asily and speak fluently the
colloquial language, and I was still very far from having, acquired the
requisite proficiency.

Even for one who possesses a natural facility for acquiring foreign
tongues, the learning of Russian is by no means an easy task. Though
it is essentially an Aryan language like our own, and contains only a
slight intermixture of Tartar words,--such as bashlyk (a hood), kalpak
(a night-cap), arbuz (a water-melon), etc.--it has certain sounds
unknown to West-European ears, and difficult for West-European tongues,
and its roots, though in great part derived from the same original stock
as those of the Graeco-Latin and Teutonic languages, are generally not
at all easily recognised. As an illustration of this, take the Russian
word otets. Strange as it may at first sight appear, this word is merely
another form of our word father, of the German vater, and of the French
pere. The syllable ets is the ordinary Russian termination denoting the
agent, corresponding to the English and German ending er, as we see in
such words as--kup-ets (a buyer), plov-ets (a swimmer), and many others.
The root ot is a mutilated form of vot, as we see in the word otchina (a
paternal inheritance), which is frequently written votchina. Now vot is
evidently the same root as the German vat in Vater, and the English fath
in father. Quod erat demonstrandum.

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