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Serbo-Croatian or Russian? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| eccodandini Newbie United States Joined 5378 days ago 21 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 8 25 December 2010 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I really want to take a dive into a Slavic language, and while Russian would be the easiest choice in terms of materials, I've been struck lately by Serbo-Croatian/Croatian/Serbian/whatever the correct term for it is at this particular time of the day... anyway. I'm wondering if anyone has studied both and found one to be easier. For Russian, I would either use Linguaphone's course or Assimil's course to begin with, and for Serbo-Croatian I would use Le Serbo-Croate sans peine, which I have read on the forum is regarded as one of the best programs Assimil ever put out.
Advice welcome! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5153 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 2 of 8 25 December 2010 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
Go with what strikes your interest most. All the Slavic languages (except Bulgarian) are of roughly comparable difficulty, and each has its little intricacies and nuances. Despite the lack of any knowledge of Russian, I'm almost certain that it is harder than SC. SC has predictable stress, is 100% phonetic, has very little palatalization, and has a somewhat simpler set of tenses in common use than Russian. Russian is not phonetic, displays florid palatalization, has unpredictable stress, is more idiomatic, and has a harder verb system. SC may be harder than Russian only in that it possesses an extra case (7 instead of 6, which is not hard) and tonal accents (which don't exist in many other languages > Japanese, Swedish, ancient Greek, Lithuanian, are a few); knowing tonal accents is only important if you really want native-like pronunciation in SC. I suggest you go with Russian. It may be slightly harder, but the literature you can read in it is mindbogglingly good and vast and you will also have access to about 250,000,000+ speakers, which is more than 10x as many as you can talk to in SC. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7036 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 8 25 December 2010 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
See also these threads: Russian and Serbian grammar question and Russian from Serbo-Croatian. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| canada38 Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5375 days ago 304 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Japanese | Message 4 of 8 25 December 2010 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Unless you plan to learn one of these languages to live, travel frequently, work, etc.
in a particular location, then in general, Russian would be much more useful. You'll also find many more resources in Russian, and probably more speakers to practice with too. I have not studied either language, so I cannot comment on their relative difficulty. That aside, if you are more interested in Serbo-Croatian, then you should study it instead. You can always go back and start Russian later, and learn it at half price since you'll already have become familiar with a Slavic language. If you honestly can't pick a favourite, and might spend equal time in both regions where these languages are spoken, then perhaps Russian might be more useful. I'm making an assumption here, so I'm open to correction, but I would think that more people in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Kosovo would be familiar with Russian, than there would be people familiar with BCS throughout Russia and the former Soviet Union. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| litovec Tetraglot Groupie Switzerland lingvometer.com Joined 5011 days ago 42 posts - 60 votes Speaks: German, Russian, French, English | Message 5 of 8 26 December 2010 at 12:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't know how does it work, but I've heard from several Serbo-Croatian speakers that it is easier for Russians to read SC texts than for Serbs to read Russian texts. The reason might be the simpler grammar of SC compared to Russian. I hope this information helps you make your decision.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tennisfan Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5240 days ago 130 posts - 247 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish Studies: German | Message 6 of 8 27 December 2010 at 8:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'll add something from my experience that I'm sure will get some flack, but might be helpful. And of course, your mileage may vary. I dabbled in both Russian and Serbo-Croatian a while back. I never studied either seriously but I did a thorough review of grammar and could hold elementary conversations in both. If I could start over with Russian, I would do it again ONLY speaking, not reading. For some reason, I had a hard time visualizing declensions when I read and wrote, but when I spoke, it came easily to me. I don't know anything about Assimil's Serbo-Croatian course, but if it uses a Latin script, it could be helpful in making the declensions easier to process when you read. Not that Cyrillic is hard by any stretch of the imagination, you could learn it in a day, easily. But constantly looking for the *changes* in words in Cyrillic proved a bit of a challenge for me, whereas with Latin script in Croatian, I had one less obstacle to see the declension. Then, if you decide to start with Serbo-Croatian and move to Russian later, the issue of declension in Russian won't be as foreign to you and might be easier to conquer.
Just a thought. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Taiga Diglot Groupie Australia Joined 6190 days ago 81 posts - 85 votes 5 sounds Speaks: English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Serbo-Croatian | Message 7 of 8 01 January 2011 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
I know a number of Polish and Czech speakers who are able to under BSC very well after interacting with BSC-speakers for a long time. For some reason, much less BSC speakers are able to pick up other Slavic languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5153 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 8 of 8 01 January 2011 at 6:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
Probably for the same reason that Brazilians find it harder to understand European Portuguese than vice versa. BCS has a more "open" vowel-heavy structure as opposed to the richer consonants (and clusters of them) of Western Slavic languages and palatalization in Russian. It's probably easier for those with more consonants and more highly concentrated consonants to understand a language with fewer of both than vice versa. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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