Stryozyk Newbie United States Joined 5230 days ago 39 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian
| Message 1 of 4 14 December 2009 at 6:44am | IP Logged |
I've been looking into the Slavic languages recently because I love them very much and I was wondering how close
Slovenian is to Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. I read that they are "mutually intelligible to an extent", but as this can
probably be said of a lot of related languages, I was wondering to just what extent. For example, are they as close
as Czech and Slovak, or are they are different as Spanish and Portuguese? Or even more different?
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Fazla Hexaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6022 days ago 166 posts - 255 votes Speaks: Italian, Serbo-Croatian*, English, Russian, Portuguese, French Studies: Arabic (classical), German, Turkish, Mandarin
| Message 2 of 4 14 December 2009 at 10:47am | IP Logged |
I'd say Spanish and Portuguese... if not more different. Even if I speak fluently Bosnian and have a solid command of Russian, I can't really understand Slovenian, not in it's spoken, nor in it's written form. Sure, I understand many words because they are really similiar, but far from understanding an article in a newspaper. I must add that I have NEVER been exposed to Slovenian tough... so maybe with a little of exposure it would be different. Many older ex-yugos probably understand it more than us (younger generations), as they were more (albeit not that much) exposed to the Slovenian language. My parents don't really understand it much. Older generations in Slovenia speak a solid BCS though... and I think younger generations understand better BCS than we do Slovenian, because of Croatian songs that are popular in Slovenia. A lot of times as I'd be driving through Slovenia with my family I'd hear Croatian songs on their radio.
This is obviously all IMHO and other BCS speakers may feel different about the topic.
Edited by Fazla on 14 December 2009 at 10:50am
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Stryozyk Newbie United States Joined 5230 days ago 39 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian
| Message 3 of 4 14 December 2009 at 6:17pm | IP Logged |
Thank you so much for your answer. It is so helpful to have the perspective of a native speaker of one of these
languages and you told me exactly what I needed to know. Cheers!
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trance0 Pentaglot Groupie Slovenia Joined 5510 days ago 52 posts - 78 votes Speaks: Slovenian*, English, German, Croatian, Serbian
| Message 4 of 4 18 December 2009 at 7:44pm | IP Logged |
Well, I have little trouble understanding BCS, but I had it in primary school for a year, I was the last generation to have it. And I was exposed to the language through radio and TV in my childhood quite a lot. Slovene and BCS are more similar than most BCS native speakers care to admit. With a little exposure one can learn to at least passively understand the language with little trouble. I would say they are grammatically perhaps a bit more different than Spanish and Portuguese, but pronunciation-wise they are more similar.
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