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Easiest Slavic Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| jpazzz Groupie United States Joined 5046 days ago 54 posts - 76 votes  Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 25 15 June 2014 at 10:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello All: I have another of my ignorant (but , hopefully, not stupid) questions. Which of the Slavic languages is "easiest" for an English speaker to learn. I'm concerned here primarily with grammar and syntax, rather than Cyrillic vs Latin scripts. I don't have any presuppositions on this, and would be very appreciate of any thoughts on the subject based, hopefully, on knowledge of or experience studying or using any of the Slavic languages.
Cheers, John Edited by jpazzz on 15 June 2014 at 10:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| drygramul Tetraglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4469 days ago 165 posts - 269 votes Speaks: Persian, Italian*, EnglishC2, GermanB2 Studies: French, Polish | Message 2 of 25 15 June 2014 at 11:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think there's a big difference in grammar for most of them.
Probably Bulgarian and Macedonian have the easiest grammar for a Romance/English speaker, and Bulgarian vocabulary has more greek and latin loanwords. But I guess Russian would be easier to learn for the huge amount of resources available. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 25 15 June 2014 at 12:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'd recommend using the search function and reading some of Chung's posts on the matter.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4254 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 4 of 25 15 June 2014 at 12:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, the languages that are "closest" to English in language typology in the Slavic branch are Bulgarian and Macedonian. Both have lost all grammatical cases except remnants of them, both use an article (that is however a suffix like in north-Germanic languages) unlike other Slavic languages. However, there's a catch. These very innovative Slavic languages will not help learning the other Slavic languages as much as learning a more conservative one would.
Then there's always the constructed language Slovio which is really easy. But in the end, the one you want to learn the most will always be the eaiest. If you really love doing it you'll find a way to learn it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 5 of 25 15 June 2014 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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There is no such thing as ''easiest Slavic language''.
While Macedonian and Bulgarian have a relatively easy noun system (compared to let's say Croatian), their verbal system and syntax are a nightmare. So, you get some savings with nouns, but you will have to work much harder with verbs. In Croatian current use, we have one future tense, one present tense and one past tense, in Macedonian they have like 10-12 tenses which are all in current spoken and written use, enough for me to feel dizzy. Croatian has a pitch accent, but its functional load is extremely low, I can only think of two pairs which differ in pitch only (rising/falling of voice): Luka (Lucas) ~ luka (port/harbor) and otrovan (poisoned) ~ otrovan (poisonous). Pitch is not as important as in Swedish, or Norwegian, or Japanese. Although Croatian has a pitch accent, it sounds much flatter compared to singy Czech language (which lacks the pitch accent). The most difficult Slavic languages are Slovenian (it's the most conservative Slavic language) and Czech (difficult because of diglossia). Other Slavic languages are more and less the same, in terms of difficulty. Easiest to pronounce: Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian, Macedonian, Slovak Easiest nouns: Macedonian, Bulgarian Easiest verbal system: Croatian Easiest sociolinguistically (most uniform, not many differences between spoken and written usage): Slovak, Macedonian, Serbian, Russian Most vowel-friendly (consonant clusters avoiding, and vowel reduction avoiding): Macedonian Most''InterSlavic'': Slovak (western/southern/eastern), Bulgarian (southern/eastern) Combining all those, as a speaker of Croatian (and passively Bosnian and Serbian) I rate them from easiest to understand to most difficult to understand: Macedonian>Bulgarian/Slovenian>Slovak/Russian> Czech> Polish/Ukrainian I find Macedonian the most beautiful Slavic language, and I enjoy listening to songs in this language, due to its vowel-friendliness we may call it ''Italian of Slavic languages''. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgfewnORHb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdFkZ5m8w5g Edited by Medulin on 15 June 2014 at 6:37pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 6 of 25 15 June 2014 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | ||
Probably a good place to start is to look at the Balto-Slavonic profile which includes short summaries (in bullet point form) for each language but also observations from several of us who have learned a few Balto-Slavonic languages. I've said it before and will say it again: Slovak is my choice (by a hair) for the "easiest" Slavonic language to learn as your first if you're a native speaker of English and you don't have any special interest in any language in the group. In particular, the following links should focus the discussion a bit: - Best order to learn the slavic languages - Best Slavic Language to Start With? - Difficulty of Slavic languages - "Easy" Slavic Language? - Learn 'Slovio' first as help to Russian? - Russian and the other Slavic languages - Slavic Language Family Learning Sequence - What is the Easiest Slavic Language? - Which One First? P.S. Thanks for the props, Cavesa :-) 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| WS9167 Diglot Newbie Slovenia Joined 3823 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English, Polish* Studies: Slovenian, French | Message 7 of 25 15 June 2014 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | ||
That's interesting. Native speaker of Polish here, and I actually find BCS to be the easiest one to understand (at least from what I've been exposed to). In fact, from personal experience most people in Croatia understood Polish pretty easily too. I do have some really marginal knowledge of Slovenian though, so maybe that changes something. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jpazzz Groupie United States Joined 5046 days ago 54 posts - 76 votes Studies: Russian | Message 8 of 25 15 June 2014 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello All,
I really appreciate the time and effort you all took to answer my question. Thank you! For some reason, I have trouble getting messages for this form finished before they suddenly disappear from my screen. My original message (which did disappear before I could post it) began with the fact that I was reasonably sure that this topic had been previously discussed. But again for some reason, I seldom have much luck with the search feature on this forum. I certainly got little when I tried "Easiest Slavic Language to Learn." So I am very pleased, indeed, to read your responses and to see the leads you've given. Trivia which may entertain: I had a grandfather (who would be about 130 if he still lived) whose native language was Slovene. I remember that he could at least communicate at a basic level with the Poles and Serbs and Croats who also lived in our small, Midwestern town. (My grandfather was a successful local business man, so communicating was important.) On the other side, my heritage is Lithuanian, so I come from two of the most difficult to learn European languages. I'm afraid it didn't much rub off. I enjoy language learning as a hobby, but am quite desperately bad at it. Many years ago, I just scrapped through the foreign language requirements of both an MA and a Ph.D. on the basis of six months at a Goethe Insitut. Thanks again, John 1 person has voted this message useful |
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