Why learn Russian?
Though it’s true a second language can help us find jobs, let’s also focus on the other reasons for learning a language. We spend so much of our lives having to serve the interests of an economy that doesn’t care about people or the world. It’s high time we were able to put the interests of each other ahead of those of CEOs and tax havens. Learning a language, in a variety of ways, can help us do this.
Society often funnels us down a career-path. Before we’ve had the chance to discover where our passions reside, we find ourselves scrambling from paycheck to paycheck on low or minimum wages. Worse still, the labour we provide either leaves us starved of inspiration, or in some cases even robs us of time to pursue our interests - all of which has damaging implications for our mental and physical health.
Learning a language can provide some relief, and even an escape, from these pressures. It can’t stop us worrying about bills or rent, but it can help us find other lines of work. Aside from potential career benefits, the process itself is rewarding, and a lot more fun than traditional methods have led us to believe. Far from being an unwelcome burden on our daily routines, learning a language can become an enjoyable distraction from life’s pressures. As well as helping our immediate mental health, it is also thought to aid cognitive function, and could delay the symptoms of dementia.
Learning a language may even help us tackle the problems facing the world. If we can communicate with and learn from each other, we stand a better chance of organising against issues as global as climate breakdown.
With an estimated 153 million speakers, Russian is the seventh most widely spoken first language in the world. When second language speakers and learners are included, there are as many as 258 million speakers, making Russian the eighth most widely spoken language in the world. It is an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and is often a lingua franca in former countries of the Soviet Union - such as Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. There’s also significant Russian-speaking communities in China, Cyprus, Finland, Hungary, Mongolia, Poland, and the United States.
Although speaking a new language does not revolutionise how you see the world, the people and cultures it takes you to will. It's almost like discovering the world again as a child, just in a different tongue. It refreshes the mind and can fill you with the impetus to experience different cultures and meet new people. This could be as conveniently as watching Russian films or reading a Dostoevsky novel in the evening. It could be an experience as spontaneous as chatting with people at a bar in Nizhny Novgorod, or before a football match in Saint Petersburg. It could even be a whole new life in Moscow or Sochi.
After learning any language, the prospect of learning others suddenly feels much more feasible, and this is especially true for languages that share similarities. After learning Russian, you’ll find it easier to learn languages from the Slavic language family, including Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Macedonian, and Bulgarian. Though from the Romance language family, Romanian will also become easier to learn, as it has been influenced by Slavic languages.
Chances are that if you’re reading this, you already have an idea of why you’d like to learn Russian. Whether it’s for professional reasons or pure curiosity, I hope these paragraphs have given you a brief sense of the benefits learning Russian, or indeed any language, can bring.
If you're interested in learning Russian, there's a How to Learn Languages guide :
