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The English language is considered to be one of the most popular second languages in the world. Learning English as a second language might be more or less difficult depending on what your native language is and how similar it is to English. For example, if you compare the Russian language to other languages like German or Spanish, you will see that the Russian is more different from the other two compared to English. Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, different grammar structures, and different phonetics. This is why Russian students often experience more challenges compared to some other nationalities. One of the biggest problems for Russian learners is English grammar. There are a number of aspects of English grammar that may confuse students. One of the most common issues is articles. Articles don’t exist in the Russian language, so just the fact that you have to put an extra word in front of a noun makes it confusing for a Russian person. As you can imagine, distinguishing definite articles from indefinite articles is also very difficult for these students. They often forget to use articles or they use the wrong one. Another part of English grammar that Russians struggle with is phrasal verbs. The problem is that after learning the basic meaning of a verb you have to learn many other variations of it. Moreover, these variations usually have very different meanings than the original verb. Being unfamiliar with these kinds of verbs makes Russians mix the variations, use them in the wrong places and mix up word order. The next thing that Russians get confused about is negative sentences. The problem is that double negation is prohibited in English, but there is no such rule in Russian. That’s why a lot of the students use two negative words in one sentence. The last two grammar problems I want to bring up are omitting the auxiliary in questions or negatives and mixing the gerund and the infinitive. There is no auxiliary in the Russian language which is why they often forget to use it in English. Also, in most cases, Russians use the same tense both for the infinitive and the gerund, so instead of “are you working today?” they would say “you work today?”. Besides grammar, there are other aspects of the language that may cause difficulties for students from Russia. Pronunciation is one of them. The English language has a number of sounds that the Russian language does not have. Therefore students from Russia tend to replace these sounds with other ones. They may use some similar Russian sounds instead, or they might also replace the right sound with a different English sound. Here is a list of sounds that are commonly mixed up: [v] - [w], [s] - [θ], [z] - [ð], [f] - [θ], [w] - [ð], [t] - [θ], [d ] - [ð]. These mistakes can be very dangerous because changing one sound may make the whole word sound like a different word. Russian students also tend to replace long vowels with short vowels. For example, they may sound like “slip”, when they try to say sleep, or when they want to say sheet it may sound like a common swear word. Analyzing the mistakes that are common for Russian students helped me to understand the importance of cultural background. I came to the conclusion that knowing a student’s native language helps teachers see where his or her mistakes come from. This suggests that cultural background might be one of the most important factors in teaching English.
