Saying you can be more emotional in Russian is such a goofy thing to say.

very true..I am Swedish and if you compare English and Swedish.....there is a difference

Glorifying of any Russia’s stuff is making me feel shame since feb 2022. But the way Lex is looking at everyday humor cause of 20 century is notable all in all. Thank you!

The main advantage actually is Rus language doesn't really have dialects so no matter where you are in Russian-speaking country everyone understands you well

A russian Jew who has never experienced elementary school education in the U.S. speculates that the Soviet approach was better. How does he know? The 'Tolstoevskiy phenomenon' and the perceived 'greatness' of russian language and culture are overrated due to ignorance. Clearly, Lex doesn’t fully understand either russian or English.

This is interesting coming from a guy who has a native tongue that is considered much more stringent than English. We tend to say what we mean, using far less words than english, and there are fewer subtleties.

Didn't even mention the name but if you hear 'russian' (the word) and 'location' in the same sentence you know they're talking about habib haha

I can't help but to think some of these points are very little but stereotypes. But maybe I live in the wrong part of Russia. No, that wasn't meant as sarcasm.

A friend of mine who came from Germany said English is extremely difficult to learn. Way to many exceptions to the rule. German is very straightforward. As a former speaker of Italian, it is much more of a beautiful language.

yeah. you can watch young man interviewing drunkhard. Like super drunkhard dude, he driks so much that his face look like he was punched all his live. And young man asking him school questions and he answering them 8/10 right.

Yup, having the same thoughts - "How much culture am I missing by not knowing more languages" - obviously on a level sufficient to read, listen to serious material.

VERY interesting topic, and interesting comments too!

It is same with Serbian, Polish, Bolgarian...all slovanic language...slovan's languages are language of rooth...english or german is not If you have rooth, you can go deeper than ocean and higher than sky... From Slovenija🇸🇮

Both english and russian are beautiful languages! ❤

Some definitions have built in philosophy. In Serbian the word for care is the same as worry 😮

Swearing in Slavic languages is a form of art

Also, what should be said: most of Slavic nations experienced severe censorship quite recently - we all needed to become quite smart how to use a language and not get banned.

Slavic swearing is goated sure, but Balkan slavic is on ANOTHER level with swearing creativity

Russian Linguistic Chauvanism is as insufferable as their political and historical lunacy. Just so unselfaware. They mistake their own ignorance for our languages poverty.

Alex Friedman is smart, ""deep"" only against the background of Americans who know nothing about Russia. But actually a very shallow person. He always turns things out very strangely. And somewhere he will tell the truth and at the same time add to the total pile of shit.

as a native Russian speaker, I can say that English is very economical and concise. I feel more comfortable when discussing politics, philosophy or science in English.

You say russian cause you dontknow georgian language.

Bro after learning some Russian and speaking with natives this is so accurate, they all are so well spoke and well mannered it’s so surprising. And even when they speak it’s so eloquent over the simplest of things Russia is beautiful

I find russian language very lego-like. Anything can be transformed into anything: verbs into nouns, adjectives and back. Same with curses. Amazing outlet for complex emotions!!

English is colorless.

Speaking of the Russian plumbers. I remember having quite philosophical conversations with a couple of them. It comes as a bonus with a fixed plumb.

You know Russian culture is trash when the highest form of literature is an author who has a habit of killing women in his novels

English is efficient. If Russian is mugged in the street he needs to yell four syllables to get help - PO-MO-GEE-TEH. American just yells 1 syllable: "Help"

Russians have a sense of humor? They seem cold and emitionless to me like most europeans

I can sum it up like this: I grew up bilingual, German and Russian. For me Russian is for emotions, expressing feelings, talk about philosophy, the meaning of life, the deeper kind of conversations, if you know what I mean. German is more scientific, to discuss the news for example, or certain historical factual events. English is for ordering pizza on the phone and small talking about how your day was.

man has dunning kruger in russian.

Well, Russian is my first language, but I have no idea what this guy is talking about. Since when does English have any problem with expressing emotions? And were the rest of the world just having the best time of their lives during the 20th century?

Just some words to say "a dog" Собака - dog Собачка - cute/little dog Собачонка - little, weak dog Сука - female dog Кобель - male dog Пёс - adult male dog Псина - bad/big dog (male/unknown sex) Пёсик - little/cute male dog Дворняга - stray dog

A veey interesting take, but I have to respectively disagree. I believe English is much better and much more precise when used to describe feelings or a state of mind. Russian is much more vague. I might be lynched for this, though I believe English is really a richer language than Russian. Generally speaking. P.S. I am a native Russian speaker, a naturalized Dutch. Thus, I speak Russian, English and Dutch. Russian and Dutch are comparable to eahc other in their ability to describe feelings, thoughts etc. Engish is on a higher lave in this regardl than both Russian and Dutch.

So tired with this vodka bullshit... Pretty much no one except alcoholics drink vodka in Russia. We love beer, we love wine, champagne, we love cocktails, we love wiski and cognac. Most people in Russia just don't drink vodka.

I'm Russian and I speak English. I write fiction in English, so I understand the challenge. Honestly, I can't stand it when Russian-speaking people cry the blues while talking to the people abroad. ‘The Russian language is expressive because of the suffering of the Russian people.’ No, it is expressive because of its absolutely incredible word-building, because of prefixes, roots and suffixes, which can be used as blocks to build words; one prefix or suffix can fundamentally change the meaning of a word. For example, ‘бежать’ means ‘to run’. ‘ЗА_бежать’ means that a person rushed to a place where they stayed for a short period of time before leaving, while 'ПРИ_бежать' means the same thing, but the person stayed in the place instead of leaving shortly after they arrived. ‘У_бежать’ means 'to ran away'. At the same time, ‘ОТ_бежать’ means that the person ran a short distance away and stopped. The Russian language is richer because of word formation and the freedom of the word order in a sentence. This makes the language very flexible, in a way that a small change in the word or the word order can bring a whole new tone to a sentence. It has nothing to do with suffering. One can describe eloquently and with colours both joy and yearning in Russian, as well as, idk, the process of pouring milk into a glass. All thanks to the structural features of the language.

Пока в английском не можно будет сказать русское "понаехали", я не буду воспринимать его серьезно

diferent level of swearing not in multitude of ways to say "fcuk". It's is possible in russian to swear and yet not offend anyone. As for language itself, there are words to describe weather or time of day occuring that would need 4-6 words in english.

Ok here we go. Those who think English is simplistic clearly had too much Russian classical literature and almost none of English. They both, and pretty much all the languages during their evolution have had enormous depth and sophistication that have flattened out as we got mostly focused on technology. Swearing in Russian or Slavic is not an art form just because one can butcher words and twist them into cuss-based adjectives, adverbs and verbs from a noun with a bunch of extra suffixes and prefixes. It's just. Linguistic. Flexibility. Nothing art-formly. To the generalization: (Why are there people speaking for entire nations btw?) The fact that a great portion of post-Soviet population uses cuss words in normal emotionally neutral speech vs venting a frustration is a very very sad indicator of hillbilly proportion in each country. Nothing linguistic to be proud of, only general culture and lifestyle issues. Sad. Junior highschool educational load-yes, super reading -oriented schools. But not that dramatic "expected excellence" and "fear" all over, that's just your childhood, cadet-wannabe, sorry. However, if you take English-speakers and care to assess the correctness of speech (esp written) vs Slavic, I'm sure you'll notice that the PRESENT day English-speakers make fewer errors even on an average highschool graduate level. The infamous Soviet education may have been stricter and more heavy but the following generations have been cultivated to become so so so much dumber and repulsively ignorant on a far greater scale. Not only do people struggle to spell, they also have a much broader range of speaking mistakes, from homeless to successful individuals. Very rich language? Or maybe overdramatic and sloppy? Side note: having read all the school required books from both backgrounds, I can stand by my assurance that the Russian language is capable of and actively has been conveying just as much joy, love, awe, etc. as your "suffering" mentioned. These were biased labels the guest tried to sell to masses. Very irresponsible, given the impressionable and influential host...Too bad.

This is some very weird mystical approach to languages. As a Russian who speaks English, both languages can be as poetic and curt as the situation calls for it. Russian modifies the words themselves, so you can make a deeper and short sentence, I guess, where in English you'd need more separate words. This whole spiel about "oh 20th century and tragedy" is such bullshit. English, as a language, existed long before America. Russian, also existed long before the 20th century... both nations had wars, including a civil war... So he's just pulling stuff out his ass.

learning English for Russians is very complex. in English you have a special order of words in sentences to differ for example a question from a statement. But in Russian we don't have it we link words in sentences with changing the end part of it and we differ questions from statements by intonation. We have only 3 tenses: past, simple and future. If you need "perfect" tense you just need to add "yet or already" in the sentence without changing the verb. Articles - we don't understand it at all until we speak with natives and get used to them. Also in Russian we have much more words to explain ourselves. it's very hard for me to understand how someone could call the same word a time in the year, a tiny river and squishy spiral thing... Last spring I was walking along the running transparent spring with pure water and found a suspension spring. in terms of tone the way English people speak with their head voice in Russia we use this tone when we try to annoy someone😂 Mostly we speak with a chest voice. And you always seem too excited when you speak about something.

Another one dreamer who doesn't understand Russia and it's culture at all.

Remarque wrote a line, that russian is kinda amazing in swearing, I think that is rlly something you know.

Wait till they discover polish

He is talking about the simplicity of American English, not English itself. There are a lot of poetics written in English, mostly British though, that are just way ahead of Russian poetics in terms of expressing feelings and picturing the world around you. Aurora Leight is one canonical example of the richness of the English language. But of course, linguistically speaking, it is not right to compare a language with a vocabulary of 800k words to one with just above 200k.

In the far future, there is will be only 1 nation - Human. We will use the only 1 language which is easy to get and express lots of fealing like in russian one. Unification is unevitalbe. My thoughts about it, language will mostly based on english with another form of grammatic sentence and contains different words from other nations depends on inventions.

Наш слоняра

I find that the opposite is true honestly. When speaking English you don't have to know very far in advance what you're gonna say, you can just throw out broad concept after broad concept and narrow it down to what you're trying to convey. In Russian, because it packs so much particularity into every word, it's gonna come out awkward if you're a bit scatter-brained like me :')

there is no american language tho

Being russian and professional linguists, I can say that this man, in the video, consciously or not, invest too much significance in modern Russian language. Without any doubts, our language is dramatically more complex by grammar, and extremely sophisticated system of prefixes and suffixes alltogether with cases and declinations make russian language incredibly flexible, a competitive comparison with german languages (English language is a german language) is erroneous. Everything merely depends on an individual level of a particular language: a native English language speaker can have rather poor vocabulary, and narrowed world-awareness what prevents such a person from their linguo-sophistication, BUT it only depends on a person, NOT ON a language. Here, in Russia, we also have upsetting quantity of people whose daily usage of the native language is restrained and they also suffer from communication problems.