Why Russians Fail in Learning English
It doesn’t matter whether you learn English alone from scratch or together with tutors, you will certainly face these problems. (No joke).
I have been learning English for almost half of my life. I would like to tell you issues which I came across during this long journey.
Tenses
First of all, is the tenses. We have three tenses in Russian. How could you explain 12 English tenses to a person who for 20 years (or even more) of their life has used only the past, present and future tenses? The English tenses are unusual information for us, especially the perfect tenses. Therefore I made a huge amount of mistakes in using the grammar for the perfect tenses which are actually the hardest to understand.
In some cases, you definitely should use a perfect tense instead of a simple tense, but the question is how to define these sentences/questions? As far as perfect tenses, you should ask yourself about the duration of the situation and its results for the specific moment in the timeline.
For example:
- I lived in London. (Past simple. I lived in London and now I do not live there anymore);
- I have lived in London for 10 years. (Present Perfect. I relocated to London some unknown time ago and still live here);
- I have lived in London since May. (Present perfect. I relocated to London in May and still live here);
Articles
There is one more unusual grammar point for Russian native speakers: the articles. (We do not have articles in our language). The people who invented English didn’t care about making English similar to other languages and now there are three articles in English: `a` (one of many objects), `the` (one specific object from many), or `zero article` (an object in general). (OMG!). The purpose of it is clear we need to define an object, and an article can easily do that for you.
For example:
- I opened the window to look at the sunset. (I opened one particular window to see the sunset);
- I opened a window to look at the sunset. (I opened one of many windows we don’t know which);
What is that?
How do we call/say that/this?. (Translated from Russian. Definitely).What if I tell you that this question asks about a method of describing or identifying something, but not about an actual term? Some of my readers will be surprised or shocked. The correct questions for asking the term of an object are:
- What do you call it/this?
- What’s it/this called in (a language)?
- How do you say this in (a language)?
For example: you are in a situation and forgot the term of something. What are you going to do? Stay and pronounce “hhhhhhhmmmmmm” and “eeeeemmmmmm”? No, just ask “What do we call this?”.
What do we call a person who from time to time forgets words?
Phrasal verbs
I want you to pay particular attention to this paragraph. Because phrasal verbs in English (British, American, Australian etc) are used A LOT. Thus it’s good to know popular phrasal verbs.
I can’t find all the commonly used phrasal verbs and copy them into this article, but some of them are:
- give up — to stop trying to guess;
- call back — to return to a place in order to see someone or collect something;
- look forward to sth — to feel pleased and excited about something that is going to happen;
Source: dictionary.cambridge.org
As there is a myriad of phrasal verbs in English for almost every situation in our lives, it is not necessary to memorise them all. Some of them appear once in a blue moon so you can guess the meaning of a phrasal verb by the context.
“Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.” ― Flora Lewis
