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Mentality and Language Awareness |
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Mentality differences between Russian and Western mentality In our approach of teaching languages we focus on the position of finding similarities and differences between two languages, as well as Russian and Western mentality as these are two ways of thinking and you have to understand from the very beginning into which area you would like to interfere. | Aspect of comparison | Characteristics of Western mentality | Characteristics of Russian mentality | | Business Matters | Individualism | Collectivism | | Making Idles | Specification | Generalization | | Future Plans | Optimism | Uncertainty | | Communication | Informality | Formality | | Work and Business | Competition | Cooperation | | Decision Making | Practicality | Emotions | The importance of studying mentality differences has practical implications. Russian businessmen, being aware of mentality differences, could avoid many cross-cultural and sub-cultural conflicts, which will lead to further international cooperation. In order to help you to catch the main differences between Russian and English we propose you the following table: | DESCRIPTION | ENGLISH | RUSSIAN | | word order | - fixed | - very fluid | | meaning | - expressed through the addition of words (for example auxiliaries) and movement of words within limited boundaries | - conveys meaning largely through changes in the composition of words and intonation (e.g., by inflections or the addition of prefixes and suffixes) | | phonology | - English has 12 vowel sounds (5 long, 7 short), plus 8 diphthongs; - consonants are pronounced with intention mostly; - intonation is according to the type of sentence or phrase with fixed word order; - has variable stress patterns; | - Russian consists of 5 vowel sounds, with no differentiation between short and long vowels; - Russian has a similar number of consonants to English, but their sounds do not fully overlap, Russian consonant can be both hard and soft what makes difficulty in pronunciation; - intonation may change the sentence from narrative to interrogative type with the same word order; - has variable stress patterns; | | Grammar - Verb/Tense | English has progressive and perfect tense forms, and avoids the need for affixation or inflection by the extensive use of auxiliaries; - the modal verb system in English is very complex; - there are 24 tenses; | The Russian system is based in the concept of aspect: actions are either completed or not completed. This is shown by appending affixes to the verb stem. There are few auxiliary verbs; - there are 3 tenses; | | Grammar - Other | - the English article system itself is extremely complex; - in English all inanimate objects are the same gender “it”; | - Russian has no articles; - all Russian nouns are one of three genders no mater if it is animate or inanimate object; | | Miscellaneous | | - Russian is a largely phonetic language. This means that word's pronunciation can be predicted from its spelling and its spelling from its pronunciation. |
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