Re: college prep

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

> ...and a maddening number of patterns and exceptions in the verbal aspect
> system,

Ain't harder than English, in total. English has 6 tenses, and simple &
progressive of each (you have no idea what horror that is!!!), while Russian
has only 3, and unlike past and future, the present is always "unfinished".
(But the imperative and infinitive can be "finished" or "unfinished", too.)
German has 6 tenses, but one is rare*, 2 more are precisely synonymous**,
and there is no such unnecessary stuff as simple/progressive.

> and unpredictable word stress...

That's true.

The pronunciation isn't easy either. But the orthography is rather easy.
Don't be afraid of the Cyrillic script, you'd learn that in a month or less
:-)

* The future perfect tense; even rarer than in English, because you usually
just "put yourself into the future" and use the ~ present perfect.
** Those that are homologous to the past tense and the present perfect
tense. In the southern dialects, the past tense is completely extinct,
except for "was/were" and "wanted".