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Slavic Language Family Learning Sequence | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| 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 49 of 51 18 December 2006 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | ||
Part of the problem is defining the hardest and easiest of the Slavonic languages. It depends on the learner. I recently read a book on Slavonic linguistics by Townsend and Janda and it presented the distribution of the Slavonic languages in Europe as a C-shaped arc: (East Slavonic) (Wes t Slavonic) (Sou th Slavonic) The book noted that we can derive certain rules of thumb about the grammar and typology of the Slavonic languages. The East Slavonic languages have the most cases (7 or 8 for Russian depending on whom you talk to), but the fewest tenses. All of these languages use the Cyrillic script (Belorussian also has a Latin script but it's not frequently used). Three out of the four East Slavonic languages have variable stress (Rusyn is the odd one out). The West Slavonic languages have either 6 (Slovak) or 7 (e.g. Czech, Polish) active cases. However, this group has more tenses than the East Slavonic languages but fewer than in the South Slavonic languages. All of these languages are written in Latin script and have fixed stress. The South Slavonic languages have less evidence of inheriting the old Slavonic case system (e.g. modern Bulgarian has lost almost all of the declensions except for in the pronouns. Standard BCS has merged the old endings for the instrumental, dative and locative plural into a common ending of "-ima" unlike other Slavonic languages to the north and northeast), but have the most tenses (e.g. in addition to the present, past, future and conditional, BCS has the aorist, pluperfect and imperfect, while Bulgarian has tenses in the indicative, imperative, conditional, subjunctive and renarrative moods.) Some of these languages are written in Latin script (e.g. Croatian, Slovenian) while others use Cyrillic (e.g. Macedonian, Serbian). Except for Macedonian, all of the other South Slavonic languages have variable stress (like East Slavonic languages) Therefore the ends of the C-shaped arc (i.e. East Slavonic and South Slavonic) show extremes to each other in regards to number of cases or number of tenses. In addition, Slavonic languages at the ends have variable word stress (except for Rusyn in East Slavonic and Macedonian in South Slavonic). The rounded part of the arc (i.e. West Slavonic) falls in the middle when it comes to number of cases and tenses, and is on the other extreme of word stress with all of these languages having fixed word stress. Given all of this, it depends on which features you would find to be easier or harder to learn. I personally find variable unmarked stress to be more difficult to grasp than mastering cases or tenses. Of the four Slavonic languages that I've studied so far, Slovak has been the easiest and Croatian has been the hardest. Edited by Chung on 18 December 2006 at 10:15pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| orion Senior Member United States Joined 7022 days ago 622 posts - 678 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 50 of 51 19 December 2006 at 1:23am | IP Logged | ||
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OK, now I am really not in a hurry to try another Slavic language! Thanks for the info, very interesting.
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| Theodisce Octoglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5887 days ago 127 posts - 167 votes Speaks: Polish*, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian, Czech, French, English, German Studies: Italian, Spanish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Portuguese | Message 51 of 51 02 September 2012 at 11:45am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd like to share some of my experiences with Slavic languages. Being a native speaker of Polish, I figured out I could acquire Slovak with relative ease. I spent about 100 hours with the language, mainly listening to the radio. This enabled me to understand most of what I was listening to. Then I moved to Czech, mainly because there was more attractive content available in Czech than in Slovak. First weeks were really difficult, the language seemed so different (mainly due to some peculiar characteristics of Czech that distinguish it from other West Slavic languages), but ultimately I managed to acquire relatively good listening comprehension. Having spent about 450 with Czech (again, mainly listening to the radio) I am now able to read authentic literature with a high degree of comprehension. When it comes to podcasts, I may say I understand almost everything concerning topics I have at least some interest in. Moreover, my Czech helps me understand Slovak without much difficulty. The same may be said about written Sorbian, although the language failed to attract my longstanding attention due to the scarcity of available materials.
Having stayed for about 2 years with the western branch, I moved on to Russian. The initial phase during which I didn't understand much of the content was relatively shorter than the corresponding phase in Czech. I've been enjoying Russian for 120 hours, the amount of time enabling me to listen to a university lecture with a good degree of comprehension. I'm not trying to say it's a universal strategy, in fact, my learning sequence seems to be pretty random, but there are some merits to it. If I was to draw a conclusion, I would say that 100 hours of listening to a language is a solid foundation upon which to build your knowledge, provided you already have a decent command of a Slavic language. Edited by Theodisce on 02 September 2012 at 11:46am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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