2. Two short sentences here don't accurately convey the horror of Russian's case system, where not just verbs but also NOUNS must change (decline) into one of 6 main cases (potentially more depending on whether you consider the locative, partitive genitive, vocative, etc. as distinct cases) :D, but yes absolutely - basically, you only ever have the possessive form in English 'add 's, or for pronouns just learn 'his/her/their' and even verbs have a maximum of 8 forms (be - am - is - are - was - were - been - being), with the vast majority having just four or five.
3. 9 is an odd number to pick, most people agree there are 12 or 16, but you have (multiply as appropriate) past, present, future, simple, future-in-the-past, continuous, perfect, perfect continuous, indicative, imperative, subjunctive, active, and passive forms.
Russian on the other hand has 2 grammatical tenses (past and non-past), and 2 aspects (perfective and imperfective), as well as a couple of forms constructed using auxiliaries (immediate future, conditional). It also has gerunds and participles, and all of this before we even start thinking about verbs of motion.
4. Russian does have the concept of specificity in some cases - in particular there are some cases where the genitive can be used instead of the accusative to indicate indefiniteness.
Definitely 0/10 for recommending learning Russian, except as an exercise in masochism (10/10).
Definitely 0/10 for recommending learning Russian, except as an exercise in masochism (10/10).
Hardly a 10/10 for the BDSM part. Whilst the Russian language has retained many grammatical features of the Proto-Indo-European language, it has also dropped many (i.e. perfect tenses, the aorist, a number of noun cases, merged long, short and ultra-short vowels into same quality vowels and lost all nasal vowels and the list goes on). Russian, whilst having its own share of linguistic quirks (but, hey, what language does not?) is no more complex than, say, Sanskrit.
For the purpose of inflicting severe bouts of pain in the rear orifice, give Basque (an absolutive-ergative language) or Georgian (a Kartveli language with the split ergative) a go. Both have no known language ancestors, both are highly agglunative languages with some serious phonetic challenges and with a wealth of deliciously mesmerising grammatical peculiarities.
Or try native highly agglunative North / South American (e.g. Navajo for agglunative and fusional delights and the tenseless verb conjugation by 7x modes and 12x aspects of each mode and Quechua for reversed concepts where future is placed «behind» the past which is always «ahead»), or Innuit, or North-Caucasian languages. Russian will feel like a godsend and a breeze after that.
Those all sound super exciting. I'm in Hungary at the moment and the language here is also pretty agglutinative, so that's not so scary, but the idea of seven modes and twelve aspects is... well, next level.
I revise my 10/10 downwards, based on what you've mentioned here to somewhere around a 6.
3. 9 is an odd number to pick, most people agree there are 12 or 16, but you have (multiply as appropriate) past, present, future, simple, future-in-the-past, continuous, perfect, perfect continuous, indicative, imperative, subjunctive, active, and passive forms.
Russian on the other hand has 2 grammatical tenses (past and non-past), and 2 aspects (perfective and imperfective), as well as a couple of forms constructed using auxiliaries (immediate future, conditional). It also has gerunds and participles, and all of this before we even start thinking about verbs of motion.
4. Russian does have the concept of specificity in some cases - in particular there are some cases where the genitive can be used instead of the accusative to indicate indefiniteness.
Definitely 0/10 for recommending learning Russian, except as an exercise in masochism (10/10).