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Comparing the difficulty of Slavonic lang | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5583 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 1 of 23 12 August 2009 at 3:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I have recently had a debate with my language enthusiast buddy about where all the Slavonic language would rank in terms of difficulty if were were to rank them. This language family is interesting so I thought I'd ask here.
My friend argued that he sees Polish as the hardest of the slavonic language family. His reason is that in Polish masculine noun declensions have a further distinction between animate and inanimate, and then a further distintion between whether what is animate is a person or not. He also note the nasal sounds of polish as a difficulty. I on the other hand believed that Russian is the hardest. Compared to other Slavonic languages, its pronunciation seems to be more distorted and has much more palatalisation, especially when compared to the likes of Serbo-Croatian which seems so smooth. Spelling in Russsian also appears to be less regular than in the others. I understand that virtually all Slavonic languages are 4 cacti, however, which ones are slightly more difficult and which are marginally easier? Any opinions on this? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 23 12 August 2009 at 5:07am | IP Logged | ||
I and several others have chewed up a lot of bandwidth on this topic. This thread titled "Three questions about Slavic languages" in the Beginners' Forum should best answer your question, although other threads have dealt with the same topic. http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=11569&PN=17 In my experience I'd rate them from easiest to hardest as follows (this is strictly based on linguistic characteristics and how I as a native speaker of English found them. It says nothing about the difficulty in obtaining sufficient learning materials in these languages) 1. Slovak 2. Polish 3. Czech 4. Rusyn 5. Macedonian 6. Upper or Lower Sorbian 7. Serbo-Croatian 8. Bulgarian 9. Slovenian 10. Ukrainian 11. Belorussian 12. Russian I don't really want to elaborate on how I came to this list since it a good part of it is subjective and whatever parts are objective have already been dealt with in my previous posts on the subject. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| paparaciii Diglot Senior Member Latvia Joined 6336 days ago 204 posts - 223 votes Speaks: Latvian*, Russian Studies: English | Message 3 of 23 12 August 2009 at 12:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hardest for whom?
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| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5838 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 4 of 23 12 August 2009 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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[@paparacii ---- This is all from the perspective of native English speakers obviously... On a second note, I know that ppl from Baltic States have serious reservations against Russia, but a lot of other Europeans would seriously envy you the ability to speak Russian, so it's not all bad]
--------------------------------------------- All this is news to me.. Typical, I picked the hardest one (Russian). Even the legendary Turaisiawase has struggled with that... But on the other hand, it's bigger and more useful than any of the other ones, unless you live in the particular country where they are spoken. I actually believed that Latvian and Lithuanian were Slavic languages. Perhaps I was wrong.. If not why aren't they on the list? EDIT: Romanian possibly also missing from the list? Edited by cordelia0507 on 12 August 2009 at 1:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hombre gordo Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5583 days ago 184 posts - 247 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Portuguese, Korean | Message 5 of 23 12 August 2009 at 1:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Latvian and Lithuanian are not Slavic languages, they are Baltic languages. Romanian is a Romance language which is apparantly closely related to Italian.
Chung, thanks for your contribution. Just out of curiosity, if we changed this thread to "the difficulty of Eastern European languages" as opposed to only Slavic languages and included the likes of the Baltic languages, Hungarian, Estonian and so one, how would your ranking of difficulty become? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Reykjavik Triglot Newbie UkraineRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5587 days ago 15 posts - 19 votes Speaks: Ukrainian, Russian*, English Studies: Icelandic | Message 6 of 23 12 August 2009 at 2:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't see how Russian can be more difficult than either Ukrainian or Belorussian. Both have slightly -more-
complex grammars and more varied vocabulary; Belorussian has slightly more regular spelling, yet I don't think this is a major bottleneck when learning Russian. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Reykjavik Triglot Newbie UkraineRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5587 days ago 15 posts - 19 votes Speaks: Ukrainian, Russian*, English Studies: Icelandic | Message 7 of 23 12 August 2009 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Also, Rusyn one of the easiest ones? I think it greatly depends on the variant you're learning, be it Pannonian, or
Slovak, or Carpathian, but Rusyn is one of the most archaic/stale (read: difficult) Slavic languages — somewhat like Icelandic of Slavics, both phonetically, vocabulary-wise and grammatically. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 8 of 23 12 August 2009 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Transcarpathian Rusyn has fixed stress which makes it a lot easier to learn (and is anomalous among the Eastern Slavonic languages since the kindred Ukrainian, Belorussian and Russian all have mobile stress).
The "Icelandic" of Slavic doesn't really exist anymore (unless you count Old Church Slavonic). Slovenian and Sorbian retain the dual, Russian retains the most cases, Bulgarian and Macedonian have expanded on the old tense system from Proto-Slavonic, Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian still maintain (more or less) pitch-accent distinctions of Proto-Slavonic. However none of the modern languages retain all of the traits of older versions of the Slavonic languages. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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