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Similarities between Czech and German? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Sionis Newbie United States Joined 4901 days ago 33 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Romanian | Message 1 of 16 13 August 2011 at 11:21am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm keep reading about similarities between the two languages becasue of the German influence over the Czechoslovakia and the Czech language, but in my Czech studies I can't see any relations to German (even though my knowledge of German is limited).
Is there something I'm missing or is the influence something on the lines of past vocabulary? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sionis Newbie United States Joined 4901 days ago 33 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Romanian | Message 2 of 16 13 August 2011 at 11:23am | IP Logged | ||
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Also, does anyone have any workbook recommendations for someone learning Czech? The only ones I'm seeing are $100+ so I don't want to slip up a get a bad workbook without doing some research.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| floydak Tetraglot Groupie Slovakia Joined 4855 days ago 60 posts - 85 votes  Speaks: Slovak*, English, German, Spanish Studies: French | Message 3 of 16 13 August 2011 at 11:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, to be honest, I don't think there are really some big similarities.
Having good knowledge about both languages, there might be some words in Czech derived from German (even plenty), and maybe more in regions closer to German borders, but! in general I don't think there are bigger grammar similarities than in German/Polish or German/Slovak. This languages (german/czech) are quite different in virtualy everything. And for Czech native it probably would be harder(or same hard) to achieve German fluency than english/spanish/french fluency. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fnord Triglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5034 days ago 71 posts - 124 votes Speaks: German*, Swiss-German, English Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch | Message 4 of 16 13 August 2011 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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In Europa, there are three "big" language families:
- Germanic (mainly English, German, Dutch, Scandinavian and others) - Romance (Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian...) - Balto-Slavic (Russian, Ukirainian, Polish, Czech & Slovak, Serbo-Croation & Slovenian...) Languages share considerably more similarities within their respective groups than to others. As a native speaker of German, I could gather quite a lot of information from Dutch texts (and even some from spoken Dutch), without having learnt the language - yet Czech, which is also spoken in a neighboring country, seems almost totally unintelligible to me. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 5 of 16 13 August 2011 at 6:43pm | IP Logged | ||
It's a remarkable fact that despite centuries of rule and oppression by a foreign language/culture, most languages will retain the unique features of grammar and even pronunciation that existed in them and their ancestors from the beginning. Czech may have been influenced by German but is still 100% a Slavic language. Likewise Greek may have been influenced by Turkish yet it is 100% Indo-European (Hellenic) and not Altaic at all. Arabic may have influenced Spanish but Spanish is clearly still a Romance language and not a bit Semitic. Take Hungarian: most of it's vocabulary is based on non-Hungarian roots, mostly Slavic, German, Turkic, etc. Yet the language is totally Finno-Ugric and not at all alike grammatically or lexically even with these other influencing languages. It seems that with most languages the rule is total replacement or co-existence side by side. The cases of complex mixed languages (rather than a pidgin) are the rare exceptions. Michif, Mednyj Aleut, and Cappadocian Greek come to mind. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Butterworth Diglot Newbie Czech Republic Joined 4887 days ago 7 posts - 9 votes Speaks: Czech*, EnglishC1 Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 6 of 16 14 August 2011 at 3:11am | IP Logged | ||
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Lots of them, very informal speech -
wiki page 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6585 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 7 of 16 14 August 2011 at 7:50am | IP Logged | ||
It's only a guess, but I would say 70-80% of these expressions can be found in Slovak as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sionis Newbie United States Joined 4901 days ago 33 posts - 34 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Romanian | Message 8 of 16 15 August 2011 at 4:08am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you all for the answers.
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