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Best Slavic Language to Start With? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Swift Senior Member Ireland Joined 4599 days ago 137 posts - 191 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French, Russian | Message 1 of 31 29 May 2012 at 12:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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I am curious as to which Slavic language is the best to start with if one is interested
in them in general. I am not intending on taking up one of these languages for at least a year, but I am just curious to know which language gives the strongest foundation in the language family or the most advantages to study other similar languages. This isn't so much of an advice question as a question of curiousity. I'm sure there is no simple answer for this and that many people will have different opinions, which is something I really enjoy about languages. The thing that interests me the most is the effect that the divide between languages which use the latin or the cyrillic alphabet would have on possible answers. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5057 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish | Message 2 of 31 29 May 2012 at 12:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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This topic has been oft revisited and one of the best responses has been Professor Arguelles's response in
in this thread
Although I disagree with the point that he makes about Bulgarian being "simplified", if cases are your weak point and if you've had experience with Romance languages, then certainly Bulgarian would be more familiar to you than the others and thus be simpler to get a grasp on. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5720 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 3 of 31 29 May 2012 at 12:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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The only problem I see with studying Bulgarian instead of Russian is that there are far more resources and content for Russian than for Bulgarian, as well as something like 10 times as many native speakers.
Unless you have a special reason, such as living in Bulgaria or talking to Bulgarian family and friends, I can't see using Bulgarian all that much, and I don't know anything about Bulgarian newspapers, film or literature, so I don't know how much opportunity there is to read or watch things in Bulgarian, but I'm sure Kartof could shed some light on this. Of course, like most countries with non-native English speakers, I'm sure most young Bulgarians know some English (I used to work with some Bulgarians, and they spoke English well). I guess the question is: how hard are Russian cases? I've studied some Latin and realize that languages that use a lot of cases get pretty confusing. I think Bulgarian also has a definite article while Russian doesn't. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5057 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish | Message 4 of 31 29 May 2012 at 1:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh, I wasn't advocating learning Bulgarian over Russian, I just meant to shine some light on as to why Prof.
Arguelles probably stated that Bulgarian is "simplified" compared to other Slavic languages which may be misleading on its own if you're not aware as to what he was referring. The OP asked to know which language would offer the strongest foundation in learning other Slavic languages and if, within this, similar grammatical structures was the most heavily weighed category, this would make Bulgarian the worst candidate due to a lack of cases. Certainly Russian would be a better choice for a first time learner due to the sheer number of speakers and the literature available in Russian. I would say though that Bulgarian poets have been especially prolific within the category of literature and that the Bulgarian movie industry has had its share of successes. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Irish_Goon Senior Member United States Joined 6406 days ago 117 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English* | Message 5 of 31 29 May 2012 at 5:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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If you want to tackle the bear of this language group then go with Russian. Cyrillic is hard as hell but interesting.
However I am partial to Czech as they are responsible for me being interested in languages and the friends I have met from there are great. Bottom line......who cares, do what you like! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7147 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 6 of 31 29 May 2012 at 6:01am | IP Logged | |||||
I've already spilled my guts on Slavonic languages in general, and you can find me shooting my mouth off in various threads under "Links" in the Balto-Slavonic Profile. Yet if you're genuinely indifferent among your choices in the group, then I'd suggest that you flip a coin between Russian and Slovak. My top 3 reasons why Russian could be a plausible choice as an otherwise indifferent Anglophone's first Slavonic language: 1) There's a lot of material and support available which should tide you over in rough spots or provide encouragement to keep working at it. 2) You'll get a sense for how inflection works and the basic principles that you'd pick up from Russian should make you rather familiar with the same or similar concepts applied in most of the other Slavonic languages (details naturally vary within the group, but if you're used to verbs of motion in Russian, then you shouldn't have your mind blown when reading about them in Czech or Polish, for example). 3) You may as well get over the psychological hump of learning a different alphabet at the beginning. If you ever were to study Russian, you'd probably conclude that the preconception of Russian's difficulty stemming from using Cyrillic to be laughably exaggerated. In other words, learning Cyrillic as someone familiar only with Latin script will likely turn out to be small potatoes as you'll soon be wrestling with more substantive concepts in morphology and phonology that distinguish Russian from the non-Slavonic languages that you already know. My top 3 reasons why Slovak could be a plausible choice as an otherwise indifferent Anglophone's first Slavonic language: 1) Slovak has a reputation among non-Slovak Slavs to be the most understandable of the Slavonic languages without prior training/exposure. This is partially anecdotal since it relies on "feel" or getting the gist of something, but this "feeling" can be explained partially by Slovak's development. Basically Slovak is classified as a Western Slavonic language based on its high similarity to Czech and its noticeable similarity to Polish and Sorbian languages (this similarity is more apparent in speech than print since Polish and Sorbian spelling conventions may make Slovak in print appear less similar to the uninformed observer). On the other hand, Slovak has certain traits in its morphology and phonology that make it more appear or sound similar to Southern Slavonic languages (i.e. Slovenian, BCMS/Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Bulgarian) in ways that Czech, Polish and Sorbian languages do not. Slovak also has a few traits that make it seem more intelligible to the average monoglot Eastern Slav (i.e. Belorussian, Russian, Rusyn, Ukrainian) which are lacking in the other Slavonic languages. See this post for some examples of how Slovak resembles several Slavonic languages. As I've noted once in a short but nonscientific way, Slovak has a lot of A but still a bit of B and C (with A, B and C representing sets of characteristics typical for each of Western, Southern and Eastern Slavonic respectively). 2) Although the amount of learning material and support available to learners of Slovak is puny compared to what's available to those learning Russian, the situation is improving and is much better than it was when I started to learn Slovak. There is now at least a core of solid material in print in addition to a small but respectable set of online courses and dictionaries. See the information under "Books" and "Links" in the Slovak Profile for what I mean. 3) Slovak seems to combine the best and worst of what's found in the Slavonic languages, and if you can get a good grasp of it, you'll be mentally prepared for a fair bit of what could await for learning the other languages (it's somewhat tied to point 1)). In Slovak you'll see verbal aspect, declension and vocabulary that has cognates in other Slavonic languages. However to make things a bit easier to learn, Slovak uses fixed stress unlike Russian, Bulgarian or Ukrainian (among others) which use mobile stress, and it doesn't have quite as intricate a setup for verbs of motion as in Czech, Polish, Russian, Belorussian or Ukrainian. In addition its sets of inflectional endings don't get subdivided into as many ways as say Czech, but neither does Slovak combine or merge them as in BCMS/SC to say nothing of Bulgarian and Macedonian which have pretty much lost the declension (only to have become a royal pain to learn for conjugation because of all sorts of distinctions that go beyond what the ancestral Slavonic conjugation likely had). I suppose that the drawback of this "simplifcation" is that you could end up secretly complaining why certain Slavonic languages need to make things tough unlike Slovak, but that's life. P.S. My first Slavonic language was Polish for which I began under the guidance of a very good instructor. What I've noted in this post is done with the benefit of hindsight or several years of blundering about. If I were in the OP's shoes, and somehow had already accumulated what I now know about Slavonic languages, I wouldn't choose Polish as my first Slavonic language if I were to begin learning it by myself. However having that instructor for my beginners' Polish class many years ago was a stroke of good luck and in retrospect more than compensated for whatever shortcomings I would have had if I had somehow decided to learn Polish on my own as my first Slavonic language. Edited by Chung on 29 May 2012 at 6:33am 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4850 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 7 of 31 29 May 2012 at 6:32am | IP Logged | |||||
Conversationally I find Bulgarian much easier. But it's the declension that makes me much less confident since it's my Achilles' heel.
A LOT. I think I'll be original, but... Ukrainian maybe? At least Polish conlangers praise its usefulness in understanding Russian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Serbian, Polish and Czech. And I guess they are more or less right. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Micoh Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5732 days ago 13 posts - 24 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 8 of 31 29 May 2012 at 6:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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Mithridates of Page F30 had a couple short articles
talking about this too: the best gateway Slavic language. At first he suggested Croation but then he tweaked his answer to Serbian. Check it out! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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