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What is the Easiest Slavic Language?

 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
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clumsy
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Poland
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 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.


Well, Polish has soft consonants too.

s - ś
c - ć
z - ź

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liddytime
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 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


Heh. It's quite a long jump in most cases ;-).


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).



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!!
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Sennin
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Bulgaria
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 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


Heh. It's quite a long jump in most cases ;-).


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.


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

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Chung
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 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


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)
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Merv
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 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

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Sennin
Senior Member
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 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.


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.


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mjhowie1992
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 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.


Well, Polish has soft consonants too.

s - ś
c - ć
z - ź


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.
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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


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).


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