🇩🇪 → 🇷🇺
How easy is Russian for German speakers?
Going from German to Russian (Русский) has a composite linguistic distance of 71% (heuristic estimate). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.
71% distance
FSI Cat III — ~1,100 hours
Lexical similarity
10%
Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.
Grammatical distance
66%
Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.
Phonological similarity
13%
Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.
Writing-system match
0%
Latin → Cyrillic
Genealogical kinship
40%
Indo-European ↔ Indo-European
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Sample sentences side-by-side
How everyday sentences look in both languages:
🇩🇪 German
Die Universität hat ein internationales Programm für Wissenschaft und Technologie.
🇷🇺 Russian
Университет имеет международную программу по науке и технологии.
🇩🇪 German
Der Winter ist lang und kalt, aber der Frühling bringt Wärme und Licht.
🇷🇺 Russian
Зима долгая и холодная, но весна приносит тепло и свет.
Other easy languages for German speakers
The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from German:
Think you can tell them apart?
A quick 3-question check between German and Russian. No signup.