Is Russian Hard To Learn? (Answered!)

Russian is a very difficult language to learn—there is no two ways about it. Compared with English, Russian has a rather complex grammatical structure and rules, not to mention the fact you need to learn a new alphabet if you want to write in the language. Pronunciation can also be very challenging for English speakers.

So, there’s no sugar coating the difficult you will face in trying to learn Russian.

While this will vary a great deal from person to person, and some may find it much easier to learn Russian than others, whoever you are, it’s going to take time, patience, and commitment.

Let’s find out more.

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How long does it take to learn Russian?

This question will, naturally, depend on the person as well as a variety of other factors.

It also depends on just how good you want your grasp of Russian to be.

With all this said, there are certain metrics we can look at to judge how long it will take, on average, to get to a point of comfort with the Russian language.

For most people, learning Russian to the point that you are able to converse and conduct yourself in Russian will take around 1100 hours of study.

This translates to around 44 weeks of full-time studying.

So, it will take the average person the better part of a year to be able to learn Russian.

By the end of this period of study, though, you still aren’t out of the woods.

By the end of this initial study period, as I said, you should be at a point where you can comfortably get by in Russian.

However, any language learner will tell you that from here, the best thing you can do to increase your ability with Russian is to immerse yourself in the language.

Live in Russia, and use the language every day.

After several years of this, you may be able to reach a point of fluency with the language.

Indeed, the most adept language learners may even be comparable to a native speaker by this point.

So, in other words, the whole process will take years.

You can get a good grip on the language with 11 months or so of study.

But from there, you’ve still got a good deal of work to do.

Even for the best learners, learning Russian as an English speaker is going to be difficult and take time.

What difficulty level is Russian?

Helpfully, languages are ranked by the FSI scale, which is a U.S. scale by which languages are rated based on their relative difficulty for an English speaker to learn.

This scale goes from I-V, with category I languages being the easiest to learn and V being the hardest.

On this scale, Russian is a category IV language.

So, it’s close to being among the hardest languages of all for an English speaker to learn, with category V languages including things like Arabic, Cantonese or Japanese.

So, again, don’t have any illusions about what you’re getting into here.

Russian, by any standard, is considered a very difficult language to learn.

Let’s look at exactly why that might be.

Is Russian hard to learn for an English speaker?

There are a few key factors that make Russian very difficult for English speakers to learn.

For one thing, the grammar rules are very complex, and as in most languages, feature a great many exceptions to those rules.

While English grammar, too, can be relatively complex, it comes naturally to you as a native speaker.

Learning a fresh grammatical ruleset is always difficult in any language, but especially so with Russian.

Another thing that makes Russian very difficult for English speakers is the pronunciation. It is very different from the cadences and subtleties of English, and this can be hard for some to grasp. With imitative sounding out of words, though, it is far from impossible.

Naturally, of course, you also have an entirely new alphabet to learn with Russian.

While the script is not as different from English as, say, Chinese or Japanese, and has many English cognates, learning a new script is always challenging.

Finally, cultural differences can make learning Russian quite difficult, too.

Differences in metaphorical expressions and other similar modes of everyday speech can be difficult to get used to at first.

How does Russian compare to some other exceptionally difficult languages?

Is Russian harder than Japanese?

Most people would not argue that Russian is harder than Japanese.

Russian may be very different to English, but it’s massively closer to English than Japanese is.

Pronunciation is easier, the script is easier to learn, and cultural differences are not as great.

Whereas Russian is a category IV language, Japanese is category V.

Japanese is about as different from English as you can get in a language, and Russian will start to feel a lot more closely related to English if you’ve tried to learn Japanese.

Either way, though, they are both difficult and will take a lot of time to learn.

Learning Russian is going to take a great deal of time, then.

No matter what your natural aptitude for learning languages may be, Russian is a complex language that is much more distantly related to English than other languages like Spanish or French.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with a challenge, and the last thing I would want is to discourage you—just be prepared for a lot of studying!
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