English has a much larger and more nuanced vocabulary than any other language.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
Russian, which sounds terrible … French, which sounds great
That’s in the eye of the beholder (should I say the ear of the listener). To me, Russian sounds OK, but French sounds just awful. (Plus, the pattern of stressing all last syllables makes any kind of poetry sound like military chants to me.)
French … is hard to pronounce well.
More like it has higher standards for what counts as ‘well’. In my first days in Dublin everyone could understand me despite my then-awful spoken English, to the point one could suspect they had telepathy or something; on the other hand, the French seem unable (or unwilling) to understand at all any less-than-perfect French.
I prefer the sound of Klingon to the sound of French. I’m not kidding.
Also, my general impression (as one who speaks native English and near-native Russian) is that English has more nouns and adjectives with more nuances, but Russian has more, and more nuanced, verbs.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
That’s in the eye of the beholder (should I say the ear of the listener). To me, Russian sounds OK, but French sounds just awful. (Plus, the pattern of stressing all last syllables makes any kind of poetry sound like military chants to me.)
More like it has higher standards for what counts as ‘well’. In my first days in Dublin everyone could understand me despite my then-awful spoken English, to the point one could suspect they had telepathy or something; on the other hand, the French seem unable (or unwilling) to understand at all any less-than-perfect French.
I prefer the sound of Klingon to the sound of French. I’m not kidding.
Also, my general impression (as one who speaks native English and near-native Russian) is that English has more nouns and adjectives with more nuances, but Russian has more, and more nuanced, verbs.