Ruskii Iazik

Although, the Romanian language (technically Moldavian, but this is just a dialect of Romanian - similar to comparing English spoken with a strong Scottish accent to Oxford English) is the official language of Moldova, there is an extremely large Russian speaking community in the country. Indeed, in Balti the Russian speakers predominate and so in the city the main language of communication is Russian. Thus for example, if you go into a shop to buy something, almost certainly the person serving you will speak to you in Russian. If they see that you are not very comfortable in Russian they will often switch to Romanian, but not always, thus creating some awkward and indeed amusing moments. One time for example, the person serving me spoke only in Russian, but all of a sudden, when I nearly left the shop without paying 2 Lei for a plastic bag, she started speaking Romanian! The Russian language is interesting to learn, but quite tricky. Partly, because you need to get used to a new alphabet in order to be able to read the words, but also because the words are Slavic based thus if the languages that you are familiar with are Latin or Germanic based i.e. Romanian and English, it's very hard to recognize and work out what all the words mean. For example if you are familiar with the English word 'success' it doesn't take much effort to understand and get to grips with the Romanian word 'succes' but the Russian word 'успех' takes a bit more getting used to. Finally, Russian seems difficult as there are very many word endings. The Russian language uses six cases and often each case has different endings. As an example, in Russian there are six different types of masculine nouns. Each type can be plural or singular and be found in one of six different cases. Thus, by my calculations there are 6 times 2 times 6 i.e. 72 different possibly states in which a Russian masculine noun can be found for example an animate, singular noun in the dative case which would have the ending -у or an inanimate, plural noun in the instrumental case which would have the ending -ами. Admittedly, things are not quite that complicated as quite a few of the noun endings are the same. In the example above, an inanimate, singular noun in the dative case also has the ending -y and an animate plural noun in the instrumental case also has the ending -ами. Nevertheless, things are still tricky compared to English where the only change to noun endings is to add an -s (with a few exceptions) in order to show plural or Romanian where there are four different masculine noun endings depending on case and number (singular or plural).