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Slavic Language Family Learning Sequence | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| winters Trilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 7045 days ago 199 posts - 218 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, Serbian*, Russian*, English, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: Greek, French, Hungarian | Message 25 of 51 12 May 2006 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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nox - I can speak both Croatian & Russian. Russian is, if you know another slavic languages, relatively easy to learn. Compared to Croatian, it is much easier in the aspect of morphology; when it comes to the lexis, the vocabulary of both languages is fairly similar to a decent extent (there are, though, ENTIRELY different things and so-called false friends, but, nevertheless, you can still recognise and intuitively understand many of the unknown words). The spelling is somewhat more of a challenge because it is not phonetic (despite the subtle differences in Croatian between Č and Ć, and IJE/JE, the Croatian spelling is easier, because it is mostly phonetic, whilst Russian is not as much), but once you get used to it, it is alright ;) When it comes to pronounciation, a lot of the sounds match; Russian sounds softer, though, more palatalised (which is in the script indicated by "soft" sign; there is also a "hard" one), and I suppose the only "alien" sound would be the sound of Russian "hard I" (y).
Also, the words are stressed in the Russian in the different way, i.e.it takes some time to adjust and to intuively understand which syllabe is stressed. Overall; I could write an essay about them, but the bottomline is, they are quite similar and Russian is easy to learn if you can speak Croatian. The other way round, as far as I've seen, is more complex (i.e.it is harder to learn Croatian from Russian), but still one does not have greater problems ;) You asked about declensions. They are similar to some extent, BUT...a lot of it confuses. For example, the word "sestre" in Croatian is in the genitive case, but in the Russian it is dative, etc... Accusative mostly matches in the singular (e.g."sestru" in both languages). I hope I helped. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| winters Trilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 7045 days ago 199 posts - 218 votes Speaks: Croatian*, Serbian*, Russian*, English, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: Greek, French, Hungarian | Message 26 of 51 12 May 2006 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | ||
The Croatian standard is based on the ijekavian-jekavian form of Štokavian speech (unlike the Serbian one, which is based on the ekavian form of it), and that form is ineed not remarkably similar to Slovene in any way - the similarities are just to the same extent as with the other slavic languages, I would say. However, there is one dialect in Croatian, quite widespread in the continental part of the country, called kajkavski, which is much closer to the standard Slovene. If you can speak that dialect, you can understand Slovene with no problems because a lot of it is really similar (characteristics, even pronunciation to some point, and lexis is more similar). But overall, Slovene & Croatian are much LESS similar than people usually think! I cannot tell you much about how hard Slovene is for I never officially studied it (I understand it - and this is where it stops ;)). The cool thing about, though, is that Slovenian is one of the few languages to have preserved the dual grammatical number from Proto-Indo-European. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tomasus Pentaglot Groupie Czech Republic Joined 7033 days ago 54 posts - 56 votes Speaks: Slovak, Czech*, EnglishC1, German, Russian | Message 27 of 51 13 May 2006 at 5:13am | IP Logged | ||
I would say the 80% figure is valid for youngsters mostly. Those of us who lived in the old Czechoslovakia, can understand well above 95%. (Except those who never watched TV and never traveled out of Prague.) I also wanted to comment on Slovenian and Czech. These are very close. Slovenian hockey team has now a Czech trainer and he said they understand him most of the time just fine. I just quickly glanced into Slovenian Textbook and I could understand an article at the end rather well, without having any previous exposure to Slovenian, though of course there were some words I only got from the context and "feeling". If someone knows Czech, there is a nice Slovenian textbook produced by Charles University here, by a native Slovenian, with Czech under belt, it shall be a matter of almost no time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| brumblebee Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6776 days ago 206 posts - 212 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese | Message 28 of 51 07 June 2006 at 2:00pm | IP Logged | ||
What exactly is the advantage of choosing Slovak over Czech? How many of the Slavic languages does Ardaschir speak anyway? 1 person has 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 29 of 51 07 June 2006 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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For me the advantages of Slovak over Czech are:
1) Slovak declension and conjugation are a little bit easier to grasp than those of Czech. I think that it's related to the fact that there are fewer endings in Czech and thus, the same letter or suffixes do a lot more "double-" or "triple-duty". Some of the endings in Czech seemed even more ambiguous initially than what I had experienced when starting to learn Slovak. 2) Slovak uses the vocative with only a few nouns. Czech uses the vocative regularly (i.e. all nouns have a vocative form). In other words, there's one fewer case to deal with in Slovak. 3) Slovak is a little easier to grasp because there aren't two standards as in Czech. In Czech there is a formal standard which is used in official situations and most textbooks and a colloquial standard which is used in all informal situations and even in some formal situations (e.g. interactions between professors and students). The difference between the two can be noted in verb conjugations, and sound shifts which change the endings in nominal and adjectival declensions). The distinction is so strong that the "formal" and "colloquial" forms are often written down in newer textbooks and are seemingly codified (I'm not talking about slang.) (There was an article on the internet that mentioned this distinction but I think that the link is now dead. If you want, I can send the article to you since I kept a copy of it out of interest.) Slovak doesn't have such a distinction between the formal and informal (slang notwithstanding). I found that I could grasp a Slovak conversation more easily after learning from my textbooks than I could when trying to grasp a Czech conversation after learning from my textbooks. 4) Slovak has a reputation of being a sort of "bridge language" within Slavonic languages. While it is closer to Czech, Polish and Sorbian than to the other Slavonic languages, standard Slovak shares a few features with South Slavonic languages (especially Croatian and Serbian) which Czech, Polish and Sorbian do not. 5) For now, if you learn Slovak, there's no real need to learn Czech for travelling since the languages are still similar and mutual intelligibility is very high. (Of course this point is meant more for people who will stay in Czech Republic for only a short time. If you would like to work or study in Czech Republic, logically and out of courtesy you should learn Czech!) If things stay as they are, Czech and Slovak will eventually diverge and be as different from each other as Spanish and Portuguese for example. Even now, some Czechs and Slovaks are noticing that Czech children are starting to have difficulty understanding Slovak and vice-versa. 6) You can surprise more people if you speak Slovak rather than Czech. Anything Slovak is often in the shadow of anything Czech and Slovaks expect even fewer foreigners to speak their language than Czechs do when hearing foreigners speak Czech. For me, the disadvantages of learning Slovak over Czech are: 1) It's harder to find native speakers of Slovak than Czech. This is related to sheer numbers. There are about 11 million speakers of Czech worldwide, but about 6 million speakers of Slovak worldwide. All else equal, it'll be harder for you to find a native speaker of Slovak if you want help or practice with speaking. 2) Because Czech has been more popular than Slovak, the demand (and resultant supply) for good Slovak learning materials is lower. For Czech, here are some good courses that I have checked out in bookstores or used at home or in class: "FSI FAST Czech Course" "Le tcheque sans peine" by Assimil (in French only - "Czech without effort." ~ "Czech with Ease") "Colloquial Czech" by James Naughton "Teach Yourself Czech" by David Short. "Czech Step-by-Step" by Lida Hola "Pimsleur I Czech" and "Pimsleur Compact Czech" "Czech for Fun" by Susan Kresin "Communicative Czech" by Ivana Reskova "A Practical Czech Course for English-Speaking Students." by Milos Sova (now published by Ohio State University with textbooks, cassettes and workbooks) In Slovak: "Colloquial Slovak" by James Naughton "Beginning Slovak" by Oscar Swan and Sylvia Galova-Lorinc "Slovak for You" by Ada Bohmerova "Slovencina pre cudzincov" by Tomas Dratva et al. (Slovak for Foreigners) The choice in dictionaries is also similar. There are more useful Czech dictionaries than ones in Slovak. In general, it'll be easier to learn Czech on your own than Slovak because there are more materials out there. In addition, there are more Czech faculties than Slovak ones at universities and colleges. Take a look at the Czech and Slovak profiles if you're curious about some of the materials out there. As you can see, I think that there are more advantages to learning Slovak over Czech, but it may be more practical to learn Czech because it's easier to find learning materials for Czech. Good luck to you if you decide to study either of these languages. Edited by Chung on 07 June 2006 at 7:04pm 6 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 30 of 51 07 June 2006 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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From what I can piece together from old posts, Ardaschir knows Russian and Polish but I'm not sure to which level. I have a nagging suspicion that he knows other Slavonic languages too but I can't seem to find a post which mentions this. Edited by Chung on 07 June 2006 at 7:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7078 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 31 of 51 08 June 2006 at 3:54am | IP Logged | ||
Serbo-Croatian, Czech, and Bulgarian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Nephilim Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 7146 days ago 363 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English*, Polish | Message 32 of 51 08 June 2006 at 8:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Chung,
Go to the beginning of this thread. Ardaschir got onto the topic of the slavonic language learning sequence in response to one of my questions. It is a great post. Nephilim 1 person has voted this message useful |
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