I am doing these days a lot of collaborative writing with a colleague born and raised in Russia, and now working in the US. He has a very good English and yet, as we circulated various texts, I noticed that he tends to drop the definite article, the, more than is acceptable. I attributed that to a trend of his native language.
Because I will continue working with him for some time, I hope to be aware of other such possible errors influenced by his mother tongue (especially because I'm not a native English speaker either!). So, what are common errors (or shibboleths) of native Russian speakers when they write in English?
Best Answer
A, an and the are all dropped. Using past tense with did (in my experience almost all non-native do this until they learn not to). Sometimes using she instead of he. Word order is not as important in Russian as in English. Missing prepositions
Russians I have met who have large vocabularies tend to stress words with more than two syllables in an idiosyncratic manner since they likely only ever read the words.
I have the same problem on rare occasions where I know a word, know how to use it but guess the pronunciation since I got it from literature.
More here
http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/russian.htm