How do people speak and read Russian? There are seemingly infinite long words that are almost identical or at least similar. I thought Turkish was crazy about this but Russian is another level. Большое спасибо мои друзья

Writer, podcaster, and commentator on foreign affairs and politics. Runs /dropglobalnews

Clanker Broadcasting Service /cbs

Having learned Russian grammar as a child and spent many years in the Turkic-language world, I always felt Russian was a lot more similar in construction to English than, say, Azerbaijani or Turkish. The glutinative constructions of the latter just don't feel intuitive like the simpler Russian contructions.

That said, what drives one's head in about Russian is the use of prepositions and cases. In theory, you really only need one, so having two adds a lot of overhead when trying to form sentences correctly.