The order of words in a sentence is something to be specially mentioned, as it stands out as one of the key difficulties in understanding Russian and some other Slavic languages. Although there is a general regulation and a pattern that in most cases shows the order in which the parts of sentence align, there is no particular word order in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarus and Rusyn. The word order in other Slavic languages is not a very important factor, too. For example, in the sentence «Я люблю кушать ванильное мороженное» (I like to eat vanilla ice-cream), any word can swap position with the other one without the loss of even tiny bit of sense or grammar correctness. In Polish, Czech, Slovak and other western Slavic languages this feature is weaker due to influence of Romano-Germanic languages, but still present to some extent.
Differences between Russian and its closest relatives lie mostly in the vocabulary. It is easy to other Slavs to understand Russian, but much harder vice versa. For example, where others Slavs have similar basic words like «кінь», «конь», «koń» (horse), Russian has a completely different word «лошадь». Russian has two distinct words for hand an arm, much like all of its neighbors. Russian word «чай» which means tea is derived from Sinitic cha and Ukraine is the western border of this similarity among Slavic languages. Another important difference to be taken into account is the borrowed vocabulary. Russian was greatly influenced by a large number of European and Asian languages through the course of its history. Great Migration, Mongolian Invasion, Napoleonic wars, World Wars I and II are characterized with lots of different people passing through Slavic lands and thus leaving their trace in languages. One of the biggest prides of Russians is their diverse, colorful and almost omnipotent in terms of expressing emotions obscene language.
