<p>I'm currently a sophomore and I haven't taken any foreign language up until now. The reason was that I wasn't really motivated for school until the third trimester of my freshman year, when I started going to my current school. My grades were at like a 2.7 for the first two terms and the tri I switched I got a 4.0. I temporarily went to another school for most of a semester this year and had 8 classes which I ended up with a 3.6 and now I am back at my current school on tris and currently have a 3.8 and am enrolled in 6 classes.</p>
<p>This year I'm taking APUSH and have a B+ and I'm in honors 2nd year algebra, the rest is pretty much a typical sophmore workload (including gym). I'm telling you all this to let you guys know my motivation and the type of student I am. Now back to my original question, how difficult is Russian to learn as a second language? I want to end up going to a high ranked college and double major in computer science and physics and most colleges I looked at require 2 years of foreign language and recommend 3 and my school offers 2 years of Russian.</p>
<p>I choose Russian because I don't want to take Spanish like everyone else and I'm Slavic in decent and intend to visit Russia one day, but I don't exactly "need" it to be fluent, just to get 2 years of foreign language in high school and if the college requires I continue it I'll continue in college.</p>
<p>I want to know the difficulty because I want to keep my GPA up next year and junior and senior year I'm getting killed with 3+ AP's each and year round sports and possibly work and volunteering. Plus their really heavy workloads for the AP's, next year I'm taking AP Computer Science, Advanced Pre-Calc, Pre-AP Chemistry, AP Stats and AP Comp and senior year its AP Physics B, AP Chemistry, AP Calc, AP Gov/Econ, and AP Lit or another AP language class. Pretty much I consider myself intelligent but I've never even tried to learn another language so I don't know how much my "intelligence" will help me in that field and I want to know how others thought of it so I know how much I can keep my grade up in that class on top of the other classes I'm taking.</p>
<p>Thanks, thats good news because every Google search I did made it sound impossible and I figured it must be people trying to learn on their own or just learning it straight in college and that the high school level would be easier.</p>
<p>It depends.
For me it was very hard … but so are all languages.</p>
<p>But for several other people I know, it was not hard at all.
It depends on what your talents and abilities are and how much work you put in it.</p>
<p>Russian (as I recall) has ten cases.
How many does Spanish have? Three? Four?
So, I guess one could say Russian is more than twice as difficult as Spanish. ;)</p>
<p>Some kids at my school take Russian and they say it’s pretty hard. It depends on if your a language person and how much energy you’re willing to put into it.</p>
<p>“Russian (as I recall) has ten cases.
How many does Spanish have? Three? Four?”</p>
<p>Spanish doesn’t really seem to have any more noun cases than English. The only nouns that really decline as far as I could see are pronouns like “I/me” and “he/him.”
Spanish has fourteen verb tenses, and English has just about that many but English doesn’t have anywhere near as many verb endings.</p>
<p>+1 halcyon. Spanish has I/me like in french but Russian has even more pronoun cases.
Spanish is definitely easier imo but I suppose it depends on whether you want to study a language because its easy or because you’re really interested in it.</p>
<p>Trickstar, Russian is a very hard language to learn. Not as hard, as Japanese, but a lot more difficult than Spanish. However, if you have any relatives (you mentioned your Slavic descent) who speak this language and can help you to study it - you’ll be fine.</p>