I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile.
All intellectually-minded Bengalis (that is to say, all Bengalis) feel themselves to have a special connection to Russian culture. Some of it is standard Cold War stuff based on projection of Russian soft power (my mom got a television at home for the first time when my grandfather brought one back from a trip to Moscow for work in the late '70s), but it's more than just that. In
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, the main character is called Gogol. In fact, at my high school, there was a Bengali boy the year below me named Gogol. One of my closest friends in graduate school was raised in Calcutta; her family calls her younger brother "Pushuk", which is a diminutive from Pushkin. When I pointed out the special connection between Bengal and Russian culture to my parents once, they disagreed with me until they recalled that I have a cousin named Natasha. A few years ago I met a Bengali friend I had had in elementary school; his family had moved to India when we were 11 and I hadn't seen him in over a decade. I would have bet any amount of money that he was interested in Russia, and of course he was.
Here's an article I found online that touches on the phenomenon.
I'd like to say that my own interest in Russia was completely spontaneous, but that's not right. When I was ten years old, I was at my grandparents' house in Dhaka, where I found that I had read every English-language book in the house except for a translation of War and Peace. I was too young to understand much of it (although even at the time I was aware of how wonderful
the scene where Natasha kisses Boris is), but I emerged with a vaguely positive attitude toward Freemasonry and a lifelong fascination with the Russian lands. Years later, in my other grandparents' house in Dhaka, I found a little model of the main building at Moscow State University. I recognized it instantly, of course.
I studied Russian for multiple years in college and used to be able to speak it reasonably well. I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile. I have no similar connection to German.
Both German and Russian have productive case systems, which is good, but word order is freer in Russian than in German, which is a point in favor of Russian. In both languages gender and case interact with each other, but I find German more difficult to parse in this respect than Russian, mostly because German articles are confusing. Russian avoids this issue by simply not having articles.
The articles mean fewer noun endings, which are ridiculous in Russian [and Icelandic ftm, but that's for a different thread].
And free word order is not necessarily a positive, when it means so many endings [or prefixes] to learn.
And frankly, it makes Yoda-speak lose its effect.
Well, I natively speak a language that has free word order thanks to its functional case systems, so that nouns might be declined does not scare me in the least. The issue with German articles is that there are not enough different endings: "der", for example, can be the masculine singular nominative or the feminine singular dative or genitive or the plural genitive, while "den" is either the masculine singular accusative or the plural dative. This is confusing. Lack of differentiation can be an issue with Russian, too, especially with feminine singular noun declension, but it's not like in German.
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