This still sounds like you (and your classmates) are attributing his success at Russian to the person rather than the situation. You believe that he’s getting these things right because of his knowledge of the material, you just think that the knowledge comes from his studying rather than an innate ability. But effort, like ability, is an internal attribute. It’s just less fixed / more changeable.
From the psych wiki: Heider (1958) made the distinction between internal (person) and external (situation) attributions. Then Weiner (1971)
proposed that the stability of the cause is also included in individual’s explanations of outcomes. The distinction between stable, non-variable causes (such as innate ability for internal attributions and inherent task difficulty for external attributions) and unstable, variable causes (such as effort and luck respectively) was combined with Heider’s internal/external dimension to form a basis for classifying the performance attributions made by individuals
This still sounds like you (and your classmates) are attributing his success at Russian to the person rather than the situation. You believe that he’s getting these things right because of his knowledge of the material, you just think that the knowledge comes from his studying rather than an innate ability. But effort, like ability, is an internal attribute. It’s just less fixed / more changeable.
From the psych wiki: Heider (1958) made the distinction between internal (person) and external (situation) attributions. Then Weiner (1971)