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Languages you can read based on others? | ||
Tags: Linguistic relationships | Reading | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Einarr Tetraglot Senior Member United Kingdom einarrslanguagelog.w Joined 4622 days ago 118 posts - 269 votes  Speaks: English, Bulgarian*, French, Russian Studies: Swedish | Message 9 of 46 23 April 2012 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You'll definitely be able to deal rather effortlessly with Ukrainian. Yes, it may seem as if you would need some Polish to it but I do believe Russian will be ground stable enough for you to be able to comprehend the language. As for Belorussian I really cannot say, since I've never had any encounters with the language.
For me, out of the Slavic languages, I can understand Macedonian effortlessly, while I face some difficulties with Serbian, but if i pay a little effort it's easily understood. Strangely enough, probably because of me being exposed to the language from an early age, it's been easy for me to understand, but not to talk properly Russian. Actually if I have to be honest, when it comes down to which language I'm able to understand best, judging by the fact that I originally speak Bulgarian, I'll say Macedonian first and not Serbian, but instead Russian second. When it comes down to other Indo-European languages, my knowledge of French did manage to help me understand some Spanish, and my limited knowledge of Danish has helped me as well. Actually, I just found a nice Finnish movie , but Swedish subtitles only are available, which are so far, so easy to understand. Sadly my attempt with Finnish several years ago was very very unsuccessful, but that's another story. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5043 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 10 of 46 23 April 2012 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I used to be able to read Swedish, though I don't speak it. Because Finland is a legally bilingual country, I used to read the Swedish on everything instead of Finnish. As I grew to understand more Finnish, my understanding of Swedish decreased, even if it is in the same language family as my native English.
Every once in a while I've read things in Portuguese and Italian, though I don't speak either. My high ability to read French without being able to speak it was one of the main reasons I decided to do French in the last 6WC. And yes, I can sometimes and almost easily catch the meaning of things written in Dutch. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7165 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 11 of 46 23 April 2012 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This thread reminds me a lot of what a bunch of us put down in "Does anyone read neighborhood languages?"
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| clang Groupie United States Joined 5348 days ago 54 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Italian | Message 12 of 46 23 April 2012 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For someone whose native language is not a slavic language (and especially for someone whose native language is
not a slavic language and has not had a lot of exposure to second and third slavic languages), knowing Russian well will allow you to pick words and phrases out of additional slavic languages. I've met a few Ukrainians, for example, who say they have no trouble with Polish and don't understand why I can't just understand it. They forget that they already speak Ukrainian and Russian (natively) and have had frequent exposure to Polish. This is not the same as my basic Russian fluency! This is one of my favorite posts on the forum. It's about learning multiple slavic languages. My personal experience has been that once you spend some time with a language from a different part of the slavic tree, your passive understanding of slavic languages in general will shoot up. Good Russian plus some quality time with Czech and you can get the gist of something written in BCS. The examples that I first noticed personally (when you run into these things outside of a linguistics textbook, it is exciting!): Nerozumím (Cz) = Ne razumijem (Cr) = Не понимаю (Ru) = I don't understand. BUT, Nevím (Cz) = Ne znam (Cr) = Не знаю (Ru) = I don't know. And Czech, Russian, and Croatian are Western, Eastern, and Southern Slavic, respectfully. Edited by clang on 23 April 2012 at 6:42pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4697 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 13 of 46 23 April 2012 at 5:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think once you have two, and especially three "neighborhood languages" the family starts to become very transparent. With English, German, and Yiddish, e.g., I have discovered that there is this transparency in Dutch, Luxembourgish, Low German...I would expect that with your existing coverage of the Romance languages and experience with reading "neighborhood languages" that any continental Romance language should be relatively accessible for reading.
As for the Slavic languages, I've heard that they are more transparent internally than the Germanic and Romance languages. My experience here is relatively limited, but I can share that when I tried studying Russian a number of years ago, I didn't get very far, and yet I was able to gist a little bit of a web page in the supposedly more distant Bulgarian. IIRC, Barry Farber suggested in his book that if one knows any two slavic languages (or at least any three, one each from east, west, and south), s/he can communicate with someone speaking any slavic language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Tecktight Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States Joined 4985 days ago 227 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, Serbian Studies: German, Russian, Estonian | Message 14 of 46 23 April 2012 at 6:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I can speak somewhat to the Slavic transparency, as I have a bit of experience with that.
Knowing Russian helps with Polish and Czech, and somewhat with BCS. I find BCS helps me more with Czech than Russian does. BCS is extremely useful for Bulgarian, while Russian is less so. Also, obviously, for Slovenian. I know a tour guide from Poland who knows every language in the Slavic family. He had an advantage in that his native language is Polish, obviously, and, from there, he learned Russian, and then BCS. After that, he just picked up the rest by traveling around. I think once you have a good grammatical base, which you are getting with Russian, it will all come fairly easily to you. I think learning languages in Czech, Serbia, etc. and the "middle" countries is a lot easier than learning Russian, just because the people are a lot warmer initially and will encourage your efforts. Of course, this is for people like you who learn a lot through immersion. Admittedly, resources for these languages are a lot more scarce than for Russian or Polish. Moreover, paling around with Slavs is basically the same protocol in every country. Lots of drinking and eating. Fewer smiles *initially* the further North/East you go. The Slavs become more like pineapples. Once you get to know them well, though, you have a good friend for life. I'm sure Mark or someone will step in here somewhere to disagree, but since I have Slavs of both sides of the Slavic part of Europe in my immediate family, and friends of every Slav nationality in-between, I think I can comment fairly on the differences between them. Edited by Tecktight on 23 April 2012 at 6:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Vihelik Pentaglot Newbie Estonia Joined 4606 days ago 17 posts - 56 votes Speaks: Estonian*, Mandarin, English, Russian, Korean Studies: Tibetan, Spanish, French | Message 15 of 46 25 April 2012 at 4:44am | IP Logged | |||||
I tried to read the original of "King Stakh's Wild Hunt" by the Belorusian author Uladzimir Karatkievich relying solely on my knowledge of Russian. I have seen the Russian movie based on the book and also read it in Estonian, but I must admit that without the side-by-side English translation of the Belorusian text I would have been soon totally lost. I was continually amazed by the similarity of Belurusian to Russian and at the same time dismayed by the fact that I still couldn't understand the details without relying on the English translation. Here is the link to the on-line version: http://www.belarus-misc.org/download/King-Stakhs-Wild-Hunt-d ual-Bel-Eng.pdf 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5343 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 16 of 46 25 April 2012 at 7:39am | IP Logged | |||||
I would imagine that you have higher demands to yourself than I do, and that this particular work is a lot more complicated than the litterature I read so far. I am satisfied if I only get the gist of what happens, since the basic question is "who dunnit?". In a work like you mention, understanding the nuances of the language is important, because the language itself is part of the reading experience. I would therefore imagine that at the stage where I would cry victory, because I have understood more or less what is going on, you would still be frustrated, because you are not getting the details. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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