what learning Russian is teaching me about English

Learning a new language is a pretty straightforward way to expand your mind. Different languages have different ways of expressing things, different words for the same concepts, or the same words for different concepts… sometimes you’ll find a word for an idea a word for which does not exist in your own language. There. You are one concept richer.

But beyond vocabulary and syntax, learning Russian has convinced me of one thing: English is far more of a mixed language than I ever realized, and maybe that’s why literary culture in English-speaking civilization is declining.

Allow me to explain. Russian is almost entirely a Slavic language. Yes, there are some words borrowed from English or French, but the grand majority of Russian words came from Slavic roots. From a language-learning perspective, I’m glad about this, because there’s less vocabulary to memorize, and because word formation is very logical and predictable if you know the root word. From a culture-learning perspective, I’m also glad about this, because the smaller vocabulary and more closely connected words lend themselves to be repeated more often.

For example, take the root хран. It in itself is not a word, but it forms into сохранить, хранение, and other words. So this one root pops up when I’m talking about saving a file to my phone (сохранить), when I’m talking about salvation in the religious sense (also сохранить), when I’m talking about a museum curator (хранитель), or when I’m talking about a locker (камера хранения). These meanings begin to build up on each other, and between poems, articles, conversations, road signs, lectures… the cross-referential potential is enormous. I haven’t even tried to memorize any Russian poetry (yet), but I can’t hear or see a word with the stem тревож/г without being instantly sent back to Pushkin’s На холмах Грузии.

This ability to cross-reference based on even a single word, more even than vocabulary acquisition, is why I think it’s important for English readers to be familiar with Latin, Greek, French, and German. If I don’t know where my words came from and cannot identify where else they are used, will I ever really know what they mean beyond the instinct of having grown up with them?

But, of course, to ask someone to know all of these languages and their accompanying literary traditions… is ridiculous. It just isn’t going to happen. At this point the English anthology alone is too vast to come close to familiarity with it, let alone adding all of the classical world plus German and French. Our lexicon now is gigantic, and the same idea has 5 potential root words (all from different originating languages).

The English language has expanded to the point where cross-referential and even analytical value has to be on the sentence-level; it is rare that a word in itself is sufficient to carry any weight. I'm enjoying studying a language that is deeper in the specifics.