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Polyglots around us - do you know one? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6396 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes  2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 49 of 121 03 May 2008 at 10:41am | IP Logged |
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Pauline,
I don't want to offend anyone either. I'm going to the gym, spend my time more productively and let someone else finish this off. I don't want to waste another 30 minutes of my time explaining to someone that the skies are blue when there are no clouds. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Deniz Bilingual Heptaglot Groupie Czech RepublicRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6631 days ago 94 posts - 97 votes Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, FrenchB2 Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese, Indonesian, Persian | Message 51 of 121 04 May 2008 at 11:46am | IP Logged |
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Pauline,
I would be very careful in making statements about issues I have no clear information about. As you may notice, I am just another one who increased the number of languages by adding Slovak (being a Czech) and well I did that for a reason. The two languages are much further from each other , than any French dialect I encountered and standard French ( I have had extensive contact with people speaking Canadian F., Belgian F., Togo F., Ivory Coast F., Swiss F. and with French people from all parts of France). Sometimes there were minor differences in all the aspects you mentioned (ie. vocabulary, idioms, even grammar), but the word MINOR should be stressed. The differences were never significant enough to make conversation impossible not even dramatically more difficult than with speakers of standard French. Take in account that French is my second language and I have yet to reach the advanced fluency. If you consider a person learning Czech (without a strong background in other slavic languages) being on the same level as I am in French, his capability of conversing with a cultivated speaker of standard Slovak would be very limited as there is at least a little difference in almost every single word ( unlike Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian ) due to diverse influences and many unlike points in the grammar systems. I would use an example of my English professor back in high-school, who mastered Czech to a proficient level (as well as French, Russian and Ukrainian), and he did not understand a word when my mum spoke to him in a very standard accent of Slovak. As Vlad already mentioned, even Slovaks and Czechs tend to view these two languages as totally mutualy intelligible and easily understandable, but this really owes a lot to the fact that our two countries were together for about 60 years, in which almost all the medias worked bilingualy and so we developped ears for the other language. If a Czech got as much exposure to Polish as to Slovak, his listening and reading comprehension would be just as good in Polish as well. Comprehension is not everything though and that is why I included Slovak in my profile. My mum is Slovak and so is half of my family and thus I can speak the language, and I can speak it without accent or with a very slight one and that is something that a majority of Czechs and Polish cannot do. Edited by Deniz on 06 May 2008 at 5:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| hokusai77 Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6964 days ago 212 posts - 217 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Italian*, FrenchB1, EnglishC1 Studies: GermanB1, Japanese | Message 54 of 121 07 May 2008 at 9:54am | IP Logged |
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My company's sales staff (where I also work), is made up of people who are proficient in at least two languages, besides their native one. Our area manager for France and Spain is of course fluent in English, Spanish and French (besides her native Italian), while my colleague in charge for Scandinavia is Finnish and also speaks English, Italian and Swedish.
My partner is Italian and is fluent in English, German and Spanish. I have also some bilingual friends, foreigners who live in Italy, and who speak their mother tongue and Italian, plus some other European languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| showtime17 Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Slovakia gainweightjournal.co Joined 5896 days ago 154 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Russian, English*, Czech*, Slovak*, French, Spanish Studies: Ukrainian, Polish, Dutch | Message 55 of 121 07 May 2008 at 3:34pm | IP Logged |
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The differences between Flemish/Dutch and Czech/Slovak are that Flemish and Dutch are written exactly the same, while Czech and Slovak have different written standards. It is actually quite interesting to compare these languages and their development, since it is decisions in the mid 1800s that shaped their fate. There were debates in Flanders on whether Flemish was a separate language and the side arguing for a common language with the Dutch won out. In Slovakia, there were the same discussions, however the side that argued for Slovak being a separate language won out. I would also argue that Czech and Slovak are way more similar to each other than for example Slovak and Polish and the ties go way more into the past than the 80 years of a common country. Czech was used as the literary language by many Slovaks since the Middle Ages (for example people like Stur wrote in Czech first before the standardization of Slovak)
Czech and Slovak are different languages, because it was decided that they are. I for one actually speak both, although most Slovaks don't speak Czech, they just understand it. And trust me they're not the same and it's not just differences in accent. I can on the other hand imagine had things gone differently, that Czech and Slovak could have been standardized as one language, for example based on some Moravian dialect (the dialects in Moravia are very similar to Slovak in some aspects, even using words considered "Slovak", while dialects like Zahoractina in Slovakia are very close to Czech, in fact so close that sometimes I have trouble telling apart a Czech "trying" to speak Slovak and a Zahorak) However I can tell you that the differences between Czech and Slovak are much greater than between Dutch and Flemish. Had Flemish been standardized around some version of a Western Flemish dialect and Dutch around some dialect from the area close to where Frisian is spoken, then I can imagine them drifting away to be different languages as Slovak and Czech, but today's reality is different. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Deniz Bilingual Heptaglot Groupie Czech RepublicRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6631 days ago 94 posts - 97 votes Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, FrenchB2 Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese, Indonesian, Persian | Message 56 of 121 08 May 2008 at 10:34am | IP Logged |
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Showtime, thanks for your very informative post. On the other hand, I still think that differences between Polish/Slovak, Polish/Czech and Czech/Slovak are very comparable. Try to listen to Polish podcasts, read Polish books and watch Polish TV for a couple of weeks to see how close Polish is.
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