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Cacti from non-native speakers of English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6287 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 25 of 42 23 February 2010 at 3:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Russian perspective on languages:
0.5: Ukrainian, Belarus 1: Polish, Slovak, Bulgarian 2: Serbian, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portugese 2.5: Czech 3: English, French, Kazakh (and other Turkic: Yakut, Tatar, Tuvinian, Turkish, Azeri), Mongolian (Buryat) 3.5: German 4: Arabic, Korean 5: Chinese, Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese Edited by Siberiano on 24 February 2010 at 8:53am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5247 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 26 of 42 23 February 2010 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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What makes Czech more difficult than the other Slavic languagues?
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6287 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 27 of 42 23 February 2010 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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I might be not accurate, but it has a very specific phonetic system, which makes pronunciation very difficult, and more German loanwords. All together, as people who tried both Czech and Slovak told me, this puts Czech aside from other Slavic languages and makes learning much harder.
I'm not certain, though. Maybe it's correct to give Slovak 1.5, and Czech 2.5 cacti. Edited by Siberiano on 23 February 2010 at 5:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6950 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 28 of 42 23 February 2010 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | ||
I generally agree as I learned Slovak and Czech as foreign languages. Slovak comes off to me as a little bit closer to Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish than Czech does. It's not just about the German loanwords or pronunciation (largely melodic contours/intonation) in Czech but also certain aspects of inflection which are unique to Czech. Another thing to keep in mind is that the use of Colloquial or Common Czech can reduce even further the intelligibility with other Slavonic languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5247 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 29 of 42 23 February 2010 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK, that's interesting. I've always heard that Slovak and Czech were almost the same language, so I've was a little
surprised about the 3 cactus rating. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6950 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 30 of 42 23 February 2010 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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They are indeed almost the same and for purposes of mutual intelligibility among natives, they're about 85%-95% mutually intelligible. However for foreigners it's often a different story. When I first heard Czech (I was watching Czech news with my Slovak friends) after about 2 years of Slovak study, I had a hell of a time understanding it. It sounded like a strange Slovak dialect with noticeably different prosody (it says something if a non-fluent non-native's ears can pick up differences in prosody), unintelligible words (in certain instances they reminded me of Polish cognates), and lots of e's and i's where I was expecting a's, o's or u's as in Slovak. My native Slovak friends were a bit surprised that I was struggling so much with understanding it. I honestly didn't realize the full extent of Czech's distinction from Slovak until I subsequently started to learn Czech from scratch.
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| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5247 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 31 of 42 23 February 2010 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, mutual intelligibility among natives is one thing and among non-natives quite another. I speak Spanish fairly
well, and I understand most Spanish dialects and regional variants without problems. Spoken Portuguese, however, is for me very hard to understand, whereas native speakers of Spanish understand it a lot better, I think. I know foreigners who speak very good Norwegian but understand almost no Danish, whereas most Norwegians undertand spoken Danish quite well. Edited by tractor on 23 February 2010 at 9:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5603 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 32 of 42 25 February 2010 at 8:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Native speaker of Italian
1 cactus: Spanish, Portuguese 2 cacti: Romanian 3 cacti: English, German, Swedish, Dutch, Latin 4 cacti: Hindi, Indonesian 5 cacti: Mandarin 1 person has voted this message useful |
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