a minute of russian language
The thing I like most about Russian (that isn’t there in English) is how much you can do with words. I mean, when English words are more or less solid, Russian are Lego bricks. You can strip them down to roots and then make something new!
Like, you can take a root and then add a suffix, and it will add to the meaning! You can add a suffix telling that this object is small. And you can tell exactly how small it is! Smaller than regularly? Small? Tiny? Really tiny? Tiny AND cute? Or maybe just not fully grown up? So small that it is slightly ridiculous? Go for it! You can tell if the object is a bad or a good thing, if it is cute or ugly, scary or funny, big or small, difficult or easy, and all with suffixes!
But wait, there are prefixes too! Those work best with verbs. How did you do that? Did you finish doing it or not? Or maybe you did more than was needed? Or maybe you didn’t do enough? How did you do that, in one go or during a long time? Difficulty? Direction? Whether or not you did it before? Yep, you can tell all that with prefixes!
And my favourite fact is that there is a word in Russian without any root! It is “вынуть”, meaning “to take something out of something”, and basically it has a prefix “вы-”, a suffix “-ну-” and an ending “-ть-”, and that’s it! Everyone knows and understands that word perfectly well, even though it doesn’t have the root that would actually hold the meaning! (’v’)
