I was just on Wikipedia researching for a joke (I know, and the joke isn't even ready yet) and I figured just for the hell of it I'd look at the Russian version of the article I was skimming. One of the words in the name started with "Bc". Or rather "Вс", which are the Cyrillic equivalents of v and s. These consonant sounds that an English speaker would never start a word with unless there was a vowel between. Much more difficult for us than "sv", which is also a rarity in English, although we use "svelte." Which goes to show that there's some wide and strange variety even within the general Indo-European family.
2 comments:
A few years ago I thought it might be cool to learn to speak some Mandarin Chinese. When I learned that individual syllables change meaning depending on the tone used I pretty much gave up the idea.
Russian might be easier, but not that much. It must be nice to have a gift for learning other languages. I had a friend in London who was fluent in twelve languages - including several Chinese dialects - and could muddle through a dozen more.
In the West there are two kinds of people well equipped to learn Mandarin. The first are those who start studying it at a very young age. The second are those specially motivated because they need it for work. That second group will be growing, I'm sure. The Chinese writing system is interesting because the pictograms are used by entirely different languages. It's like if there were one character that an English speaker would see and hear "dog", while French, Spanish, and German speakers heard "chien", "perro", and "hund."
Russian is somewhere in the same family as English, but there still must be a lot to learn. Your friend must have been quite gifted.
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