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These days, the English language is a language of international communication, which unites people from different countries when they want to do business, learn something new, make friends, etc. This makes it important for people from all over the world. Millions of people are trying to learn this language and to gain fluency, and people from Russian-speaking countries are not an exception. English and Russian have more differences than similarities, which makes it really challenging to study English as a second language. In this essay, I would like to highlight some of the main difficulties for learners of English, whose native language is the Russian language, according to my own learning and teaching experience. Firstly, I would like to mention some of the pronunciation problems. There are no short and long vowels in Russian. As a result, it is hard for learners to distinguish between them in English, which often causes mispronunciation of words such as “sheep” and “ship”, “book” and “boot” etc. It is also challenging to understand the difference between “man” and “men” and to pronounce them correctly. And, of course, a big problem is the pronunciation of some letters and letter combinations, such as “r”, “h”, “w”, “th”, “ng” etc. Secondly, there are many words, which do not have the meaning a Russian-speaking person, according to the pronunciation or spelling, expects them to have. Such words are called “false friends”. “Accurate”, for instance, does not mean “careful”, but this is what a Russian-speaking learner expects it to mean, due to the similarity to the Russian word “akkuratnyy”. Some words have the same pronunciation but a different meaning. “Chef”, for example, means “boss” in Russian, but “the main cook” in English. There are many more words like that, which cause confusion and misunderstanding. And, of course, there are words like “teach” and “learn”, “shade” and “shadow”, “do” and “make”, which have different meanings but one translation into Russian. This is a frequent problem faced by learners. Thirdly, Russian-speaking learners experience difficulties in understanding the grammar of the English language. There are no language analogs to match with the articles “a” and “the”. There are a lot of problems with the use of prepositions, as they are rarely used similarly to the Russian prepositions and usually appear in structures, where learners do not expect to see them, and, on the contrary, are not used in contexts, in which they are used in the Russian language. Another problem is the tense structure, which is completely different from the Russian one. For example, it is hard to understand how to use any of the Perfect tenses, as there is no such thing in Russian. Fourthly, the punctuation rules are different and learners, for instance, often overuse commas when they write emails, essays or something else in English, as in Russian commas are used more often. To sum up, I would like to say that there are plenty of problems, which Russian-speaking learners of English have while they are learning this language. Some of them prefer lessons with native speakers from the very beginning of their studies. However, the best teachers for them, in my opinion, are Russian-speaking teachers, who walked a mile in their shoes when they were learning the English language themselves and, therefore, have many good examples and explanations for learners to understand English quicker and easier.
