If you know one Slavic language well, how easy is it to learn others?

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If you know one Slavic language well, how easy is it to learn others?

Postby tastyonions » Mon Feb 06, 2023 11:14 pm

Is a Russian speaker learning, say, Polish, in a similar position to a Spanish speaker taking on Italian or French?
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Re: If you know one Slavic language well, how easy is it to learn others?

Postby Saim » Tue Feb 07, 2023 8:16 am

I’d say the Slavic languages are on the whole closer to each other than the Romance languages. The only thing is that they’ve developed separate traditions for the coinage/borrowing of formal terms and neologisms, whereas the Romance languages all borrow from Latin for this. So in terms of pragmatics, listening comprehension and grammar there’s probably more of a discount, but you need to give vocabulary more specific attention to begin to read comfortably (depending on the pair of course — obviously going from Polish to Belarusian or Serbian to Macedonian is easier than Polish to Russian).
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Re: If you know one Slavic language well, how easy is it to learn others?

Postby anitarrc » Tue Feb 07, 2023 8:31 am

It depends on the common vocabulary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity

For an Ukranian Speaker, Polish is easy. For a Serbian speaker, Bulgarian is easier.

Just like with romance languages. I understand zero Romanian, but it was easy to learn Portuguese. I learned French when I was a kid, which helped to understand some concepts of Spanish. But the vocabulary is quite different.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... 17.1350185

should tell you more
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Re: If you know one Slavic language well, how easy is it to learn others?

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue Feb 07, 2023 7:24 pm

Have a look at the old HTLAL thread Slavic Language Family Learning Sequence. In the very last post, Theodisce says:
Theodisce wrote:If I was to draw a conclusion, I would say that 100 hours of listening to a language is a solid foundation upon which to build your knowledge, provided you already have a decent command of a Slavic language.
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Re: If you know one Slavic language well, how easy is it to learn others?

Postby Irena » Tue Feb 07, 2023 10:22 pm

Keep in mind that Slavic languages are morphologically significantly more complex than Romance ones. Even though the logic of almost all Slavic languages is pretty similar (Bulgarian and Macedonian are the exceptions), it's pretty tough to get all those endings down, since there are just so many of them. It depends on the language, though. In my experience, Russian has a significantly lower barrier to entry than Czech (because the case system is a lot more complicated in Czech than in Russian). I "attacked" Czech with two Slavic languages under my belt (one native, and the other one a certified C1), and it was still very hard for me.
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Re: If you know one Slavic language well, how easy is it to learn others?

Postby Axon » Thu Feb 09, 2023 4:29 am

Irena wrote:Keep in mind that Slavic languages are morphologically significantly more complex than Romance ones. Even though the logic of almost all Slavic languages is pretty similar (Bulgarian and Macedonian are the exceptions), it's pretty tough to get all those endings down, since there are just so many of them. It depends on the language, though. In my experience, Russian has a significantly lower barrier to entry than Czech (because the case system is a lot more complicated in Czech than in Russian). I "attacked" Czech with two Slavic languages under my belt (one native, and the other one a certified C1), and it was still very hard for me.


That's a really interesting perspective, thanks! Can you give more detail about what you found difficult in Czech after already being fluent in two other major Slavic languages? For monolingual English speakers (or at least for me), the concept of cases itself is a difficult thing to understand, so for example when I look at Polish and Russian I don't see anything particularly hard about the case systems of either one over the other. They're both in the same field of difficulty.
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Re: If you know one Slavic language well, how easy is it to learn others?

Postby Saim » Thu Feb 09, 2023 8:19 am

In my experience I only really had to learn the Slavic case system once, after that it was always pretty intuitive. Even the Baltic case system feels pretty easy, at least from my dabbling in Latvian. But I also studied linguistics at uni so your mileage may vary.

anitarrc wrote: I understand zero Romanian, but it was easy to learn Portuguese.


Funnily enough, I remember a Twitter thread of a bunch of Catalans surprised at how "easy" it is to understand Romanian. The trick here is that they were listening to a speech by Moldova's president on the war in Ukraine, with sentences like guvernul a declarat că[1].... Romanian language planners intentionally brought the formal register more in line with French after years of Old Church Slavonic being the main prestige language, so depending on the register of the material Romanian can range from impenetrable to surprisingly transparent for speakers of languages from the contiguous part of the Romance continuum. I think this really exemplifies the fact that even though the Romance languages have been diverging from each other for longer than the Slavic languages have, the vocabulary overlap is still comparable.

[1] This is a made-up example, I don't remember what she said exactly, but a lot of it was quite easily intelligible for anyone who speaks two other Romance languages.
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Re: If you know one Slavic language well, how easy is it to learn others?

Postby Irena » Thu Feb 09, 2023 11:55 am

Axon wrote:Can you give more detail about what you found difficult in Czech after already being fluent in two other major Slavic languages? For monolingual English speakers (or at least for me), the concept of cases itself is a difficult thing to understand, so for example when I look at Polish and Russian I don't see anything particularly hard about the case systems of either one over the other. They're both in the same field of difficulty.


In short, the case system. The basic logic of the seven cases was very intiutive to me. Ah, but just for nouns, there are fourteen basic declansion patterns (that's what I had in the grammar book I was using). And that's before you get to nouns that decline accoring to one of the patterns, but with some sort of twist (e.g. some sort of palatalization), or those that decline according to one of the 14 patterns in the singular and another in the plural, or those that retain traces of the old (otherwise vanished) dual in the plural, or some types of loan words that have their own declansion patterns... It's just a lot of stuff to memorize.

And that's just nouns. The pronouns, if you will believe it, are hugely complicated. For example, here's "on" ("he") put into the Genitive case: jeho, něho, ho, jej, něj. Yes, five different ways of putting the third person masculine singular pronoun into the Genitive case. And no, they are not interchangeable; you need to know which one to use when.

Russian streamlines these things a bit more. The basic logic is very similar, but you just don't get as much stuff to memorize. As for Polish: I've never tried learning it, but rumor has it it's even more complicated than Czech.
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Re: If you know one Slavic language well, how easy is it to learn others?

Postby tungemål » Fri Feb 17, 2023 12:43 pm

Let's examine this question further.

The Slavic languages are divided into south, east, and west branches. However, naturally there would be influences between the branches as well.

I know a little bit Polish, and after having heard Ukrainian spoken at a few occasions I've noticed that I could understand some words. But Ukrainian belongs to the eastern group, and Polish to the western group.

Here are some questions that I have:
- Is Ukrainian more similar to Russian (same group) or more similar to Polish (neighbouring country)? I read that Ukrainian might have vocabulary in common with Polish, while Russian vocabulary is a bit different. This has something to do with Old Church Slavonic.
- Are the West Slavic languages more or less mutually intelligible (Czech and Polish)? I imagine a native Polish speaker would not need much study to understand Czech (to speak would obviously require more)
- my understanding is that Serbo-Croat-Bosnian is more or less the same language, and that Macedonian and Bulgarian are really close and mutually intelligible. True?
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Re: If you know one Slavic language well, how easy is it to learn others?

Postby Iversen » Fri Feb 17, 2023 1:16 pm

The first Slavic language I tried to learn was Russian, and then I worked on Serbian and jumped straight into Bulgarian afterwards. Then I had a peek at Polish, followed by Slovak (because of the gatherings in Bratislava), and the last one I have added to my agenda is Ukrainian because of Putin (and because I wonder why we haven't seen more from such a big country). So I have skipped across the internal dividing lines within the Slavic family without thinking much about the order.

But generally I have had more trouble with Slovak and Polish than with the South Slavonic languages, not least because of their pronunciations. Russian was also a troublesome affair because it was the first from the family I looked at, and it was an on and off affair for several years. But if I should choose no. 1 now then I would first and foremost look at the available materials, and then at my holiday opportunities. Russian has still an avalanche of study materials, but due to touristical considerations I wouldn't study it as the first one if I had to make the choice today. I would probable go for Polish and one of the South Slavic languages - and then add Russian later.
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