Interesting facts about the Russian language

Russian is the 7th most spoken language in the world. It is the official language in the Russian Federation, which has a population of more than 140 million people. Russian is also spoken in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and other republics of the former USSR. Russian speakers thus have a good chance of being understood anywhere from Riga to Belgrade.

There are only about 200,000 words in the Russian language. This number has doubled since the 19th century, when only 50,000-100,000 words were recorded in dictionaries. This number is very small compared to the English language, which is made up of over 1,000,000 words. Russians actually use very few of these words, and you will find that due to this many words have more than one meaning.

Many people who are learning to speak Russian agonise over its pronunciation and grammar. The various endings of the nouns, six cases, two aspects of the verbs and the correct placement of stress may seem tortuous indeed. But the good news is that there are only three tenses in Russian and the word order in Russian sentences is predictable.

It is compulsory for all astronauts in the international space station to learn Russian, so we can call it an international language of space.