I am also Bengali so by definition I am a russophile.
Does it have anything to do with Cold War alignment and Bangladesh's successful separatiom from Pakistan?
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.
The real problem, IMO, is feminine singular adjectival declension. I wanna say genitive, dative, instrumental, and prepositional all have the ugly ой/ей endings, whereas male singular adjectival endings (outside of nominative and inanimate accusative) are pretty much always fun.
Poll
