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clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5176 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi
| Message 17 of 40 27 September 2010 at 2:20pm | IP Logged |
mjhowie1992 wrote:
In my personal opinion, Polish is the easiest. However, I am frequently exposed to
Polish, so of course I am biased on this topic. To me, Polish seems to be the most
regular. I have looked a little into Czech, and I have not liked its grammar structure,
and there seem to be no patterns in the way cases are formed. I believe that Polish is
the easiest language to pronounce out of the three for a tongue originally trained to
speak a West Germanic language. Russian has too many slight differences between its
"soft" and "hard" consonants, which can take a long time for a learner to learn to
differentiate. Czech doesn't seem to be as widespread as Polish is, but then again,
neither of those languages can compare to the expanse that Russian has accomplished
over the years.
I still say that Polish is the easiest, even though none of those three languages are
necessarily "easy" for a learner with no prior Slavic knowledge. |
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Well, Polish has soft consonants too.
s - ś
c - ć
z - ź
1 person has voted this message useful
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6227 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written)
| Message 18 of 40 27 September 2010 at 5:30pm | IP Logged |
Sennin wrote:
liddytime wrote:
5. Relatively easy to jump to another Slavic language after having a good
command of Russian |
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Heh. It's quite a long jump in most cases ;-). |
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Actually, not so. I have many Russian, Ukrainian and Polish speaking friends who say they can understand each
other without problems. I speak intermediate level Russian and while I can't understand other Slavic languages
perfectly, word for word, I can generally get the gist of the conversation and make myself understood.
clumsy wrote:
The noun declension is one of the hardest part in Slavic languages (if not the hardest).
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Actually the noun declensions aren't THAT hard. Once you start using them it kind of becomes second
nature as to which case is used. The REALLY hard parts about the Slavic languages are the darn perfective
and imperfective verb aspects - 2 different verbs for the same word depending on how it is used in a sentence
and all the different verbs of motion!!
идти
ехать
ходить
переходить
уходить
ездить
проходить
отправляться
съездить
уезжать etc etc...
I still get those all mixed up!!
1 person has voted this message useful
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6032 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds
| Message 19 of 40 27 September 2010 at 6:00pm | IP Logged |
liddytime wrote:
Sennin wrote:
liddytime wrote:
5. Relatively easy to jump to another Slavic language after having a good
command of Russian |
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Heh. It's quite a long jump in most cases ;-). |
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Actually, not so. I have many Russian, Ukrainian and Polish speaking friends who say they can understand each
other without problems. I speak intermediate level Russian and while I can't understand other Slavic languages
perfectly, word for word, I can generally get the gist of the conversation and make myself understood.
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You can make yourself understood in Polish after having studied Russian to intermediate level? I find that odd. Also, I'm not so sure about the mutual intelligibility Polish<->Russian, perhaps your Polish friends know some Russian.
Edited by Sennin on 27 September 2010 at 6:01pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 20 of 40 27 September 2010 at 6:26pm | IP Logged |
brian91 wrote:
I am mainly interested in learning Polish/Russian/Czech but am also open to learning others. For example, Bulgarian is supposedly the easiest Slavic language, but I'm not sure how true this is. Also, is it true that Polish is
more difficult than Russian?
Thanks in advance,
Brian |
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As to the title of the thread, I'd cut to the chase and start with Slovak :-P
As for the rest of your post, may I direct you to the following links:
how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1954 6&PN=1&TPN=1#217536 (thread for mutual intelligibility about Slavonic languages)
how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=592& PN=59 (thread for sequences in learning Slavonic languages)
5 persons have voted this message useful
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5271 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French
| Message 21 of 40 28 September 2010 at 5:00am | IP Logged |
In short, I think the question is wrong. The question should be...given the fact that I do not have an
attraction
to any particular Slavic language above the others at the moment, but want to learn (at least) one of them, which
should I learn?
The answer is simple: Russian.
This is not like picking a Romance language where you're struggling between the number of speakers of
Portuguese, the cool literature of Spanish, the opera sung in Italian, and the gastronomy of France.
Russian is just such a dominant language in the Slavic family - in terms of numbers of speakers, cultural impact
and
literary importance, territorial distribution, not to mention resources available - that it would be silly to take up
Czech or Polish or Serbian first. Which is not to say that learning these (or Bulgarian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian,
etc.) is worthless, only that you need to have a special reason/fascination to justify learning them. Easy they are
not and making a major exertion to learn one just because they are *slightly* easier in one or another trivial
grammatical point from Russian is not worth the time and effort.
Edited by Merv on 28 September 2010 at 5:03am
7 persons have voted this message useful
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6032 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds
| Message 22 of 40 28 September 2010 at 9:52am | IP Logged |
Merv wrote:
Russian is just such a dominant language in the Slavic family - in terms of numbers of speakers, cultural impact
and literary importance, territorial distribution, not to mention resources available - that it would be silly to take up
Czech or Polish or Serbian first. Which is not to say that learning these (or Bulgarian, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian,
etc.) is worthless, only that you need to have a special reason/fascination to justify learning them. Easy they are
not and making a major exertion to learn one just because they are *slightly* easier in one or another trivial
grammatical point from Russian is not worth the time and effort. |
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I think this pretty much sums it up. The smaller languages are also cool but from an utilitarian perspective Russian is "the king". Everybody should decide on the basis of his/her personal interests and affection for these languages, not the perceived difficulty.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| mjhowie1992 Diglot Newbie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5178 days ago 24 posts - 27 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Mandarin
| Message 23 of 40 25 June 2011 at 2:47pm | IP Logged |
clumsy wrote:
mjhowie1992 wrote:
In my personal opinion, Polish is the easiest.
However, I am frequently exposed to
Polish, so of course I am biased on this topic. To me, Polish seems to be the most
regular. I have looked a little into Czech, and I have not liked its grammar structure,
and there seem to be no patterns in the way cases are formed. I believe that Polish is
the easiest language to pronounce out of the three for a tongue originally trained to
speak a West Germanic language. Russian has too many slight differences between its
"soft" and "hard" consonants, which can take a long time for a learner to learn to
differentiate. Czech doesn't seem to be as widespread as Polish is, but then again,
neither of those languages can compare to the expanse that Russian has accomplished
over the years.
I still say that Polish is the easiest, even though none of those three languages are
necessarily "easy" for a learner with no prior Slavic knowledge. |
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|
Well, Polish has soft consonants too.
s - ś
c - ć
z - ź
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Polish has only these three, which are very easy to pronounce. Things become more
difficult when one enters into Russian, where many rules come into play.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5597 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes
| Message 24 of 40 26 June 2011 at 12:03am | IP Logged |
Quote:
Polish has only these three soft consonants |
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What about mi, bi, pi wi, fi etc? Isn't the m in miasto pronounced soft?
I don't see, where the phonology of Russian should be more complicated than the Polish system (apart from maybe the unstressed vowels).
1 person has voted this message useful
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