All this is simple enough, and goes to prove the fundamental identity, or rather the community of origin, of the Slav and Teutonic languages; but it will be readily understood that etymological analogies so carefully disguised are of little practical use in helping us to acquire a foreign tongue.  Besides this, the grammatical forms and constructions in Russian are very peculiar, and present a great many strange irregularities.  As an illustration of this we may take the future tense.  The Russian verb has commonly a simple and a frequentative future.  The latter is always regularly formed by means of an auxiliary with the infinitive, as in English, but the former is constructed in a variety of ways, for which no rule can be given, so that the simple future of each individual verb must be learned by a pure effort of memory.  In many verbs it is formed by prefixing a preposition, but it is impossible to determine by rule which preposition should be used.  Thus idu (I go) becomes poidu; pishu (I write) becomes napishu; pyu (I drink) becomes vuipyu, and so on.

Closely akin to the difficulties of pronunciation is the difficulty of accentuating the proper syllable.  In this respect Russian is like Greek; you can rarely tell a priori on what syllable the accent falls.  But it is more puzzling than Greek, for two reasons:  firstly, it is not customary to print Russian with accents; and secondly, no one has yet been able to lay down precise rules for the transposition of the accent in the various inflections of the same word, Of this latter peculiarity, let one illustration suffice.  The word ruka (hand) has the accent on the last syllable, but in the accusative (ruku) the accent goes back to the first syllable.  It must not, however, be assumed that in all words of this type a similar transposition takes place.  The word beda (misfortune), for instance, as well as very many others, always retains the accent on the last syllable.

These and many similar difficulties, which need not be here enumerated, can be mastered only by long practice.  Serious as they are, they need not frighten any one who is in the habit of learning foreign tongues.  The ear and the tongue gradually become familiar with the peculiarities of inflection and accentuation, and practice fulfils the same function as abstract rules.

It is commonly supposed that Russians have been endowed by Nature with a peculiar linguistic talent.  Their own language, it is said, is so difficult that they have no difficulty in acquiring others.  This common belief requires, as it seems to me, some explanation.  That highly educated Russians are better linguists than the educated classes of Western Europe there can be no possible doubt, for they almost always speak French, and often English and German also.  The question, however, is whether this is the result of a psychological peculiarity, or of other causes.  Now, without venturing to deny the existence of a natural