I started learning russian some time ago, and through the videos I watch there's always Russian conjugation videos that I notice are pretty similar to how french conjugate their verbs.
For the record, I am a native arabic speaker, at a c1 level in english, and in my country the french language is a subject we take in every grade, so I started to notice it's somewhat the same.
So, is it pretty close to the french conjugation system?
There are some superficial similarities like how the plural you is used as a polite pronoun and a bunch of borrowed vocabulary from French.
But I'd say they are not that similar. Russian is a lot closer to other Slavic languages and French is a lot closer to other Romance languages. It might be interesting to look at Romanian and see how much Slavic influence it has.
Things in russian that don't in French:
perfective / imperfective tenses, locative / genitive / instrumental cases
Things that exist in french that don't in russian:
conditional verb tenses, subjunctive verb tenses, compound vs simple past tenses, definite and indefinite articles
Things like reflexive verbs exist in both languages but their construction is different enough that I wouldn't say they are similar.
As a Romanian that is trying to learn Russian, I feel like my language is in a weird spot between Russian and French fr fr 💀
But there actually is subjunctive mood in Russian
I thought it was just tacking on бы rather than a whole verb tense of its own, like it is in French, but I could be wrong.
Yeah, there aren’t several subjunctive tenses in Russian, but it’s still considered as a separate grammatical mood, and often corresponds to French subjunctive, so I’d rather consider it as a similarity
Locative, genitive, instrumental cases and all those you mentioned, as far as I know they are the same for arabic, we do use those, I mean surely we have a different system of root and stuff but still we use it.
And I think I felt that they're similar because both languages add suffix for different tenses and subjects
Yes but those cases don't exist in French; prepositions can be used without declination. Only cases you really need to be aware of are Accusative and Dative and only really for personal pronouns like her / him. Otherwise there is no declination. It's similar to English in that regard.
Different verb suffixes for different subjects is very common in European languages. Spanish, German, English all have that as well.
I don't think you understand what cases are if you think Arabic has them - fusha certainly has accusative and genitive, but not the others.
they do have the accusative case, it's just not used as much. but yeah the nominative and genitive are completely lost except for a few fossilized expressions and words
Absolutely not. There is some commonality, of course, but more differences than I can count in a single post. The most obvious thing is that Russian still has a pervasive nominal declension system, with case/number/gender suffixes on all nouns, adjectives, and similar parts of speech. French only has vestiges of case (in personal pronouns) and, like English, relies on word order and prepositions to express functions of nouns in a clause. Granted, gender is marked on adjectives, articles and some pronouns, but number marking on nouns and adjectives has mostly disappeared in spoken language and is only preserved in writing. Because of this, French word order is much more rigid, and elision is much less tolerated than in Russian.
As regards conjugation, the Russian tense/mood system is rather more simplistic than French. Russian has no imperfect, no preterite like French passé simple (even in formal writing), its only past tense is a catch-all former perfect, which has, moreover, lost 1st/2nd/3rd-person distinctions. French has two future tenses, synthetic and analytic, for each verb, and the synthetic future (futur simple) is distinct from present; Russian has a single synthetic non-past tense, which serves as either present or future (or both) depending on the inherent aspect of the verb, and verbs for which it's the future can't be used in the analytic future construction. Also, the meaning of the analytic futur proche in French is rather different from Russian будущее составное. French has a vigorous system of irrealis forms: subjunctive differentiated by tense, and a separate conditional; Russian simply marks all sorts of irrealis with the particle бы, which only combines with past-tense forms. Each language has its peculiar tense-like constructions: for instance, French immediate past vient de <infinitive> has no counterpart in Russian, while Russian aborted-action <past> было has no counterpart in French.
On the other hand, Russian makes an extensive use of verbal prefixes to express variants and shades of situations, while French prefixation is rather poor. You need a whole clause in French to express notions like недозагрузить.
I have never learned more in a post than this one, I understand it more now, I mean they do have suffix and stuff, but each one has differences In the usage of suffix and what they really express, they're pretty different in many things, to me I think that Russian is quite easier to learn than french, in french there's different grammatical structures than Russian and no case system, while the only hard part I'm facing in Russian is cases, and not that I know what they are but can't understand them, not like that, but I just don't get if they're the same as Arabic cases or not.
Though, thank you for your response it's full of new information I appreciate it
Cases in Russian are quite similar to Arabic, though Russian has six of them rather than three, and the functions of the common ones (nominative, accusative and genitive) are not exactly the same. But, as in Arabic, there's case agreement between noun and modifier. E. g., “the great king”: nominative великий царь ~ al-maliku al-‘azīmu vs. accusative великого царя ~ al-malika al-‘azīma.
ooo, I understand it more now, it's our harakat, kinda, what about the other three that aren't the same, if you'd be free to explain them to me, I can understand nominative, I think it's like الفاعل، المبتدأ و الخبر، for us, and accusative is like الحال، المعرف و النكرة and other things.
Accusative is rather the case of direct objects. As in, e. g., “I've found the great king”. It is also used in combination with certain prepositions to signify things like direction of movement, elapsed time, etc.
The three cases which Arabic doesn't have are as follows. Keep in mind that cases can be used either bare or combined with a preposition, and the meaning of a preposition+case combination can be very different from the bare case.
So, the truth is: whatever makes your journey more comfortable and interesting :)
Yea, I mean they're not so close on origins, sure Russian is influenced enough by Latin but not like french, but it's fun to see them a bit related or try to make it sensible in my brain by connecting to other languages. At that rate, what does Russian and arabic have in common? Honestly I feel like they're pretty close
Russian was influenced by French, and only by descendance it was influenced by Latin through French. At some point in history, all the Russian aristocracy spoke only French as a mothertongue, while Russian was considered the language of peasants. So lucky you, you know about 10-15% of the noun vocabulary, although you may have to adapt to recognize them.
I don't know much about Arabic grammar, but if you compare Russian to English and French, it's pretty clear French share more similarities with Russian than English. Not because French is actually similar to Russian (it's not that similar by the Indo-European family standards) but because English is such a massive outlier grammatically.
There's no case system in French, so you're not destined to ride this grammatical similarity train for too long. Still worth making observations here and there.
There's a case system in Arabic, and many other things, Arabic is like a tree with a holy amount of branches, but Russians have 3 more cases than we do and I hear ppl saying they're really different from each but idk I don't think do
I am a French native speaker learning Russian, and I don't find them simular at all.
Lots of russian words come from French because of history, but I think the similarities stop there. The grammar is really not alike and if you ask most Russian speaker who learn French, they will say it makes no sense haha. So I am really curious in which regard you see similarities in them.
Edit: I saw you were saying it is because of the add of prefixe for verbs, but I would say it is very common for lot of langages (German for example) and there is much more nuance in Russian regarding that than in French.
I see it in the usage of vous as plural and as a formal "you", the они and ils/Elles too 😅, and suffix, I saw some similarities there and I was like, could it be?
I don't know much about other Indo-European languages except french and English, but I don't see the same in English that I see in french, still it's pretty fun to connect those little similarities to each hehe
Yeah I see, to be fair, I feel like english is more of an exception as most other europeans langages have those same distinctions. It is funny tho, I don't speak arabic but by speaking with friends who do, I always also felt like grammar of arabic was more alike to the russian one (because of case and all).
Exactlyy, the thing is we have 3 cases and Russian has 6 but still everything Russian uses has a counterpart in Arabic, mostly everything
Well, we don't have a direct analog to Idafah in Russian, we just make a genitive construction or use adjectives, sometimes make them up on the fly
see it in the usage of vous as plural and as a formal "you",
This pretty universal in European languages other than English
German du/Sie
Spanish tu/usted
Even older English used to have a thou/you distinction - you is technically the plural
Oh learning French was pain. I hated to memorize all your tenses, guys. Le subjonctif and La négation restrictive - I still don't understand them properly haha
Haha, I give some French class to russian speaker and each time they hear me say "Par contre il y a des exceptions", which is all the time because of wonderfull French langage, it is followed by some kind of desesperate боже мой among them
Thank god I was taught French as a kid, so my teacher didn't point out all these nuances. We struggled with just the number of rules, and to me they look more or less consistent, unlike English or Russian
I also noticed that the present tense endings are similar, since both languages share the same Indo-European root, but when it comes to other things, French and Russian use different patterns. For example, the verb tense system is different. There are genders, but they are different. There are participles, but they are used in different situations. Russian and French have moods, but they are constructed differently and can appear in different situations.
The word 'to be': Russian: ja jest, ty jest, on jest, oni jest/sut' Old Russian : ja jesm', ty jesi, on jest, oni sut' Polish: ja jestem, ty jesteś, on jest, oni są
French: je suis, tu es, il est, ils sont Latin: sum, es, est, sunt
English: I am, You are, He is, They are Middle English: eom, eart, is, sind
Subjunctive mood
In the grand scheme of world languages, yes. They’re both Indo-European, and they both have Indo-European conjugation systems. Beyond that surface level, they’re pretty different.
As an Arabic speaker French may resemble Russian to you because both of them belong to IE language family, but that resemblance is not very deep from the perspective inside the family. French has many more verb tenses, while it lacks the verb aspect; French has no case system, but unlike Russian it has articles; unlike French where a sentence must include both a verb and a noun/pronoun, in Russian it's possible make grammatically correct verbless or subjectless sentences. Sentence structure is quite different, especially when it comes to negation or condition.
What they have in common: coincidentally, both have 3 conjugational groups of verbs, both have genders (although Russian has 3 while French has 2), singular tu/vous differentiation (French influence on Russian), and reflexive constructions (although not exactly equivalent). Also coincidentally, both Russian and French treat verbs of motion in a special way, although for different reasons: in Russian they bear the property of directionality. Unlike Arabic, only the singular third person is gendered, except for the verbs in the past tense where it's gendered for the whole singular row.
There are some things I didn't understand, what are conjugational groups of verbs, I'm a bit slow atm😅, and how is it in arabic that only singular third person, do you mean that the noun is gendered or the verb after it, we do say هي تلعب، هو يلعب
In French there are 3 verb groups based on their conjugational patterns -er verbs, -ir verbs and irregular verbs. In Russian we have 1st and 2nd conjugations and few irregular verbs.
Sorry, I confused myself and confused you as well. Let me explain. In Russian both verbs and adjectives must agree with the related noun/pronoun in gender and number.
I incorrectly explained that: unlike Arabic Russian doesn't have gendered second person pronouns, but verbs (only past tense singular) and adjectives (singular), related to that pronoun have to be gendered anyways.
If I remember correctly, it's true for French as well.
It is
French is so weird that it hardly looks like anything to me.
I find Russian conjugation rather similar to Spanish, or even more to Latin, especially when you know the phonetic correspondences between the languages.
Me too😭, I honestly hate french as a whole but It's a subject that I can't really choose to change except if I was in another governorate, so I understand it a bit even tho I hate it.
What is phonetic correspondence, the similar sounds used in speaking?
Like, the Cyrillic letter Я originally stood for a nasal vowel, something like [an].
So, "they stay" = "стоят" was pronounced something like "stoiant". And in Latin it's "stant".
The participle "standing" = "стоящий" was pronounced something like "stoianti". And in Latin it's "stans", simplified from the earlier "stants".
So, the deeper into the languages' past you can see, the more similarities you notice.
So Russian has some latin influence since they come from the same big Indo-European family, that's probably why I see some little similarities between Russian and other Indo-European languages
>So Russian has some latin influence since they come from the same big Indo-European family
No, Russian has some Latin loanwords, but they appeared way later than these similarities. We just have the same roots.
no - Slavic, Germanic and Romance languages resemble each other because they have the same grandfather, so to speak, they are all cousins.
Later, they have influenced each other primarily in vocabulary, but most of the features you are listing (e.g. the conjugation of verbs) are similar because they were the same language a few thousand years ago.
Well, French, German, and Russian have some similarities in verb morphologies because they are European languages, highly influenced by Latin and Greek.
Mais non
согласен. словообразование очень похоже и вообще французский язык оказал большое влияние на русский язык, культуру
абсолютно, я думаю что суффикс похоже
Romance languages are closer to Russian than Germanic languages, yes, but French is weird for native Russians. At least, weirder than Spanish, and Spanish isn’t as similar as it may seem. But, knowing French can give you hints about Russian grammar — at least, things like cases and grammatical gender don’t seem alien.
Speaking of conjugations, there is a similarity but they’re also similar in Spanish. It’s what most Romance languages share with Slavic languages, what German still has (in a simpler form) and what English has almost lost.
Source?
Just based on the amount of similar rules in grammar. Didn’t mean etymological closeness at all.
Nothing seems alien to me tbh, arabic itself is alien enough to me, the only thing I am scared of is mandarin lol.
Im doing my best to connect things to each so I can understand easily, conjugations seem easier when I do so.
Isn't Russian influenced by latin? And so are the Germanic languages
Russian has lots of loanwords from French and German, sometimes Italian. They came into Russian since 18th century through Peter The Great, then his descendants. Some loved Prussian culture, some made French a de-facto standard among Russian nobility. Science was either Latin or German, opera and first Soviet cars were Italian. Since Peter, Russia was cosmopolitan in some ways. It’s a really brief history.
But there are deeper influences. Out of Slavic language family, Russian stands out in pronunciation and some orthographic rules. First, it derives mostly from Novgorod dialect, rather than Kievan, and Novgorod dialect was partly affected by Finno-Ugoric languages and Norse Germanic dialects. Then, Roderick (Rürick) and his clan became rulers of Kievan Rûs (which is discussed to be a name of his tribe, and he was Sweden). Then, Moscow Principality, where dialect was somewhat in between Kievan and Novgorod. Slow development over time and distance did its best. Then, enlightenment. Science, as I said, was Latin and German in many cases, so literate people have spoken different languages, not only Russian. Before 1917 Revolution, simpler people had spoken a little bit different language, it sounded softer, phonetically closer to modern Ukrainian or Belorussian. Then Revolution happened, and Lenin forced everyone to learn, starting with Russian. And those who were eligible to do that had spoken the language developed through “enlightenment”.
So, yes, German had influenced Russian but not in grammatical sense, but rather phonetically.