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"Easy" Slavic Language? | ||
Tags: Easiness | Slavic Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6455 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes  Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 33 of 44 02 October 2008 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, useless in the sense that almost no one speaks Slovio. However, it might be a good way to get started with Slavic languages in general and maybe if you speak Slovio well you can even understand a little bit of Russian/Polish/Bulgarian... If I wanted to learn a Slavic language and didn't know which one, I might consider learning some Slovio first, as a propaedeutic step. It's the same thing with Interlingua for the Romance language family. Esperanto is too eclectic to give you the same kind of advantage. But keep in mind that among the world's 6000 or so languages, probably 95% are less useful than Esperanto! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6229 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 34 of 44 02 October 2008 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I found my Esperanto fairly useful for Polish, really. A couple of features of Esperanto that had always driven me a bit nuts suddenly made perfect sense as I saw them in Polish. Also, perhaps 5% of Esperanto vocabulary is Slavic: it's not a lot, but when you're grasping for a first toehold, it does help. Esperanto is nowhere near enough to make Polish even minimally intelligible, but it was created by a native Polish speaker and reflects Polish in more ways than you'd think at a glance.
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| Deecab Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5751 days ago 106 posts - 108 votes Speaks: English, Korean* Studies: Mandarin | Message 35 of 44 02 October 2008 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Volte, I appreciate your insight on Russian and Polish and found it helpful. However, I disagree that Korean and Mandarin are harder to pronounce than both.
I'll give you Mandarin because of tones but Korean? Edited by Deecab on 02 October 2008 at 6:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 5938 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 36 of 44 03 October 2008 at 2:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6229 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 37 of 44 03 October 2008 at 3:16am | IP Logged | |||||
I consider Korean harder to pronounce than Mandarin, even taking tones into account. I can be minimally comprehensible in Mandarin, although I probably sound terrible. I can't even hear Korean correctly, much less produce it. The tense consonants are perhaps the apex of Korean's phonetic difficulty, but they're not the only difficult thing. Korean may not look that hard on paper, but in practice, I find it a lot harder than anything else I've encountered, including click languages and tonal languages. I'm starting moving towards remedying this: I've just ordered a fair amount of material on learning Korean, and should be able to start seriously using it in December/January. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5824 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 38 of 44 03 October 2008 at 11:07am | IP Logged | |||||
My claim that Esperanto is useless was based mostly on the fact that it doesn't have specific geographical and cultural associations. Slovio is also deprived of those two vital components. At least Esperanto has a "population" of non-native speakers, which makes it slightly less nonsensical. When I learn a language, I want to be able to explore a new place, immense myself in a new culture. Sheer number of speakers is also important but not to the exclusion of everything else. That's why I think, languages like Esperanto and Slovio are no fun at all. Edited by Sennin on 03 October 2008 at 11:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| zooplah Diglot Senior Member United States zooplah.farvista.net Joined 6158 days ago 100 posts - 116 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: German | Message 39 of 44 15 June 2013 at 8:54am | IP Logged | |||||
Tion mi tute ne komprenas. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4799 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 40 of 44 15 June 2013 at 9:22am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, than just choose your Slavic language based on the target culture. I suppose to give you any advice on that, I would need to know more about you, about what you like and are looking for. I'd say Russian and Polish are the easiest choices. Not necessarily from the point of view of linguistics. But there are the most learning resources, the most speakers (well, Ukrainian might have more than Polish, not sure now) and quite the widest range of cultural pieces and directions to choose from. A smaller language like Czech (or Slovak or Croatian and so on) could be awesome when someone knows already what they'll enjoy and that it is there. Let me tell you openly about Czech culture and reality: We don't have many horror writers (unless you count in the journalists), Prague becomes Atlantis every ten years (2002 and last week, so we could be ok for a few years now) and I could count good music bands on one hand (the rest is crap like the most bands anywhere but 1% of Czech bands is much less in absolute numbers than 1% of American bands), our history is quite sad and we are in the international newspapers only when something really embarassing happens (at least four times during the last year or so if I remember correctly). There is a good Czech movie from time to time but only one or two interesting tv shows (and at least ten times as many stupid soap operas). We've got a few good sci-fi/fantasy authors (but the Polish and Russians have more and even better). But we've got Jára Cimrman!(basicaly Czech Leonardo da Vinci created by one theatre, members of which are dying out. One of the best parts of the Czech culture.I mean Jára Cimrman, not dying out of course.). And the black humour, that's great. Lately it clashes a lot with that political-corectness-at-all-costs nonsense. So, what I wanted to tell you. Unless you know what exactly you are after and that smaller language xy will satisfy your needs, choose a larger language with wider options. Russian and Polish are the logical ones to consider. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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