tastyonions wrote:Is a Russian speaker learning, say, Polish, in a similar position to a Spanish speaker taking on Italian or French?
Warning: LONG post below.
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I can’t answer your answer with the precise examples given, but can summarize my experience as someone who started studying Slovak in earnest after having learned Polish to a high-beginner / low-intermediate level. Even then, I might be even more removed from the example that you have in mind since I began to study Polish as a native speaker of English who was already fluent in French, had studied some Latin, and was working on German and Hungarian.
Slovak is my second Slavonic language and when I started learning it a lot of the novelty in it was gone even with my less-than-fluent background in Polish at that time. Note that Polish and Slovak belong to the same subgroup within Slavonic so the similarity between them is greater than what’s observed between either of them on one hand, and say Russian on the other.
Vocabulary acquisition in Slovak was easier than otherwise because of all of the common Slavonic cognates although here’s a
short list of the many false friends between the two languages.
Slovak pronunciation is fairly straightforward with a Polish background although I needed to mind that Slovak stress is almost always fixed on the first syllable (as in Czech) whereas in Polish it’s almost always fixed on the second-last syllable. Note that a word’s stress in most other Slavonic languages (e.g. Russian, Bulgarian, BCMS/Serbo-Croatian) is
not fixed which makes the learning of proper pronunciation of unfamiliar vocabulary much more challenging. This was my experience when studying BCMS/Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Russian.
A few Slavonic languages, Russian in particular, also exhibit vowel reduction which largely explains why Russian spelling is so unphonemic compared to the spelling of other Slavonic languages which lack that vowel reduction. Slovak and Polish (among a few others) are blessed by fixed (i.e. predictable) stress and a lack of vowel reduction, which in turn makes their spelling highly phonemic and the learning of proper pronunciation based on spelling alone much less stressful.
Polish and Slovak use extensive inflection with noticeable similarities in the endings and/or the patterns used. Note that the vocative is still used in Polish (and Czech) whereas in Slovak it is not, barring a few masculine animate nouns whose vocative forms are taught nowadays more as exceptions than proof of Slovak maintaining a paradigm of seven rather than six cases.
Compare the full declension of Polish
pies and Slovak
pes “dog”:
Polish pies / Slovak pes | Polish - singular | Slovak - singular | Polish - plural | Slovak - plural |
Nominative | pies | pes | psy | psi, psy |
Accusative | psa | psa | psy | psov, psy |
Genitive | psa | psa | psów | psov |
Dative | psu | psovi | psom | psom |
Locative | psie | psovi | psach | psoch |
Instrumental | psem | psom | psami | psami |
Vocative | psie | N/A | psy | N/A |
Compare the full declension of Polish
dobry and Slovak
dobrý “good”:
Polish dobry (singular) | Masculine inanimate | Masculine animate | Feminine | Neuter |
Nominative | dobry | dobry | dobra | dobre |
Accusative | dobry | dobrego | dobrą | dobre |
Genitive | dobrego | dobrego | dobrej | dobrego |
Dative | dobremu | dobremu | dobrej | dobremu |
Locative | dobrym | dobrym | dobrej | dobrym |
Instrumental | dobrym | dobrym | dobrą | dobrym |
Vocative | dobry | dobry | dobra | dobre |
Slovak dobrý (singular) | Masculine inanimate | Masculine animate | Feminine | Neuter |
Nominative | dobrý | dobrý | dobrá | dobré |
Accusative | dobrý | dobrého | dobrú | dobré |
Genitive | dobrého | dobrého | dobrej | dobrého |
Dative | dobrému | dobrému | dobrej | dobrému |
Locative | dobrom | dobrom | dobrej | dobrom |
Instrumental | dobrým | dobrým | dobrou | dobrým |
Vocative | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
Polish dobry (plural) | Masculine inanimate | Masculine animate | Feminine | Neuter |
Nominative | dobre | dobrzy | dobre | dobre |
Accusative | dobre | dobrych | dobre | dobre |
Genitive | dobrych | dobrych | dobrych | dobrych |
Dative | dobrym | dobrym | dobrym | dobrym |
Locative | dobrych | dobrych | dobrych | dobrych |
Instrumental | dobrymi | dobrymi | dobrymi | dobrymi |
Vocative | dobre | dobrzy | dobre | dobre |
Slovak dobrý (plural) | Masculine inanimate | Masculine animate | Feminine | Neuter |
Nominative | dobré | dobrí | dobré | dobré |
Accusative | dobré | dobrých | dobré | dobré |
Genitive | dobrých | dobrých | dobrých | dobrých |
Dative | dobrým | dobrým | dobrým | dobrým |
Locative | dobrých | dobrých | dobrých | dobrých |
Instrumental | dobrými | dobrými | dobrými | dobrými |
Vocative | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
Compare the present tense conjugation of Polish
czytać and Slovak
čítať “to read” (imperfective)
| czytać | čítať |
1st person singular | czytam | čítam |
2nd person singular | czytasz | čítaš |
3rd person singular | czyta | číta |
1st person plural | czytamy | čítame |
2nd person plural | czytacie | čítate |
3rd person plural | czytają | čítajú |
A solid grounding in basic Polish grammar makes grasping Slovak grammar fairly painless, notwithstanding the differences in the details. One of
many such differences includes case governance for verbs with the Polish cognate requiring a different case from the Slovak one as exemplified by Polish
uczyć się “to learn“ governing an object in the
genitive while the Slovak counterpart
učiť sa requires an object in the
accusative. For example:
English: I’m learning caligraphy.
Polish:
Uczę się kaligrafii. (
not *
Uczę się kaligrafię (accusative))
Slovak:
Učím sa kaligrafiu. (
not *
Učím sa kaligrafie (genitive))
Another difference is the less elaborate setup for Slovak verbs of motion compared to that of Polish (and Czech, Russian and Ukrainian).
For example in Polish:
-
Idę do ciebie dziś po południu. “I’m going / walking to your place [home] this afternoon.” (Motion without a vehicle that’s not part of a routine or habit. There’s more emphasis on the goal of the motion than the process)
-
Chodzę do ciebie każdego dnia. “I go / walk to your place [home] every day.” (Motion without a vehicle and that’s part of a routine or habit. There’s more emphasis on the process than the goal of the motion)
-
Jadę do ciebie dziś po południu na rowerze. “I’m going to your place [home] this afternoon by bike” ~ “I’m riding over to your place this afternoon.” (Motion with a vehicle that’s not part of a routine or habit. There’s more emphasis on the goal of the motion than the process.)
-
Jeżdżę do ciebie każdego dnia na rowerze. “I go to your place [home] every day by bike” (Motion with a vehicle that’s part of a routine or habit. There’s more emphasis on the process than the goal of the motion)
Meanwhile in Slovak:
-
Idem k tebe dnes poobede. “I’m going to your place [home] this afternoon”
-
Chodím k tebe každý deň. “I go to your place [home] every day.”
There’s no explicit distinction with either verb about whether I’m going on foot or by vehicle and it’s up to me to determine whether it’s necessary to make that distinction. If it were necessary or noteworthy, I could put an adverb like
pešo “on foot” or an adverbial phrase like
na bicykli “on a / by bike”. This could be the case if I were going to the other person’s home in a way that’s different from what is typical or expected of me.
For some related discussion on verbs of motion in Slavonic languages with examples, click
here.
On a related note, the concept of most verbs coming in imperfective and perfective variants to account for aspectual differences is a novelty when you’ve never studied a Slavonic language before.
In broader terms, even Polish wasn’t
that exotic as my first Slavonic language. I was far from a rookie as a language-learner so inflection, be it in case-marking or in verb conjugation was not surprising for me. Most sounds in Polish aren’t that exotic and typologically it’s a
nominative-accusative language (i.e. it’s not ergative like Basque or Georgian) like all of the other languages that I had studied before embarking on Polish. In layman’s terms, this means that the fundamental principle of case-marking as I had learned it in English, French, German, Latin and Hungarian was also present in Polish. At the start, I needed instead to spend a lot more time building a base in vocabulary since most Polish words don’t look or sound that similar to cognates in non-Slavonic languages (when such cognates exist) and learning enough of the details of Polish grammar and pronunciation to attain a useful level of command in the language.
In general, the ease by which someone will have when learning a second Slavonic language will depend on the language pair involved plus the motivation or innate ability of the learner. Some Slavonic languages resemble each other more than others and learners can exploit this fact if they so wish. It ranges from the arguably absurd instance of a Serb learning Croatian as a “foreign language” (comparable to an American learning British English) to a less absurd but fairly straightforward case of a Czech learning Slovak (comparable to a Swede learning Norwegian) to an uncontroversial but more intellectually demanding case of a Pole learning Bulgarian (comparable to a Spaniard learning Romanian).
In my case, learning Slovak as the second Slavonic language after Polish was quite easy. I doubt that I would have had it as easy if I had instead chosen BCMS/Serbo-Croatian, Russian or Bulgarian as that second Slavonic language. Bulgarian and Macedonian are outliers in the Slavonic languages since they mark explicit definiteness (although think of “definite suffixes” instead of definite articles as in English, French, German etc.), and they’ve effectively dispensed with the entire case-marking system but have expanded verb conjugation in ways that are foreign to all other Slavs. Conjugation in Bulgarian and Macedonian resembles somewhat of what you’d see in Romance languages since verb endings take into account whether or not the action is factual, observed or verified. In this way, they’re a little like the tense distinctions in Romance languages for indicative (i.e. factual or observed actions) versus subjunctive actions (i.e. hypothetical, desired or reported actions).
On the related discussion about which Slavonic language is the best gateway for exploring the whole family, I’ve posted elsewhere that I consider
Slovak instead of higher-profile languages such as Russian or Polish to be a very good choice, if not actually the best one. In short, Slovak’s development has been such that it has shares a fair number of features with many Slavonic languages as I’ve noted in the
Slovak profile (scroll to the middle of the profile for the subsection on mutual intelligibility). As a Western Slavonic language, it’s naturally close to Czech and Polish - particularly the former. At the same time, it shows quite a lot of similarity with Southern Slavonic languages (particularly BCMS/Serbo-Croatian) since the central Slovak dialects which form the basis of standard Slovak were heavily influenced by speakers of a Southern Slavonic language. They may very well have been the ancestors of today’s Slovenes, Croats and Serbs when they lived in modern-day Hungary before migrating farther south to the Balkans no later than the 9th or 10th centuries. These “Yugoslavian” similarities are absent in Czech and Polish, thus rendering Slovak as surprisingly intelligible for Southern Slavs despite being a Western Slavonic language. I included commentary from several people who’ve studied at least two Slavonic languages in the Balto-Slavonic profile on the old forum. For interest’s sake, I’ll quote it all below:
On April 11, 2011, Chung wrote:Ardaschir/ProfArguelles wrote:[...] As has been noted before, the best entry to the Slavic languages should be any language, however small and insignificant, to which you have personal ties or special opportunities to study, etc. However, what is the best course for an ideal someone who wants to learn the whole family from scratch?
First of all, what is the whole family? The “grandmother” is “Old Bulgarian” or “Old Church Slavonic” and it is divided into three geographic sub-families. East is Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian, West is Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian, while South is Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Bosnian, and Bulgarian, and there are undoubtedly others that I have forgotten sitting here writing from memory. Some of these have tens of millions of speakers, others only a few; some have long-standing literary traditions, others have really only come into being since c. 1990. The literary factor is more important to me than the spoken factor, and thus as far as I am concerned (apart from Old Church Slavonic) the main languages are six: Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Slovenian, and Bulgarian. Of these, Slovenian is so small (something like a million speakers) that there are few learning resources, and these are of poor quality. What about the other five?
I believe there are three learning strategies for getting at them:
1) “Conservative” = learn Russian first. Russian is unquestionably the largest and most important by any standards. No one will regret having begun with Russian and gotten no further, whereas someone who starts with Macedonian or Slovak and gets no further will probably regret this decision somewhere down the line. Presuming you do continue with the project, after Russian it would probably be best to alternate Western and Southern languages.
2) “Grammatical”: If you know that grammar is your weak point, then you should being with Bulgarian, for this is unquestionably the most “simplified” language of the family. From Bulgarian, you should proceed to one Eastern (Russian) and then one Western (Czech/Polish) before returning to another Southern language, then the other Western.
3) “Lexical”: If you know that vocabulary is your weak point, then you should begin with a Western language (either Polish or Czech) as these have the most Latin/ French/ German (and therefore English) words, and then Russian and then a Southern language before returning to the other Western and concluding with the other Southern.
I myself started with Russian. I cannot calculate the hours exactly, but I shadowed Assimil's older Russisch ohne Muehe for years, wrote out the entire text numerous times, and did grammatical exercises from an old Hugo's course and several others, then read bilingual texts and some children's texts before spending a month immersed in it, living with a family in St. Petersburg and taking private tutorials for about 6 hours each day.
When I was able to read Russian literature with ease and pleasure, I began with Polish, then moved through Serbocroatian, Czech, and Bulgarian. I've never yet stood the test of speaking any of these, but I believe I built a solid foundation in all of them. Knowing Russian as well as I did, they was indeed a great amount of knowledge to transfer, and they were all largely transparent when I began with them. By the time I got to Bulgarian, I didn't feel as if I was really learning anything new anymore, but rather only practicing variations on a theme. This may be because of the above mentioned grammatical simplicity of the language, but I think it was rather due to overall familiarity with the family.
I would recommend this sequence or one of the other two to others, even if you are more interested in learning the purely "conversational" languages in addition to the literary five. These five have the most abundant learning materials, and after you know them, you should not need much assistance to get at the others.
Those with scholarly philological interest should of course also study Old Church Slavonic at some point early in the process. However, this is not really the direct ancestor of them all, but rather only the earliest attested form of the language that we have, so knowledge of it is not as indispensable as knowledge of Latin for the Romance family.
(
Ed.: Prof. Arguelles' comments are from the opening post in the discussion “Slavic Language Family Learning Sequence”)
Chung wrote:Of the Slavonic languages that I studied/have been studying, I find Slovak to be the least difficult and BCMS/SC, Slovenian and Ukrainian tied as the most difficult. Czech and Polish fall somewhere between these extremes. The similarities between various Slavonic languages can be very obvious and learning one Slavonic language will noticeably simplify the task of reaching basic command in the other. Collaborative profiles for various Slavonic languages in addition to discussions on HTLAL deal with this topic in greater detail.
These are the top 3 reasons why I find Slovak to be the easiest Slavonic language to learn:
1) Stress is fixed and there’s no vowel reduction (like Czech and Polish but unlike Russian and Ukrainian) and no pitch-accent (unlike BCMS/SC and Slovenian)
2) Inflection is somewhat more regular or has been “levelled” more than in other Slavonic languages (e.g. Czech, Polish or Ukrainian)
3) It does not make as many morphological distinctions for tenses as in Southern Slavonic languages (i.e. nowhere near the complexity of BCMS/SC with its 7 tenses, to say nothing of Bulgarian’s 10 tenses in indicative mood alone)
From the point of view of Slavonic languages that I’ve studied, here are some tips as they relate to learning a second Slavonic language.
1) If you know Polish, get used to the stress in Czech and Slovak being on the first syllable rather than the second-last one. I’ve caught myself several times speaking Czech or Slovak with Polish stress placement.
2) If you know only a Slavonic language that has fixed stress, get used to the frustration of learning to deal with Slavonic languages that have mobile stress. Mastering the imperative in Ukrainian is a case in point since constructing the Ukrainian imperative depends on the stress placement of a given verb’s conjugation in present tense and the stress' position varies here by definition.
3) If you know BCMS/SC or Ukrainian, get used to the fact that certain final consonants lose their voicing in other Slavonic languages. In other words, final b, d, g in print are pronounced more like p, t, k while final v in print is pronounced more like f (in Czech, Polish and Russian) or w (in Slovak and Slovenian).
4) If you know BCMS/SC, Slovak or Slovenian, get used to verbs of motion making more distinctions in Belorussian, Czech, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian.
5) If you know BCMS/SC, Czech or Slovenian, get used to the fact that accusative plural endings for masculine animate nouns in Polish, Russian, Slovak and Ukrainian are the same as their masculine genitive plural endings. In other words BCMS/SC, Czech and Slovenian do not follow the pattern in those latter 4 languages.
Hauteville wrote:Hello!
I think I should introduce myself first. My name is Karol and I'm from Poland. I've been reading this forum for a few years and I've found many interesting things on the topic of language learning. There are so many great people here and I want to thank all of you for lots of interesting content. Now is the time when I would like to add some commentary which (I hope so) could be useful for learners or people who are generally interested in Slavic languages.
RUSSIAN
When I was 20, I began to study Russian at my University. It's quite common in Poland to think that the main difficulty of Russian is Cyrillic script. Actually, the script is not a big problem. If someone works hard, it can be learned in 2 or 3 days. Of course, you can meet people who study Serbian (which also uses Cyrillic script) and can't read Cyrillic fonts fluently, but it's only because of their laziness; not because of the so-called "difficulty" of the alphabet.
The main problem that Polish people have with Russian is definitely the pronounciation. Russian is very melodic language, the main stress may fall on any syllable, which is difficult to master for Polish speakers as our language has fixed stress. Apart from that there are sounds that are difficult for Polish speakers: л (Polish people tend to mispronounce it like "ł/l"), сь (mispronounced like "ś"), ть (mispronounced like "ć"), дь ("dź") and ч ("ć"). But I think that's all what is really difficult for us. Russian grammar is very similar to ours and much more regular than, for example, Czech one. An average student of Russian language in Poland can speak it with basic fluency after 3 years at university.
UKRAINIAN/BELARUSSIAN
I've spent a few months in Ukraine, so I've picked up some Ukrainian. It's my favourite Slavic language (It sounds like Russian, but is much harder. I've always liked to compare Russian with German and Ukrainian with Dutch), but I've never had an opportunity to learn it well. When I was in Ukraine, I lived in the area of Luhansk where Russian is the dominant language. When I came home I tried to learn it several times by myself, but I've never been able to study more than 4 languages at the same time, so I had to put it off. But still I can read books or magazines in Ukrainian without any problems, I can understand Ukrainian pretty well, thanks to its similarity to Polish and Russian. The only problem is, that my spoken Ukrainian is strongly corrupted with Russian words.
The same thing I can say about Belarussian. It is so similar to Russian and Polish (even more than Ukrainian) that I can understand it (at least written language) quite well. But I've never learnt it in a systematical way and I don't claim to speak it at all.
The difficulty of Ukrainian and Belarussian is the same as of Russian. There are some details that can be harder, like pronounciation of Ukrainian "г", but still they are quite easy languages to learn for Polish speakers.
BOSNIAN/CROATIAN/SERBIAN
Right now I'm a student of Serbo-Croatian Philology and I learn the ekavian standard of BCS, mainly known as Serbian (But it's worth to know that Serbian from Bosnia is jekavian). BCS isn't as melodic as Eastern Slavic languages and it is really hard to find any sound that could be difficult to pronounce for Polish speakers. The vocabulary is also quite similar to ours (if you know Russian you get even bigger bonus). But the grammar isn't as easy as in the case of Russian. There are 7 tenses which can be quite surprising for people who only studied Eastern or Western Slavic languages before. Some of these tenses aren't used often in everyday communication, but it doesn't mean that you don't have to know them. In fact they are quite common in literature and some dialects.
There are also some traits in Serbian which are typical for Balkan languages like disappearance of the infinitive form of the verb and less complicated case system (mainly in Torlak dialects). Croatian, on the other hand, doesn't have Balkan features, but its vocabulary is "true Slavic", there are much less international borrowings and therefore it is much harder to learn, even for Polish people.
Kisfroccs wrote: [...]I've been both in Poland and Croatia/Serbia/Bosnia/Macedonia within a year's time.
In Poland I learned quite rapidly basic sentence, but without explanations of what this and that meant, I got nowhere. I was there 10 days, in a polish family, whose father also french spoke. But I was a lot out in town, where all was in Polish.
Listening : okay, but I learned not so much
Reading : oh oh, that was a pain in the ass
In Serbia, I had the impression it was easier. In Niš, I tried to read a newspaper and understood about what it was, without prior knowledge of the language. In Bosnia, a lady at the gas station asked me if I had coins : she asked me in Serbocroatian, never studied it, but I understood it completely. I she did not make any gesture to indicate what she wanted. It was really strange.
And I think Hungarian helped me too : as there are certainly slavonic loan words in Hungarian, when I was in Montenegro, I saw the sign Soba, which, I guess is the same meaning as szoba. I never checked
.
Before I went to these countries, I never studied any of these languages. I studied Russian for 6 month, with a theater teacher who happened to speak Russian as she lived in former URSS. She helped to put a concept "slavonic language" in my mind, and how they worked. Actually, I've forgot almost all about Russian. When I was in Poland, I had the impression from the spoken language, that Polish was a mix of Russian and Portuguese. I hardly understood something, though.
In Croatia it was something which I would qualify as odd, as I understood what they wanted to say, or what they were saying.
Anyway, I noted the amount of French and German in the Russian, the familiarity between Russian, Polish and Croatian, and the slavonic loan word in Hungarian and it is really interesting to see - evolving in one's time of studying languages - how languages are linked.
Hungarian structure is similar to German. I learn it from German, not from French, because it's too far away. Whether I learn Croatian from French....
I've noted (and I'm surely not the only one) that in every language, the negation as something to do with an "n". Nein, non, nem, nie, ne, 'niet', no etc.
So, I think this is all I can say to this subject, surely things that have been already said.
maxval wrote: I have studied seriously Bulgarian and Russian. And I also had some kind of studies of Church Slavonic, BCMS and Slovenian.
My suggestions are:
1. Your first Slavonic language should be one with a Cyrillic alphabet. Choose BCMS, Bulgarian or Russian!
2. From a practical viewpoint the best option is Russian.
3. Gramatically Bulgarian (and of course Macedonian, which is de facto the same) is the most distant from all other Slavonic languages: presence of articles, almost no noun conjugation, complex system of verb conjugation, so it is a very atypical Slavonic language.
4. Lexically Bulgarian would be a very good choice, since it has the most common words with other Slavonic languages. Also, many Slavonic languages were influenced by Church Slavonic which is originated in the Old Bulgarian language.
Studying Bulgarian from Russian viewpoint, potential problems:
1. Learning the use of the articles.
2. Learning pronunciation, specially the lesser degree of palatalization and the lack of palatalization before “e” and “i” vowels.
3. Learning to use the complex verb system, specially the verb tenses.
Studying Russian from Bulgarian viewpoint, potential problems:
1. Learning the difference between use of endings expressing “static situation” and “movement”.
2. Learning use of Accusative in nouns.
3. Learning correct use of noun cases, specially with prepositions.
msherl wrote: I have studied both Russian and Serbo-Croat (though not to a fluent level) and can give you my opinion on the matter. I find Russian, undoubtedly, the most difficult of the two to learn, though not by a large amount. The reasons are both lexical and grammatical. Lexically, I find it harder to memorise Russian words (though I'm not quite sure why this is). Grammatically, Russian has a much more intricate set of verbs to describe motion and the gentive case is much more difficult in the plural.
However, syntactically, Serbo-Croat is certainly more difficult as there are a set of rules to determine the order of words known as "enclitics" which appear in the language frequently. In practise though you should soon get used to what "feels" right.
I'll try and post more on the matter when I have more time.
(
Ed.: msherl's comments are from post no. 22 in the discussion “Slavic Language Family Learning Sequence”)
prz_ wrote: As a native speaker of Polish i can put my oar in to discussion. My first Slavic language which I've started to learn (except some abortive attempts with Slovenian and Croatian) has been Bulgarian. It's relatively easy language (especially for Slavs), because, except quite indigent vocative, it has no cases. The only problem for me are articles, which use sometimes seems to be harder than these in English. Very soon I've started learning the second Slavic language - Macedonian. And, even with the existence of three definite articles pertaining to position of the object and constructions like Јас го видов човекот ("I have seen him, the man") appears to be even easier than Bulgarian. But I warn you - if you don't have to, don't learn them twice at the same time - after almost monthly visit in Macedonia I speak something which i can describe "Bulgedonian". Let's hope it will pass soon
During this holiday I've started with two another Slavic languages: Ukrainian and Slovak. And here another tip - if you are tame with languages with declensions, don't start your adventure with Slavic languages with neither Bulgarian nor Macedonian... because it bludges. Well, but to brass tacks. Ukrainian is probably the easiest language for someone who's native language is Polish. With a little grammar explanation and dictionary you can simply start reading news or even books written in relatively easy language. Plus, there is no special difference between written and read words, like it is sometimes in Russian. With Slovak is a bit harder (though only a bit), but luckily I have found an amazing book called "Krížom krážom", which is one of the best language books for beginners I've ever seen.
If you'd like to ask me about the first slavic language, I would definitely say: RUSSIAN (even if I don't like such domination of one language). Knowing Russian you can count on a great number of sources for other Slavic languages, and, especially, languages of Caucasus and Central Asia. But I recommend you all of the Slavic languages - it's a great pleasure to learn them. My wish is to know every of them at least at A2 level, will this work out? We'll see.
ruskivyetr wrote: Studying Polish with previous knowledge in Russian:
I began with Russian, and I really delved into it by learning most of the cases and many prepositions in about a month. I continued to build on my vocabulary and speaking ability with much enthusiasm, until my gusto slowly decrescendo'd into a passive learning that I am now trying to work up to the lion it was before.
However, before I burned-out, I reached at least a lower B1 level in Russian. I no longer have that "B1" proficiency in production, but can understand spoken and most written Russian with B1 proficiency. I decided to begin with Polish for a variety of reasons. It is spoken by much of my extended family, and I have many relatives still in Poland. Including family, about every other friend I have is Polish, and I often find myself in Polish speaking situations. When I began Polish, I already had an idea of how similar it is to Russian, but I was confused when I saw more similarities than expected.
When learning Polish from a Russian base, you have a lot already covered regarding pronouns and possessive adjectives. In addition, there are also similarities with case formation, and strikingly similar features regarding case usage (in my opinion they are practically identical, but I'm going to leave that to someone more qualified to say so
. A lot of prepositions are similar, as are their meanings/usages, although one does see variation in that regard.
With regards to pronunciation, I don't really know how much my Russian "helped". I think it was actually somewhat of a detriment, seeing as how Russian has very reduced vowels, whereas Polish does not. Polish was actually easier in regards to orthography, and it was fun seeing the Latin alphabet version of a word that is practically the same between the two...which brings me to my next point:
Vocabulary!
Polish and Russian obviously share a lot of vocabulary, and in my opinion it's quite a lot seeing as how Russian is Eastern Slavic and Polish is Western. There are some false friends (i.e. words that are identical but mean completely different things in each language). Just don't speak a sloppy mixture of the two and you shouldn't have a problem
.
Well that's my two cents. I hope that someone finds this information useful in making a decision between the two languages, or if they want to learn Polish with a Russian base
. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions!
Ruskivyetr
P.S. I just wanted to add that it is also possible to have "conversations" with other Slavic language speakers if you know a little of a few Slavic languages. For example, I can have conversations with my Czech friend (I have at one point dabbled in Czech) and my Polish friends by infusing Polish/Russian (into the Czech) or Czech/Russian (into the Polish). It provides for some confusion, and of course you will revert to using much of your strongest language (mine being Russian), however it's still a lot of fun and we still manage to get our points across. Granted Polish and Czech are closely related, so it may not work with "further" languages like Bulgarian, Croatian, or Slovenian.
Theodisce wrote: [...] As a person with some experience in Czech and Slovak I'd like to share my thoughts. Having read a lot of medieval and early modern Polish texts I had easier access to Czech and Slovak, I guess, than most of my fellow countrymen, as they tend to preserve some archaic vocabulary not used in modern Polish.
I believe Slovak is more similar to Polish than Czech is. I started my journey with Slovak and Slovak Radio was my main resource as I believe in the importance of input and prefer audio materials. It wasn't difficult to begin to listen and unknown content explained itself by the way native speakers used their vocabulary. But when I invited a friend of mine to listen to Slovak radio, she didn't understand much. It was the moment I realized I had devoted to Slovak a significant amount of time. Still, for a Polish speaker, few weeks of radio based immersion would be sufficient to understand above 75%-80% of the content.
Czech is slightly more remote from Polish than Slovak is, still, immersion and patience gave me passive knowledge of the language similar to my command of Slovak. I would suggest Slovak-> Czech sequence for Polish speaking people.
Both Czech and Slovak are blessed with a large amount of podcasts available thanks to corresponding national radio websites. Having bigger native population, Czech has more rich literary tradition.
To sum it up, I believe 20-30 hours of listening to radio material would be enough if you already speak decent Polish. The numbers would be probably different for other languages in the family.
Having studied Slovak and Czech, I wanted to check if I would understand other Slavic languages in their written form. I discovered I was able to read a short Wikipedia article in Russian and Croatian with about 50-60% comprehension, which is a nice percentage to begin with.Sorbian has showed itself to be yet more intelligible, sharing familiar features with Czech and Polish. Written Ukrainian contains a lot of Polish loanwords and again I was able to read Ukrainian Wikipedia articles with some degree of comprehension.
Vlad wrote: Some observations for the Slovak – Czech – Russian combination
- Czech is closer to Russian than Slovak when it comes to grammar and vocabulary both.
- Czech and Russian both often use dual adjective forms like: jsem ti vděčný/jsem ti vděčen whereas Slovak doesn’t use these at all.
- Czech and Russian both often use verbal forms like the Russian говорящий, говоривший, Slovak doesn’t.
- Czech and Russian both have similar ways of building conditional constructions.
- Both Czech and Russian have the distinction between „to go by foot“ and „to go by car/tram/plane..“ while Slovak doesn‘t.
- Czech has absorbed a lot of German words, Slovak has absorbed a lot of Hungarian words and both of the languages, especially at a formal level use a lot of Latin-based or English-based vocabulary. Russian seems to be much more conservative in this respect and if there is a Russian word for the Latin or English equivalent, it will use the Russian one.
- In both Czech and Slovak the stress falls on the first syllable, in Russian it doesn’t.
- In some situations, Russian language uses a different case compared to the same situation in Slovak or Czech.
- In some situations, Russian verbs are intransitive while the same verbs are transitive in Slovak or Czech
Difficulties for a speaker of Slovak studying Russian:
- dynamic stress
- sentence stress
- the pronunciation of ш ж ы вь фь рь cь
- the absence of the verb “to be” in the present tense
- some case endings
- some perfective verbal forms
- somewhat distant vocabulary (about 30-40% has to be learned or cannot be guessed)
- fixed reflexive verbal forms in Russian versus free reflexive verbal forms in Slovak: мне еще надо много учиться – ešte sa musím veľa učiť
- having to realize when to use иду and еду, since this difference does not exist in Slovak.
winters wrote: [...] I can speak both Croatian & Russian. Russian is, if you know another slavic languages, relatively easy to learn. Compared to Croatian, it is much easier in the aspect of morphology; when it comes to the lexis, the vocabulary of both languages is fairly similar to a decent extent (there are, though, ENTIRELY different things and so-called false friends, but, nevertheless, you can still recognise and intuitively understand many of the unknown words). The spelling is somewhat more of a challenge because it is not phonetic (despite the subtle differences in Croatian between Č and Ć, and IJE/JE, the Croatian spelling is easier, because it is mostly phonetic, whilst Russian is not as much), but once you get used to it, it is alright
When it comes to pronounciation, a lot of the sounds match; Russian sounds softer, though, more palatalised (which is in the script indicated by "soft" sign; there is also a "hard" one), and I suppose the only "alien" sound would be the sound of Russian "hard I" (y).
Also, the words are stressed in the Russian in the different way, i.e.it takes some time to adjust and to intuively understand which syllabe is stressed.
Overall; I could write an essay about them, but the bottomline is, they are quite similar and Russian is easy to learn if you can speak Croatian. The other way round, as far as I've seen, is more complex (i.e.it is harder to learn Croatian from Russian), but still one does not have greater problems
You asked about declensions. They are similar to some extent, BUT...a lot of it confuses. For example, the word "sestre" in Croatian is in the genitive case, but in the Russian it is dative, etc... Accusative mostly matches in the singular (e.g."sestru" in both languages).
(
Ed.: winters' comments are from post no. 25 in the discussion “Slavic Language Family Learning Sequence”)
zhiguli wrote: Ukrainian pronunciation could be easier because the spelling is more "phonetic" and it's more sparing with palatalized sounds than Russian (which are said to be especially difficult for native English-speakers).
This closer reflection of pronunciation does cause other problems. In Ukrainian і/у in prepositions/prefixes regularly alternate with й/в (something that does not happen in Russian) and there are a bunch of rules to learn for this, and they are not always followed consistently.
Another example: the preposition з "from", which has the variants із/зі/ізо(ізі) in Ukrainian while the Russian equivalent is с (and со before a small number of consonant clusters).
Ukrainian also has a vowel shift і>о/е, while Russian has nothing of the sort.
As for vocabulary, it's hard to say. Ukrainian has been playing second fiddle to Russian for such a long time that it does seem to be a poorer, "village" language with a smaller vocabulary. On the other hand its word stock is also more characteristically Slavic, while Russian has more international words and loans from French/German/English/etc. Ukrainian also has a lot of dialects and the standard language is not so firmly entrenched as it is in Russia. Many people write according to the norms of their dialect rather than the standard, even in newspapers (I suspect this is one reason I can't find certain words in dictionaries, something that is not much of an issue with Russian).
Likewise for grammar. Some things are more regular in Ukrainian, like the plural (in masculine/feminine nouns the ending is almost always и/і, while Russian has a whole bunch of exceptions), but other things are more complicated, like:
- the -у/-а split in the genitive ending (in Russian it's almost always -a)
- the split -у/ові dative ending (in Russian - always -у)
- the vocative (various endings, as pointed out this one is largely absent from Russian)
etc.
In general the -а -ові endings are used for animate masculine nouns, but beyond this the rules are vague at best.
Ukrainian also seems more "composed", where Russian would use separate words following regular declension, Ukrainian has longer, single words that are not the same as the sum of their parts. For example saying "in x season":
En. Rus. Ukr.
"In winter" зимой взимку ("в зимі")
"In spring" весной навесні ("у весні")
"In summer" летом влітку ("у літі")
"In fall" осенью восени ("в осені")
In Rus. it's just the instrumental case of the noun.
Of course I'm biased, coming from it from having studied Russian first, but overall Ukrainian, at least as far as grammar is concerned, seems more difficult and capricious.
(
Ed.: zhiguli's comments are from post no. 6 in the discussion “Is Ukrainian easier than Russian?”)
Based on my experience of studying Russian, I noted in the old forum some of its oddities which make it stand out from other Slavonic languages. This could even be taken as partial evidence of how Russian is not necessarily the best choice as a “gateway” Slavonic language from a philological standpoint despite having the largest number of speakers. It’s a little like finding out that learning English first is not the ideal gateway into exploring all of the other Germanic languages or doing the same with Turkish with respect to all of the other Turkic languages.
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Selected vocabulary from “Oxford Take Off in Russian”-
Selected vocabulary from “New Penguin Russian Course”-
Cognates of derivatives of PIE *méntis “thought”-
Selected grammatical features from “New Penguin Russian Course”