Yeah you’re right. Sure, you’re not going to know 2000 words in 30 days. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, and to a lesser extent, in the other countries that were once republics in the Soviet Union. (6,100 and 11,000 rounded). But others were the difference is a simple change of а for an и (получить – получать), they might not be included. Also, some lexical items are not listed in dictionaries, for example, adverbs formed from adjectives. Russian has approximately 500,000 words (it’s actually impossible to count), and only 2,500 are used frequently. Now, that’s a lot of words. Agitprop: artistic political propaganda, from a truncated form of the Russian forms of the words … Do you count красивый-красиво as 1 word or 2? Get my eBook the Russian Conversational Blueprint to learn to have good conversations in Russian. Or others that are simply not relevant for you – and will never be. Professionals who use a specialized vocabulary may have about 2,000 more words in their active vocabulary. Updated the post! I started learning Russian seriously in January 2016, and haven't stopped since. There are many estimates. The Russian language has absorbed borrowings from many other languages: It adopted Greek words with the spread of Christianity and Turkic with the development of ties with Turkic-speaking neighbors. Its core was made up of words commonly used in standard Russian. Click here to find out more. You see, it all depends on how you go and count them. Curious how to learn the grammar that goes along with it? German has about 135,000 words in the Der Duden dictionary. (I, you, he, she, it, we, you, and they.) Now, that’s a lot of words. My first start with Russian was through the Michel Thomas method, Sign up here for the free trial of Russianpod101. russkiy yazyk) is an East Slavic language native to the Russians in Eastern Europe. Please log in again. feminine. However, several of the larger Russian dictionaries quote around 130,000 to 150,000. Learning to speak Russian offers many advantages, whether you want to connect to your roots, travel or live in Eastern Europe, or to take part in one of the world’s biggest economies. Note: in this article we’re going to find out how many words there are in the Russian language. The first ever edition of Vladimir Dal's ‘Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language’ (1863-1866); Portrait of Vladimir Dal painted by Vasily Perov. Get the week's best stories straight to your inbox. Russian is an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and several unrecognised countries, e.g., Transnistria. Instead of feeling overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of words to learn, everything starts feeling very manageable now. There are many estimates. Plus you can download a lot of other free decks for learning words. neuter / neutral. In the 20th century, several more dictionaries were compiled, with the number of words in them varying from 50,000 to 120,000. There is no single generic word for “blue” in Russian that can be used to describe all of the colors in Fig. Some of the most popular Lithuanian names are linked … That’s crazy. So words like милкшейк (milkshake) also have to be counted, since they are used pretty often. Now, of course once a while a more difficult word will be used in specific situations – but most of the time you can guess the meaning of those words anyways. It is believed that more than half of words in modern Russian are borrowings and about 70 percent of them are borrowed from English. Some of them are counted twice (such as идти/ходить). Speaking Russian as a Second Language. When we approach the question from this angle – everything becomes a lot more fun. 50% of words used daily are between 1500 and 2500 for Russian. English has a lot more of those. Dutch Words from Dutch Of course дошкольница is a word. But the one that I personally like the most is using spaced repetition. Add in some cognates (words that sound the same in  several languages – most famous are taxi, tobacco etc.) Because of this, the Russian language is one that can be compared to languages such as Greek, Dutch, Italian, French, Arabic, Yiddish, and others that helped to mold it into the language known today. How many Russian words do you know? It gives you clear instructions and daily tasks to follow to get to an intermediate Russian level in the next 6 months. He introduced into writing colloquial words that had not been used before and lowered the overall register of written Russian, which used to be very high-flown and formal. Unfortunately, there are many, many more words in the Russian language. We’re going to take a look at the common estimates, and how relevant they are. As we discussed above, estimates of how many words are known by the average native English speaker vary from 10,000 to 65,000+. Install Ankidroid, download a Russian-English flash card deck and you’ll surprise yourself how fast you’ll know your first 1000 words (which consist of 80% of all regularly-spoken words in Russian). It is generally accepted that there are about 40,000 roots in the Russian language. Tweet. if you were to learn 100 new words every single day – it would still take you 7 to 15 years to learn all of them. After all, with al its declensions, perfective/imperfective verbs and loanwords from English, which words are really Russian? By way of comparison, the Oxford English Dictionary contains about 400,000 words. 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