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1) Russian is native to 166 million people (2015) in the world.

2) Russian is spoken and understood in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Latvia, Moldova, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan. There are Russian speaking people in European countries, the USA, Canada, Israel, Australia and many other countries. In 2014, there were 260 million speakers of Russian in the world.

3) 110 million people (2012) in the world speak Russian as their second language.

4, 5) By the tenth century, three Slavonic language groups had emerged: Western, Southern and Eastern. Eastern Slavonic gave rise to the modern languages known as Ukranian, Belorussian and Russian. The Slavonic languages retained many features in common especially in grammatical structure, therefore the separate groups were able to use one common written language. This language was known as Old Slavonic or Old Church Slavonic (the language was used in its written form only). In the ninth century, two missionaries – Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius – were required to write down the scriptures in Old Church Slavonic and to preach Christianity to the people of Moravia. Before they set out for Moravia, Constantine invented a Slavonic, now known as the Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on the Greek alphabet, with about a dozen additional letters invented to represent Slavic sounds not found in Greek. In Russia, Old Church Slavonic remained the written language until the middle of the eighteenth century. By this time, the need was felt for a written language which was closer to the educated spoken norm. M. V. Lomonosov distinguished three styles of the written language:

    1) High Style – Church Slavonic, to be used for poetics and religion;

   2) Middle Style – to be used for lyric poetry, prose and science;

   3) Low Style – to be used in personal correspondence and in low comedy.

The Middle Style, which combined features of both East Slavonic and Church Slavonic, came to form the basis of the modern standard language. In the mid 1800’s, Standard Russian based on the Moscow dialect became the official language.

6) There are a lot of words in Russian borrowed from English. These are mostly words related to such areas as sport (football, basketball, wrestling, tennis, etc), engineering (транзистор, camera, триггер, etc), politics and diplomacy (president, impeachment, etc), finance and economy (broker, dealer, budget, balance, banknote, etc), computer technologies (computer, micro-chip, file, monitor, byte, processor, etc), social networks (blogger, chat, tweet, repost, like, selfie, etc).

7) There are a few things that are not difficult for the English learning Russian. While Russian tends to have longer words than English, as well as some tricky sounds, English speakers don't need to guess how a word is pronounced. All they need to do is just to pronounce it like it's spelt.  Another thing that helps is the English words borrowed and the flexibility of Russian word order.

8) The difficult thing for English speakers could be Russian grammar rules (genders and cases and the verb system). Well, some letters/sounds can be a problem too (like Щ and Ы)

9) If you want to learn Russian, you need to learn the alphabet, learn some basic words and phrases. Then you will have to learn the grammar rules. And it is important to have the opportunity to practise Russian, to talk to Russians, to read and listen a lot.