---
title: 'THE ONLY REASON TO LEARN RUSSIAN'
source: 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP0FwHLdzOE'
video_id: 'DP0FwHLdzOE'
date: 2026-06-15
duration_sec: 0
---

# THE ONLY REASON TO LEARN RUSSIAN

> Source: [THE ONLY REASON TO LEARN RUSSIAN](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP0FwHLdzOE)

## Summary

This video covers the essentials of the Russian language, from its alphabet and pronunciation to grammar and profanity, emphasizing that the ultimate reward for learning Russian is access to its rich literature.

### Key Points

- **Cyrillic Alphabet Origins** [00:04] — Cyrillic was not invented by St. Cyril; his contribution was Glagolitic. His students created Cyrillic by adapting Greek letters and adding new ones.
- **Peter the Great's Reform** [00:30] — Peter the Great reformed the Cyrillic script, removing redundant letters to create the civic script, leading to the modern Russian alphabet.
- **Pronunciation Challenges** [01:02] — Russian has 10 vowel letters (5 hard, 5 soft). Consonants are palatalized when followed by soft vowels. Stress is mobile and unpredictable, changing word meanings.
- **Stress Changes Meaning** [02:32] — Example: 'pisat' (to write) vs. 'pisat' (to urinate). Incorrect stress can lead to embarrassing mistakes.
- **Consonant Devoicing** [03:00] — Voiced consonants become voiceless at the end of words and in consonant clusters, e.g., 'vodka' pronounced 'votka'.
- **Six Grammatical Cases** [03:28] — Russian uses cases (nominative, dative, accusative, genitive, instrumental, prepositional) to indicate word relationships, not word order.
- **Noun Genders and Declensions** [04:42] — Nouns have three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and multiple declension patterns. Numerals affect noun cases.
- **Verb Aspects** [05:25] — Verbs are inherently perfective (completed) or imperfective (ongoing). Motion verbs require specifying direction and frequency.
- **Profanity (Mat)** [06:21] — Russian profanity is based on five root words and is additive. 'Blyad' is used as punctuation. Avoid using with strangers or mentioning someone's mother.
- **Russian Literature Beyond Dostoevsky** [07:12] — Nikolai Gogol's 'The Nose' and 'Dead Souls' are innovative works. 'Dead Souls' follows Chichikov's scheme to buy dead serfs for a loan.
- **Dostoevsky's Works** [10:09] — Dostoevsky's 'Notes from the Underground' critiques hyper-rational, isolated thinkers. His cautionary tale has two endings, both bad.
- **Pushkin's Bronze Horseman** [11:19] — The poem inverts the Don Juan story: an innocent man is destroyed by a statue of Peter the Great, symbolizing the flood caused by building St. Petersburg on a swamp.

### Conclusion

Learning Russian is challenging but rewarding, primarily for accessing its profound literature. The video encourages viewers to explore works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Pushkin.

## Transcript

You try reading Dstoyki, but you end up
a mindbroken fool. Many such cases.
Today we're covering everything you need
to know about Russians, so you never
feel out of place again. Cerillic is a
bit of a misnomer because St. Sirill
didn't invent it. His actual
contribution is glagalytic, which is an
entirely original alphabet, albeit it
was too difficult to write and copy
quickly. The solution was brought about
by his students in the Preslav Literary
School. They took Greek, they added a
bunch of letters to represent the sounds
it was missing, and they named it after
St. Sirill. But this still looks
different from modern cerillic. How do
we get that? Mm- Peter the Great. The
man was completely unstoppable and
practically the greatest reformer any
country had ever seen. He changed civil
administration, religious law, and
society as a whole to the point where
he'd come cut your beard off personally
or force you to pay up. He would
initiate and oversee a reform that would
give the nation its own civic script. If
it was redundant, it was done away with.
The decree was only a formality because
these letters weren't really used much
at that point anyway. Finally, in the
beginning of the 20th century, a few
leftover letters would be purged, giving
us today's modern Russian cerillic, now
redundancyfree.
Bonus round. This letter was used in one
book of Psalms in the 15th century, and
for whatever reason, it was turned into
an asy character. Biblically accurate
Russian letters, I guess. Good news,
Russian has dialects, but most people
today speak the standardized language.
Bad news, nailing Russian pronunciation
is like assembling IKEA furniture
without a manual. Everyone tries it.
Nobody does it well and you always end
up pacing your living room going.
There's 10 vowel letters. Five of them
are hard vowel sounds and five of them
are soft vowel sounds. Why are we
establishing this distinction? In
Russian, consonants are basically held
hostage by the vowels. If one is
standing next to an ah, it sounds normal
to us. But when followed by yah, it's
forced to sound soft. It's palatalized.
M. The way I think about it, though, my
pronunciation isn't perfect. Imagine
you're trying to say the consonant and
the Y sound that Y makes at the same
time. And if you want this effect, but
you don't have a vowel handy, it's okay.
There's the soft sign and the hard sign.
But this isn't universal. Some
consonants are always hard, some are
always soft, and the vast majority of
them can be either. Oh, but hold your
horses. We're not done yet. Russian has
vowel reduction, like English. The most
recognizable example being
>> musva,
>> musva,
>> musva.
>> But that's not all. As a newbie, you're
going to have to memorize three things
at once. The spelling, the reduced
pronunciation, and the stress. The
stress. Yes, Russian stress is mobile,
which is a fancy way of saying it's
completely unpredictable. Vada. Vod. You
might think, "Who cares if I get it
wrong? They'll know what I mean." In
Russian, pis means to write. But pis
means to urinate. Imagine you're at a
bar in Moscow. You successfully language
mogged your way through a conversation.
You hand her your unlocked iPhone to get
her number. You want to confidently tell
her to write it down, but that's not
what you actually said. Speaking of
phones and the importance of stress,
it's a widespread cultural phenomena
that Russians will refuse to associate
with someone who says zonit as opposed
to zanit. So stress is incredibly
important. Don't get it wrong. Vowels
aren't the only letters that change
based on placement. At the end of a
word, a voiced consonant to voices droo
zup. Inside a consonant cluster, the
letter to the right decides. It forces
the one before it to match its exact
state. If the right side letter is
voiceless, the previous letter becomes
voiceless with it. Vodka. If it's
voiced, the previous letter becomes
voiced.
Oh boy, that Russian sure is easy, huh?
Please like and subscribe. That's how
you support the channel. Cases might
seem like they're these facemelting,
mindbreakingly difficult things, but
that's only because you've probably had
them explained to you through the lens
of that horrible linguistic mumbo jumbo.
Get it away from me. The relationships
between words in Russian are not decided
by word order, but instead by case
endings. Here's all six of them in one
sentence.
Nominative marks who or what is the main
focus of this sentence. In our case,
Broly. Dative marks to whom or for whom
an action is being directed. Accusative
identifies who or what directly receives
the action. In this case, Broly is
showing the essence to Goku, but it's
the essence of horror, right? Which
means it needs to go in the genative
case, which shows ownership. No
different from apostrophe s in English.
Instrumental explains the tool, method,
or companion used to accomplish an
action. In our case, a vision.
Prepositional is used exclusively after
certain prepositions to describe a
physical location or what you're talking
about. The concept of case is easy to
wrap your head around. The difficulty
comes from gendered nouns. Russian has
three genders.
There are a lot of declenion patterns
and you need to know all of them. As
many of my Russian viewers pointed out
in my last video, Russian numerals are
one of the best examples of the
complexity of this whole thing. Russian
numbers make nouns change case. With
one, the noun stays in the nominative
singular. With two through four, it
usually takes the form of the genative
singular. And with five and above, it
usually takes the form of the genative
plural. Do you know your animacy status?
In Russian, nouns are split into groups
of animate, like family members,
snowmen, dolls, and the deceased or
inanimate like chairs, bacteria, trees,
and the deceased. It also affects cases.
A key feature of the Russian verb is the
aspect. Italian for example marks aspect
but only in the past tense. Russian on
the other hand categorizes all verbs as
inherently perfective or imperfective uh
finished or ongoing. Many important
verbs come in pairs of both aspects
because verbs are then further
conjugated for tenses, persons and
sometimes gender.
Speaking of going places, to go anywhere
in Russian, you need to think about how.
Is this a one-way trip or are you
trudging back and forth? Is this your
grand one-time expedition or something
you do every year?
After you heard all that, you're
probably thinking to yourself, "Russian
is so precise in particular, and you
couldn't be more right. Even commas are
written based on concrete rule sets.
Style and pause are completely
irrelevant." This is a very explosive
area of conversation, and I will handle
it with incredible caution as to not
give you the magic words necessary to
get yourself on Fodena's bad side.
However, I did say I teach you
everything. To summon Russian Exodia,
you must gather the five forbidden
pieces, the pillar of masculinity, the
feline of femininity, the act, the lady
of the night, and the ultimate
collateral damage, someone else's
mother. I know what you're thinking
right now. Are they really that few?
Yes, they are. But Russian profanity is
additive. Let's look at an example using
the symbol of masculinity. Depending on
what you snap in front of it, it either
means you're completely shocked,
absolutely apathetic, or enjoying a
succulent meal. Ble is my personal
favorite. You don't attach anything to
it. You just treat it like punctuation.
And I want to make sure you understand
me when I tell you, you don't use these
words with people you don't know, and
you never bring up somebody's mother
because that's how you get sent to the
shadow realm after Yuggeti challenges
you to a duel. Imagine learning all of
that just to watch Russian brain rot all
day. Ratuka. Russian literature has a
prestigious reputation, but I bet the
first image you're getting in your mind
is a heavy thousandpage book full of
moral grandstanding, brooding
characters, and an obligatory depressing
ending. It was great for its time, but
now we got better ones, don't we? Wrong.
We got to stop acting like Dsttoyk is
the only Russian author ever. There's a
saying, Russian literature came out of
Goy's overcoat. He has some of the most
innovative pros and storytelling, and
you've never heard of him, have you? He
literally inspired Kafka. for Gregor
Samson and waking up his monstrous
vermin. Major Kavalof wakes up without
his nose, which he finds casually
walking around downtown St. Petersburg
in a uniform. Kavalof is too afraid to
directly ask his nose to return to his
face because it outranks him. Then he
ends up struggling against an
indifferent society and bureaucratic
hell until the nose is finally brought
back to him after getting arrested
trying to flee St. Petersburg on a
forged passport. The only reason the
nose was caught in the first place was
because the officer at the border put
his glasses on and realized he wasn't
looking at a government official, but a
giant nose. Speaking of bureaucracy,
Chichikov is an ex-government clerk who
managed to come up with a cunning
scheme. In Imperial Russia, wealthy land
owners owned surfs who were legally tied
to the land. For tax purposes, the
government counted these surfs in a
census every few years. What it didn't
do is check if the souls are alive
before the next census, and so the owner
still had to pay taxes on them as if
they were living. Titikov wants to amass
a massive portfolio of thousands of dead
souls and use them as collateral for a
massive loan he will not be paying back.
On this little undertaking, he has the
misfortune of running into some of the
most bossly people this side of the
Never River. We have a pillar of the
aristocracy in a man-like money who
spends his days in idle fantasy. He's
overly polite and totally indifferent to
the morality or even legality of
Chicha's little operation. He signs the
souls over without asking for anything
in return, even wrapping the deed with a
nice little ribbon. How thoughtful is
he? The next personality he runs into is
the widow Kurabachka. She has no qualms
about selling dead people, but she is
concerned about getting ripped off. They
argue for hours about whether there
could be a sudden spike in the market
price for the dead. She only agrees to
the sale after Chichiku promises to buy
her lard sometime in the future.
Speaking of ripoff, Nazdr is a drunkard,
a gambler, and an utter psychopath who
tries to force our protagonist to buy
all sorts of useless things from him,
including but not limited to a blind
horse until he offers they gamble for
the souls in a game of checkers. He then
proceeds to immediately blatantly cheat
at the game, is caught, and then tells
his servants to attack Chichikov, who is
forced to flee for his life. From
haggling with a sly aristocrat who knows
exactly what he's doing to Chichikov
becoming suspected of being an imperial
spy or even the escape Napoleon
Bonapart, he ends up having to skip
town, a town that is rapidly
degenerating into an insane frenzy. If
you've never heard of these books
before, start referencing them on a
daily basis. When you get called out,
reluctantly confess that you've actually
been reading Russian literature for many
years, but you're deeply embarrassed to
admit it. If they start asking too many
questions, start declining nouns.
Stoltoy
has a wonderful cautionary tale about a
man who can't control his urges. It has
two endings and both of them are very
bad and not really suitable for YouTube.
Although he appears normal on the
outside, his lust is driving him
completely mad. He doesn't share his
problems with anybody and he
continuously externalizes them, blaming
the peasant girl he's infatuated with
for everything he feels. And then
everyone lives happily ever after. No,
something really bad happens. Depends on
which ending you read. That varies
between really, really bad to just sad.
oddly relevant to modern society. And
speaking of poignant in the current day,
we have DSTVKI's Notes from the
Underground, a book that has made me
reconsider my life. You almost can't
believe this wasn't written yesterday.
It feels like a criticism of the type of
hyperironic, totally quote unquote
logical thinker. These isolated,
terminally online people who think they
have the whole world figured out, then
you look at their life and it's just
miserable. Paralysis by Overanalysis.
This one you have to read right now.
It's so good I can't put it into words
and my whole life has been dedicated to
communicating things to other people.
Okay, I talk about what I want to talk
about all the time. I don't know how to
describe this because you need to
experience it for yourself. It's
impossible not to draw parallels between
the bronze horsemen and Don Juan, which
interestingly enough Pushkin himself has
adapted. But unlike Don Huan, which is
about a scandal who lives a debaucherous
life and is dragged off to hell by a
statue of the man he kills, this poem is
very different. It's instead an
inversion of the original story in which
an innocent man is utterly destroyed by
a bronze statue of Peter the Great.
That's supposed to function as more of a
metaphor because the real destruction in
his life comes from the flooding of the
river Neva. But none of that would have
happened if Peter the Great hadn't built
his capital at top a literal swamp that
was known to flood. But as with all
poems, the magic is in the verse. So if
you want to know how good it is, you're
going to have to read it for yourself.
In the original language, of course, you
wouldn't read the Divine Comedy in
English. I hope the main reason for
making this video was to a give people
an understanding of how the Russian
language actually works like in depth as
much as one can cover in 12 minutes or
so and b the greatest reason to learn
Russian which is the amazing literature.
Sure, there's revolutionary animation
and some incredible music, but those are
pretty easy to find. Good books, those
get recommended to you directly by crazy
language guys on YouTube. Either way,
I've been your host, Plasterine Hart.
See you in two weeks when I make the
Italian video. Like, subscribe, and
donate a trillion dollars to me so I
could buy myself a country and become a
brutal zar.