How similar is the Russian language to German?

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Misanthropist

I'm getting so much entertainment from this question. Some of my favorites so far are:
"...German being a Romantic language..." - they must have so much in common with the French and Italians, how could I have never noticed that...
"english letters" - they are either latin or roman letters, the English did not invent the alphabet.
I'm hoping bigdaddy's whole answer is a joke, otherwise I'm scared...
And it seems that soothsayer didn't have history at her school. What a pity.
And why does everyone think it's so hard to learn a new alphabet? Haven't you made up "code alphabets" when you were kids? Furthermore, having different alphabets doesn't mean that two languages are completely different (for example Russian (Cyrillic alphabet) and Polish (Latin alphabet). Likewise, having the same alphabet doesn't guarantee mutual intelligibility (Russian and Chuvash).

Finally, to answer your question,the similarity between German and Russian ends at them being Indo-European languages. Beyond that, they belong to two different language families: Germanic (German) and Slavic (Russian). It's interesting to note that there is actually a substantial amount of German loanwords in Russian ( http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BA_%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%86%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%85_%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%B2_%D1%80%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC_%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA%D0%B5 ) but that is still not enough to make German your "trusty friend" in learning Russian.

Humanophage

Rather similiar.

1. The alphabet. Now, that's not really an important thing, but many people here tend to emphasise it. Well, both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets are derived from the Greek alphabet. Most of the letters are identical, and those letters that are abscent in one of the alphabets (like Ð¤ or Ð›) are present in the Greek alphabet. By the way, I wonder if the Vietnamese language became much more similiar to German when they switched to Latin letters.

2. The phonetics. Most of the sounds are rather similiar as well, at least in the case of North-Eastern Germany (not so in Southern Germany). It is considerably easier for a Russian to speak German without a significant accent than to speak English, Spanish, French. On a side note, one of my Argentinian acquaintances who is of German heritage has mistaken the Norwegian language for Russian, so I suppose the further north you go, the more similiar Germanic languages sound to Russian :-).

3. The structure. Comparatively similiar, I suppose German could be placed somewhere inbetween English and Russian in this case. Both have a normal case system, for instance, as opposed to Modern English, or a honorific form for 'you' that some Germanic languages don't have anymore (Sie and Ð’Ñ‹). They were even more similiar to each other a thousand years ago, together with Old English. For instance, Old English had grammatical genders, proper cases, a free word order, various endings and other things that are currently peculiar to Russian and, to a lesser extent, German.

4. The origins. Both Germanic and Slavic languages are Indo-European, and are territorially extremely close to each other, to the point of the Eastern half of Germany being populated by the Slavs for several centuries (Slavic minorities, like the Sorbs, are still there). The similiarity is especially noticeable in the case of German and Czech languages because they stayed together for a longer period, however, it's also rather obvious in other cases, such as German and Russian.

5. The influence. The German language had an immense influence on Russian, especially after the reforms of Peter the Great. Most of the terms that concerned the subjects of his reforms have experienced a heavy Germanic influence. Many Latin words and forms entered the Russian language through German. Prussia was the most important neighbour of the Russian Empire, and middle-class German immigrants were rather common in it, which led to major German admixtures in language and culture. A major part of Russian nobility was of German origin as well, and even though French was more prestigious, it was impossible to avoid the German influence. The Russian influence on the German language wasn't as significant, however, other Slavic languages were influential in North-Eastern Germany and in Austria.

Cossak

Hmm...in Russia people use words as Swinja(swine), gastorbaiter, naturlih, fantastisch, schnell, by the way 30% use it in speech but use it as german...also all understand it,like schnizel...lol...my dad still says Arbaiten,Ferschtein?...or when i was in secondary school we used Come cu mir,schnell,schnellya!....or judo or Was ist das...

You bite your tongue mr.

How dare you even try to compare russian to german.

Russian is better.

tubebandit

when i do my arnold "get down" impersonation it could be german it could be russian.

dAmIAnOO

i have to say i dont know anything abour german ( i was learing it but forgot everything)
but russian in more similar to polish and other slavic languages

blue.dragon

They are both Indo-European languages, yet they do not appear to be closely related...

ManOfTheHour

To a person that speaks neither, they sound similar. I think that's as far as it goes.

Mr. Speaker

Don't listen to anybody, these 2 languages are practically twins.

Lizbiz

Russian is Slavonic (originating in the area of Poland) and German is Germanic (the dominate language base of most of western Europe, derived from many Indo-European dialects, except for the Latin language based French and Italian etc..) The two are not similar but steeped in a cultural cause and effect melding of dominance due to warfare and economic need. Germanic languages are not similar to Slavonic in their structure or alphabets. But it is difficult to completely separate the two or any of the European languages. We often find similarities in shared words as we do with the French, for example. None of this is definitive.

uknowuluvme89

not similar at all...I speak Russian and can vouch for that
German is really gutteral and russian is more normal lol
German and Yiddish and similar and Russian and Ukrainian are similar

soothsayer

very similar to russians welcoming the germans into moscow in 1941

Little Witchy Girl

not at all - starting with different alphabet and ending with different grammar and sounds

It is absolutely not close to it at all.

Rachel

Kind of similar, but not really.
A lot of English words come from German roots and suffixes. German being a Romantic language and Russian being a Slovik language, there are probably very few similarities.

0LDSCH00L

probably not very - different alphabet.

Time travler

It's not similar at all. Russian have a totally different alphabet. It's a hard language to learn.

mtchndjnmtch

Not even close. Only in the fact that's its foreign.

biggdaddy!

They are not similiar at all, German is the basis of English and spanish, these 2 languages move west from Germany and than were influenced by latin from the romans, but english also takes on many parts of Irish and danish to create what it is today,

Russian is actually derived from Ancient Cantonese, as you may or may not know, there is no language know as Chinese, many do not know this, in china you either speak cantonese or mandarin

I hope this helps!

yay!xkittyxstarr

Not much. Russian letters are very different and unique. German uses english letters. The sound is normally and usually very easy to tell apart. Accents and stuff. Even tone. So quite different.

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