Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
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No, it's actually fun. Brief examples:
"It depends". I have never been able to get away with just saying "it depends" - Russian version prompts you to either specify what it depends on, or explicitly refuse to, begging the question of why I am being so sneaky.
There is no word that means "complexity", but can not be alternatively understood as "difficulty". When I tell someone I want a complex challenge, they ask why I am not carrying heavy things around, as that is quite difficult.
In same vein, no word for "challenge" that doesn't also mean "ordeal". The distinction seems to be also missing from Russian brains, a very peculiar phenomenon that Russian culturologists are always upset about.
No different words for 'accuracy' and 'precision'.
No word for 'awesome' that is both strong enough and can be shown on TV. But, on the other hand, the obscene word for 'awesome' is much more awesome that 'awesome'.
English tenses are more flexible and consistent. Russian only has three, plus the standalone "have been"-like form. They don't distinguish between "I do things" and "I am doing things", for instance.
In English, you can put an emphasis on 'am' or 'is'. In Russian, to do that, you need to throw in a few extra words.
Context-independency. Russian has a small basic vocabulary, and compensates it with insanely complex syntactic structures that makes it harder to pull a couple of words from a sentence and understand what it is about.
To even things a bit, here are some advantages of Russian over Englsh:
Phonetics. If you know how to write a word, you automatically and unambiguously (with a single notable exception) know how to pronounce it. It works a little less perfect the other way around, but good enough that Russian spelling bees do not exist and don't even make sense.
English has a ridiculously huge amount of words that sound the same or similar, like 'to', 'two' and 'too', or 'bot' and 'bought'. The last one is just horrible - you insert three new letters, doubling word's length, and it still sounds the same. No such thing is possible in Russian.
Words "себя" and "авось".
Word formation. It is much more flexible than in English. You can easily say things like "недоперепрыгнул", which means "tried, but not succeeded, to jump over something".
Distinction between singular and plural "you".
Mat. English swearing pales in comparison to this.
Really fascinating! But my russian brains can't grasp this one thing, could you please at least try to explain what is this mysterious additional meaning of the word 'challenge' that can't be translated into Russian, and doesn't mean "summon to contest" or "high degree of difficulty"