphabet. Those symbols look uglier and more complicated, some are ressembling each other, then there is a bit of confusion because some symbols are identical to those from the latin alphabet but they represent other letters.

For example: H is actually N, P is R, C is S, B is V, Y is U, X is H and few other reversed letters that represent different letters or group of letters of the latin alphabet.

I don't say it can't be learned or anything like that. It can. There are eastern asian alphabets that are far more difficult(as it was mentioned before) . It's just that I don't like it and prefer the latin one at any time.


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## RelinquishedHell (Apr 10, 2012)

Russia is greatest of all countries. All other country is sissy country.


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## millenniumman75 (Feb 4, 2005)

cmed said:


> Can you give me a ride to space?


Is this thread Spacist? :con :lol


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## millenniumman75 (Feb 4, 2005)

I think Russians have had their own problems as of late, leadership doens't help. They have been through a lot.


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## cmed (Oct 17, 2009)

millenniumman75 said:


> Is this thread Spacist? :con :lol


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## Persephone The Dread (Aug 28, 2010)

I think I'm 1/8th Russian or something, but considering how often Russia's borders changed in the last century who knows for sure lol.

Their weather seems worse than the UK's (or at least as bad) and they have some terrible roads. Their buildings are really colourful and that's fun. Their freedom of speech situation seems a bit bleak and of course their attitude towards homosexuality doesn't work for me. 

There's a lot of famous models from that country. There seems to be a lot of parkour going on there and in The Ukraine which I find cool cause I like urban exploration.

Siberian Husky's are one of my favourite dog breeds...

That's about the extent of my opinions/knowledge.


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## Persephone The Dread (Aug 28, 2010)

Alas Babylon said:


> *Cyrillic is fine. It's not more difficult.* At least because Russian has far less examples of irregular spelling than English. You can practically sound out most Russian words from how they're written.
> 
> In my lackluster language learning experience, Cyrillic is the easiest alphabet to learn. You can teach it to yourself in an hour or two and you'll never forget it. It's far easier than Arabic or Devanagari.
> 
> *You want a really difficult alphabet to learn though? Hanzi or Kanji. East Asian languages have no mercy.*


lol right? And even those aren't impossible with considerable dedication. Though I guess Kanji/Hanzi aren't really alphabetical technically since they're logographic.


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## dal user (Dec 25, 2012)

Cold S**thole


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## Alas Babylon (Aug 28, 2012)

Persephone The Dread said:


> lol right? And even those aren't impossible with considerable dedication.


In my experience, no language is incredibly hard to learn if you have the motivation, necessity and enjoy learning it. That's a _lot _more easier said than done though.

I think that shows with Sad Vlad's explanation more. If you're actually interested in learning Russian and have some time on your hands, you can learn Cyrillic incredibly quickly. If you aren't motivated as much, it just becomes a chore.

The confusing issues Sad Vlad mentioned? They're pretty easy to wrap your head around with a cup of coffee and some mnemonics in 5 minutes, _if_ you're interested in it. Otherwise, they'll do your head in.

Japanese on the other hand? I love learning it, but there's just so much _to_ learn that I feel like it'll be years before I can read a book. Or maybe I'm not doing it right :lol


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## Persephone The Dread (Aug 28, 2010)

Alas Babylon said:


> In my experience, no language is incredibly hard to learn if you have the motivation, necessity and enjoy learning it. That's a _lot _more easier said than done though.
> 
> I think that shows with Sad Vlad's explanation more. If you're actually interested in learning Russian and have some time on your hands, you can learn Cyrillic incredibly quickly. If you aren't motivated as much, it just becomes a chore.
> 
> ...


Learning alone can be a pain, I managed a few months here and there of more dedicated self study. I'm still a complete beginner though.

The greatest flaw with me is that I'm not particularly self motivated, and enjoy studying with other people I think. It just seems naturally more useful for a language too. But mostly I'm just kind of lost now and need to find a point to pick myself back up from.

The biggest problem I have with Japanese I guess is how high context the language is compared to English (where every little thing kind of has to be explained.)

edit: Also I didn't read Sadvlad's second comment before posting  but yeah that makes more sense.


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## Arkiasis (Jun 29, 2013)

I'm Russian and I hate Russia.


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## sad vlad (Nov 9, 2013)

Alas Babylon said:


> In my experience, no language is incredibly hard to learn if you have the motivation, necessity and enjoy learning it. That's a _lot _more easier said than done though.
> 
> I think that shows with Sad Vlad's explanation more. If you're actually interested in learning Russian and have some time on your hands, you can learn Cyrillic incredibly quickly. If you aren't motivated as much, it just becomes a chore.
> 
> ...


5 minutes is an obvious exaggeration, considering the fact you also have to know how to write those symbols. Just copying them a few times on another paper will not be enough to have them all memorized for a long period of time. Repetitio mater studiorum est.

Leaving that aside, as I have written above I was thinking about learning a bit of russian(no delusional thoughts of starting to write novels in russian) because I had a reason for it. When the reason was gone, so was my interest in learning that language. So, yes, I had no more motivation for it.


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## Amphoteric (Sep 11, 2011)

TicklemeRingo said:


> I'd check that cat for listening devices if I were you.


Not to mention the X-ray vision and solar powered video cameras in the eyes :lol


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## nubly (Nov 2, 2006)

Russia has yet to improve since communism took over.


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## Alas Babylon (Aug 28, 2012)

sad vlad said:


> 5 minutes is an obvious exaggeration, considering the fact you also have to know how to write those symbols. Just copying them a few times on another paper will not be enough to have them all memorized for a long period of time. Repetitio mater studiorum est.
> 
> Leaving that aside, as I have written above I was thinking about learning a bit of russian(no delusional thoughts of starting to write novels in russian) because I had a reason for it. When the reason was gone, so was my interest in learning that language. So, yes, I had no more motivation for it.


I mean it takes about 2 hours or so of flat out work to probably memorise and learn Cyrillic, if you're highly motivated.

Working out the mildly confusing bits isn't that difficult. The symbol that looks like H being an N sound isn't really that hard to grasp. Russian becomes difficult when you're trying to learn the grammar.

To someone who has only learnt languages that use the latin alphabet, I can see why Russian and Cyrillic would be daunting, but the language is still far easier to learn for a Westerner than others like Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic or Tamil.

A lot of this is hindsight here. When I learnt Russian, I thought it was difficult, now that I'm learning Japanese, I think Russian wasn't that challenging.


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## sad vlad (Nov 9, 2013)

Alas Babylon said:


> I mean it takes about 2 hours or so of flat out work to probably memorise and learn Cyrillic, if you're highly motivated.
> 
> Working out the mildly confusing bits isn't that difficult. The symbol that looks like H being an N sound isn't really that hard to grasp. Russian becomes difficult when you're trying to learn the grammar.
> 
> ...


I wasn't disagreeing with anything written in paragraphs no. 2 and 3. I just gave an example of possible confussion with those letters that mean something else in the latin alphabet. Something it could be a bit confusing for someone that is looking at the alphabet for the first time. I obviously already know those since I was able to write them down as explanations in here as well.

As I have mentioned previously, I have lost my motivation to go forward with this while I was still in a very early stage of learning it. I need a reason to learn another language. I do not have a passion for learning new languages, something like a hobby. If I would have that I would probably learn very fast italian, spanish and refresh my dormant french as they are pretty similar to my language.

There obviously are languages that are more difficult to learn than russian. I would say, hungarian and finnish, for example, are harder to learn out of those that are using the latin alphabet. Out of all languages out there, eastern asian and arabic are more difficult not just because of the grammar but also because of the alphabet.

Here is probably a good indicator of how hard a language is to learn:
http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty


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## Alas Babylon (Aug 28, 2012)

Finnish and Hungarian are ridiculously difficult. I have a Hungarian friend from SAS, she tried to teach me some once. It was not successful. At all. 

Those languages aren't Indo-European though, for an English or Romanian speaker (you are Romanian yes?) it would probably be easier to learn Persian than Hungarian. That's not saying Persian is easy, that's saying Hungarian is just that difficult. Persian is also more closely related to English than Finnish or Hungarian.

East Asian grammar is not so bad actually. The problem is that there aren't many common words in the slightest, the alphabet is logographic and pronunciation is difficult. But the grammar isn't too bad in Mandarin or Japanese, so that's nice.


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## monotonous (Feb 1, 2013)

hot girls


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## sad vlad (Nov 9, 2013)

@ Alas Babylon:

I have heard hungarians here talking a lot in their language and seen them writing stuff down too. I know a few words but I really didn't want to learn it. It is not a beautiful language (in my opinion) and its non-indo-european origins makes it very hard to learn indeed. I have actually asked someone from work to translate a few things for me both ways. She could only do aproximate translations and said it's too hard to put it in hungarian or that there are no equivalents for certain things. She speaks both languages but said she had more troubles learning the hungarian grammar. She could have exaggerated a bit but I have no reason to doubt her honesty on that.

I think Estonian is probably a tough one as well. I think Ntlin is estonian. If I am not mistaken. He can agree or disagree.


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## ASB20 (Jun 5, 2013)

Too cold, blah. I wouldn't go there on vacation, let alone live there. I like my hot weather.

As for the gov't, it's corrupt, but aren't they all?​


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## apx24 (Jan 31, 2012)

I like Russia, seems like a cool place, though I don't like what they have done to the Chechens.


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## SmartCar (Nov 27, 2011)

I feel the country gets an unfortunate bad rap:yes...i can't say i've followed all of Putin's history..so i can't judge much..but i will say that Russia appears to be a kind of grey & somewhat depressed country (just my personal opinion) Russia doesn't seem as gradually modern as China per-se..China even with it's issues looks inviting..& they export a lot of things..& appear wider known..Russia seems kinda closed offish..anyways i respect that Putin is standing up to the U.S.A, i can't pretend to understand whats going on between Russia & Ukraine etc. & as much as the U.S wants to be an ally to Ukraine i feel that there are other ways to do that, that doesn't involve meddling once again in another countries problems..if a few Ukrainians want to be apart of Russia..then let them..i don't see why it's America's problem..but then again that's just my personal opinion..& i honestly don't follow politics to often..so yeah..but i try to be current..anyways i feel Russia gets a bad rap..but i don't think they're a perfect nation..but i respect Putin for standing up to Obama in terms of the Crimea situation..i like Obama..but not his stance on over-generalized threats regarding sanctions:no..but i'm gonna stop myself now..i don't like getting too heated about politics.


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## SmartCar (Nov 27, 2011)

& one more thing, i posted this elsewhere..but i couldn't resist here either:lol


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## Alas Babylon (Aug 28, 2012)

^ It's pretty standard actions for Russia. They do it to make countries scramble their jets, so they can record their response times, as well as the equipment they use and the radio frequencies that are used when that country goes on high alert. 

Basically, they scope out the defense capabilities of certain nations. Their main targets are the UK, Japan and USA.

They even sent a plane after the tsunami in Japan, presumably to scope out the response time of Japanese authorities to a major disaster.


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## straightarrows (Jun 18, 2010)

I love your music! your girls are hot! 

I think Russians are smart, but also Racits, Isolated, hate others (any others)....Drink a lot! 

Also your planes! from the soviet era


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## straightarrows (Jun 18, 2010)

Arkiasis said:


> I'm Russian and I hate Russia.


 didn't know u r russian!


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## LydeaCharlotteGirl (Aug 27, 2013)

Well Putin is'nt really a dictator/psychopath though authoritarian. Russia perhaps just wanted to protect it's interests in Crimea, the west should be careful how it reacts.


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## Noll (Mar 29, 2011)

Interesting language, interesting people, interesting culture. Bad government but our own government is not really that good either. Russia is just more visibly bad. Fyodor Dostoevsky was from Russia. Huge plus for me.


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