| The Indy
Foreign Language Academy offers group, private, semi-private and immersion
programs in Russian, as well as ten other major world languages. This
Russian website is being developed this week so please excuse incomplete
areas. When completed, you will be able to access this site during and after
completion of the class. All future language public group programs will
include on-line resources.
Why should you
study Russian?
 Russian
is the most important of the Slavic languages and is spoken or understood in
most of the countries in the former Soviet Union. Currently 170 million
people speak Russian.
This is therefore one of the
most important languages in the world and is one of six official languages
in the United Nations.
Russian is a Slavic language
that belongs to the Indo-European language group. It has therefore grammar
as well as words related to other Indo-European languages and are distant
related to such languages as English, French and German.
How difficult is it to study and learn
Russian?
Many believe that it is the
Russian Alphabet which is the biggest obstacle when learning the Russian
language. This is not the case.
Russian is not an easy
language, but for those of you that have mastered other foreign languages
the challenge is not that great. If you learn the Russian language as your
second language expect some more practice.
The grammar can at time be
difficult as is the case with French and German, while it has 6 different
cases for every plural and singular noun and adjective. The language has
three genders. Masculine, feminine and neutral. Verbs have different
conjugations. Russian uses many additional consonant sounds not found in
English. So with all this put together, it can be complicated to learn.
The alphabet in use is the
Cyrillic alphabet. This is somewhat different from the Latin alphabet. The
alphabet is built with the some basic structure as the Latin with a
combination of separate consonant and vocals characters. You can learn the
alphabet within a couple of hours practice. Written Russian in handwriting
can be more difficult to learn and recognize.
The Cyrillic alphabet which
was introduced by Saint Cirilo, a Greek missionary in 860 AD, is used in the
Russian, Ukrainian, Belarus, Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian languages. It
is also used for most minority languages in the Russian Federation.
Other Slav languages like
Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Croatian and Slovenian are all written in the
Latin alphabet
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