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Azathoth123 comments on Rationality Quotes November 2014 - Less Wrong
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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.
It seems like half your complaints are that Russian doesn't make some distinction that English does and the other half are that Russian forces you to make distinctions that English doesn't. It strikes me that you're simply more comfortable thinking in English.
Which begs the question: why is it so that my native language that I spoke since I was two and everyone in my circle understands, is less comfortable for me than a foreign language I am not even confident in my skill with, possess a limited vocabulary (compared to Russian), and have much less practice in?
Not being able to make a distinction and forcing you to make a distinction, are both bad. Look at the "It isn't a fish" example. In English you can distinguish between "It isn't a fish" and "It isn't a mammal", or you can leave it ambiguous ("It isn't"). If you can make a distinction, but don't have to, it gives you a lot more flexibility than both "not able to" and "can and must". Russian is inflexible exactly because of that.
I think Russian is just worse at carving reality at its joints. Accuracy and precision and two very different things, down to the point that more precision = less accuracy and vice-versa. That's a good distinction. Forcing you to specify a noun's gender when you're talking about it, with said genders distributed mostly randomly/historically (dare you to say why "mechanism" is male, "machine" is female, and "device" is neuter?), makes no sense, because different-gendered items do not have different behaviour. That's a bad distinction.
The comfort a language brings comes with it's associations. If you are introverted you likely had a lot of negative social experiences in your native language.
If you learned English in a more comfortable enviroment it likely brings other associations with it. I'm personally more light and make jokes when dealing in English than in German. I got my verbal English via Toastmasters and the rest via the internet.
Okay, a valid hypothesis, but I don't think it is actually the case. I learned English for 2 years with a teacher, and then via books, internet and video games. I certainly did have negative social experiences in Russian. But the comfortableness doesn't feel like being more light and effortless. More like more powerful, less unwieldy, more precise and compact. As a programmer, I often have the same set of feelings with programming languages, and I assure you, I wasn't bullied in school in C++.
Internet, books and video games don't produce lightness. You might feel powerful while playing a video game but you don't joke around.
The Toastmasters social enviroment on the other hand does produce that vibe.
When I was socially inconfident, I did very often choose English over German. As I personally got more confident I started using German with people who don't speak it (I'm living in Berlin, it happens) to have them tell me to switch to English.
C++ education is still very dry. A language like Python with it's Zen has values like "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." A lot of the python tutorials are written more lively than c++ tutorials.
I'm not saying that languages are the same when you ignore personal conditioning. I know a few people with strong NLP background where effects of language really matter who say the can't simply translate things one-to-one.
Compactness however is relative. If you translate a single German sentence into English the English one is often shorter. On the other hand one author I know with an NLP background said she probalby would need halve the text write a book in German than in English you don't say things as directly in English than you do in German.
There is less hinting around.
I recently watched the Liar's game with subtitles and it contained a bunch of instances where forms of politeness were used to express meaning that simply don't exist the same way in English.
Kinship terms are also very intestesting. English doesn't distinguish between cousins on the mothers side and on the fathers side. Other languages do.