Learning a second Slavic language

[Dylan95]

For those of you who learned a Slavic language from scratch. What have your experiences been like with your second Slavic language? Did you end up mixing them up? Did it interfere with your understanding of the first? What level were you at on your first when you started your second?

This question is not directed towards native speakers, but to people who have learned it on their own, although native speakers can feel free to comment as well.

I don't plan on starting any new Slavic language in the near future, but I'm curious.

[tarvos]

For those of you who learned a Slavic language from scratch. What have your experiences been like with your second Slavic language? Did you end up mixing them up? Did it interfere with your understanding of the first? What level were you at on your first when you started your second?

It didn't interfere - it helped me. Related languages help more than they hurt, always. What does happen is that you fill in gaps with the other language - which leads to comical situations. So you learn to excise the second from the first. Here's the thing - interference is overrated as a phenomenon. If you speak the first language reasonably well, you have nothing to worry about.

My Russian was in the C-levels already when I started Czech. I speak Russian better than I do Czech still, but I'm reasonably good at both.

[Chung]

For those of you who learned a Slavic language from scratch. What have your experiences been like with your second Slavic language? Did you end up mixing them up? Did it interfere with your understanding of the first? What level were you at on your first when you started your second?

This question is not directed towards native speakers, but to people who have learned it on their own, although native speakers can feel free to comment as well.

I don't plan on starting any new Slavic language in the near future, but I'm curious.

I studied Polish for about a year before taking on Slovak with my experience differing from tarvos' in a couple of ways.

Polish and Slovak resemble each other more than Russian and Czech do to each other. Interference for me was a bit of a problem partially on account of this quite noticeable similarity between Polish and Slovak. In addition, I started learning Slovak after I had reached something like A2 in Polish and so sometimes I erroneously filled in the blanks in Slovak with imperfect or unidiomatic Polish (if I recall correctly, tarvos did contend with Russian interference in Czech output initially but that faded after more study and practice). Anyway, I'm much better now at keeping them apart although I just take it in stride whenever I mix them up now and again. It's sometimes even comical as I can inadvertently come off as someone trying to ape a Góral ('Highlander' - Poles living near the border of Poland and Slovakia) or someone from eastern Slovakia where local dialects resemble Polish more than standard Slovak does.

However it is true that the intra-family similarities are helpful, although I'd disagree with tarvos' on the overall degree. Off the top of my head though, the perhaps "strange" forms of masculine animate nominative forms for 2, 3 and 4 (i.e. dwaj / dvaja, trzej / traja, czterej / štyria) aren't at all strange to Poles and Slovaks.

*nerdy aside about Polish and Slovak false friends ON*

According to a few Poles my use of the occasional Slovakicism can lend a rural or medieval twist to my Polish. For example, I've spoken in Polish with the stress on the first syllable as in Slovak, but unlike Polish whose stress shifted from the first syllable to the second-to-last one sometime in the Middle Ages. Another time I was once caught saying...

Moja matka się narodziła na wsi.

...rather than...

Moja matka urodziła się na wsi. ("My mother was born in the countryside").

Narodzić się sounds a bit old-fashioned compared to urodzić się and when it turns up these days it's often in Christian contexts (e.g. narodzić się na nowo. "to be born again"). Furthermore, letting się precede the conjugated verb as in the first sentence can sometimes come off as slightly less idiomatic compared to letting się follow the conjugated verb as in the second sentence.

In contrast, Slovak counterparts of "My mother was born in the countryside" are...

Moja matka sa narodila na dedine. (cf. Polish Moja matka się narodziła na wsi.)

...or...

Na dedine sa narodila moja matka. (cf. Polish Moja matka się narodziła na wsi or rather Na wsi się narodziła moja matka)

...where sa here is in "second position" by following the subject or adverbial phrase per the rules of clitic placement. Urodiť sa on the other hand has been used since the 19th century (if not earlier) for talking about agricultural yields (e.g. Urodilo sa veľa zemiakov. "A lot of potatoes were harvested" ~ "There was a good crop of potatoes."); narodiť sa is how Slovak translates "to be born" nowadays. Using *Moja matka urodila sa na dedine to translate "My mother was born in the countryside" would be flat-out wrong but hilarious to Slovaks (and Czechs for that matter).

The converse is true too for Poles. A Slovakcizied attempt like *Moja matka się narodziła na dziedzinie would be hilariously wrong/weird nowadays for the reasons above but also because dziedzina (i.e. cognate of Slovak dedina) translates now to "domain; field of study" and in Old Polish meant "inheritance". However, in the town of Cieszyn which is on the border of Poland and Czech Republic, and also very close to the Slovak border, it can mean "village; countryside" just as in Slovak.

Yet another time, I goofed a bit when talking about cheese with a Polish friend referring to it as syr rather than ser. The former is perfect Slovak but she told me after that my using it in a Polish sentence made her think of village life.

See here for a very short list of Polish-Slovak false friends and here for a short Slovak-Polish phrasebook/word-list with false friends.

*nerdy aside about Polish and Slovak false friends OFF*

[mcthulhu]

I taught myself Serbo-Croatian after having learned Russian, and the Russian made it much easier. I used to joke that I was just treating Serbo-Croatian as garbled Russian. I followed up on Serbo-Croatian with Slovene, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and several more, and it kept getting easier. The more extensive your background in a language family, the easier it is to adapt to a new language in that family. It's not just a question of common vocabulary and word roots, but also syntax and grammatical concepts. The difference between perfective and imperfective verbs, for example, may be a surprise the first time you run into it, but not the third or fourth one. Also, your investment in learning Cyrillic may not be wasted, depending on which Slavic languages you go into, which can also save some time.

I used to think that it would be great to have a rapid survey class for polyglots that would provide an introduction to all the Slavic languages together, comparing and contrasting. There are at least a few books that address Slavic languages as a group, however.

[IronMike]

I did Russian 11 years before learning BCS. I learned both through stateside-immersion. Not real immersion (we weren't required to speak the language after class), but 7 hours of class and 3-4 hours of homework a day for a year (Russian) and 4 months (BCS) really does work.

BCS was so much easier after Russian. When the instructor can come in to the class and tell you that you can "go" anywhere in BCS as opposed to having to specify the mode of travel (those pesky motion verbs of Russian) or that for the vast majority of BCS nouns the genitive plural is -a. I didn't need to hear anything else; I was hooked!

Granted, there are those enclitics you gotta get used too.

BL: I was a 2/2/2 (B2-ish) in Russian when I went to learn BCS, and after 4 months came out with 2+/2+/2 (strong B2 for reading and listening, B2-ish for speaking) in BCS. AND, the best part, my Russian did not get worse. In fact, my Russian reading went up after to 2+, so BCS helped!

[Chung]

I did Russian 11 years before learning BCS. I learned both through stateside-immersion. Not real immersion (we weren't required to speak the language after class), but 7 hours of class and 3-4 hours of homework a day for a year (Russian) and 4 months (BCS) really does work.

BCS was so much easier after Russian. When the instructor can come in to the class and tell you that you can "go" anywhere in BCS as opposed to having to specify the mode of travel (those pesky motion verbs of Russian) or that for the vast majority of BCS nouns the genitive plural is -a. I didn't need to hear anything else; I was hooked!

Granted, there are those enclitics you gotta get used too.

I'll bet the highly phonemic orthography of BCMS/SC also made your life easier when picking up and using the language. I came to be annoyed by Russian's morphophonemic spelling when I was studying the language rather like how some ESL students come to feel similarly about English spelling for its strongly nonphonemic character.