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Slavic Language Family Learning Sequence | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Nephilim Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 6927 days ago 363 posts - 368 votes  Speaks: English*, Polish | Message 9 of 51 22 May 2005 at 5:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello again Ardaschir. Apologies for not responding sooner but I’ve been absolutely swamped with exam marking and report writing. I’ve also been thinking long and hard about whether or not I want to commit to the study of Slavic languages as a project and I have decided to go ahead with it. Your point about the amount of transfer between the Slavic languages was very interesting. At the moment, after a fair amount of study, I consider myself to be semi-fluent in Polish and am working most days to expand my vocabulary. I now have a good idea of the overall grammatical structure of Polish and so I decided to carry out a bit of research to see how much actual transfer there was. I bought Colloquial Czech, Colloquial Slovene and Colloquial Croatian and Serbian (?) and found that even without the translations I could pick out quite a lot of the vocabulary and the grammar – I was quite surprised. I like the idea of selecting the order of languages based on geographic location presumably to avoid confusion. This means, then, that as Polish is western Slavonic language I really ought to go east (which in effect means Russian) or south.
Is there any reason why I shouldn’t study Russian and, say, Slovene at the same time? In your experience, is it better to always concentrate on one language at a time? Would you advise someone to do two at the same time? The reason I ask is because in an early post you mention (with Romance languages I think) that it’s good to study the whole family and see how they relate to each other. Also, I remember you saying that you learn primarily for the literature rather than conversation and you consider writing to be the least important of the skills to develop. I was wondering; when you learnt Russian you must have at some point written the words down to learn – did you write them in the printed book script or did you use the special (sometimes confusing) handwritten script where the letter ‘m’ becomes the letter ‘t’ and where the letter ‘d’ becomes the letter ‘g’. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Nephilim Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 6927 days ago 363 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English*, Polish | Message 10 of 51 22 May 2005 at 5:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Chung
I also used "Czesc, jak sie masz" and thought it was very good. I quite liked the continuing story of the love triangle between Robert Agnieszka and Michel. Also, the grammar was explained very well and the dialogues were easy to memorise. Have you used the second book in the series 'Kiedys wrocisz tu...? It takes you from intermediate level up to advanced. I would definitely recommend it. It's all in Polish but well organised and engaging. No love triangle this time I'm afraid - just lots of texts and dialogues. nephilim 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7038 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 11 of 51 23 May 2005 at 2:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Nephilim, I do think it is a fascinating intellectual task to learn an entire language family and to see how the various members relate to each other. When you have learned five or six more in addition to Polish, then I think there will be no harm in taking on two or more new ones at the same time, particularly if you learn intuitively by shadowing. However, at your early stage I think the risk of your confusing Russian and Slovene if you start them both at once is rather too high. Also, if you think several years down the road, you will probably be further along if you take them one at a time than if you take two at once. I would advise you to get a solid foundation in one before beginning another.
When I first started writing Russian I tried to print it, but I soon learned the cursive script and I have several notebooks full of it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Nephilim Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 6927 days ago 363 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English*, Polish | Message 12 of 51 23 May 2005 at 5:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Ardaschir – okay, this makes sense. I should have seen this myself when I noticed how similar they were. To me, ‘similar’ suggested a transfer of concepts (e.g. aspect) and lexis from one language to another. I now see that if transfer is one side of the linguistic coin, then potential confusion is the flipside. I think I’ll push my Polish as far as I can because it seems clear that the further I can go in my first Slavonic language the less work I’ll have to do with subsequent ones – in case of learning how to ‘chodzic’ before I ‘biegac’.
I did dabble with Russian several years ago and I found the cursive script is not as hard as it first appears – the trick of course is to make sure the tails join up in the right place or the whole thing looks illegible. Also, how organised are you with your language learning? I mean do you make weekly plans for what you want to cover or do you just let it happen. I remember reading somewhere (probably Gunnemark and Gethen) that polyglots were very organised and good with managing their time. Is this true of you? For anyone else out there who might want to have a (rather detailed) introduction to Slavonic languages to get an overview I would recommend ‘The Slavonic Languages’ by Comrie and Corbett Edited by administrator on 14 June 2005 at 9:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Martien Heptaglot Senior Member Netherlands martienvanwanrooij.n Joined 6887 days ago 134 posts - 148 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, Spanish, Turkish, Italian, French Studies: Portuguese, Serbo-Croatian, Latin, Swedish, Arabic (Written) | Message 13 of 51 14 June 2005 at 7:05am | IP Logged | ||
I am not an expert of Slavonic languages but as far as I know Macedonian also has this very simplified declension system and besides stress is more regular. Personally I consider irregular stress as one of the most difficult things to tackle especially when nouns can have different stress in different cases. Edited by Martien on 14 June 2005 at 7:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Linas Octoglot Senior Member Lithuania Joined 6694 days ago 253 posts - 279 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Lithuanian*, Russian, Latvian, French, English, German, Spanish, Polish Studies: Slovenian, Greek, Hungarian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese | Message 14 of 51 22 December 2005 at 7:24am | IP Logged | ||
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What concerns Bulgarian - this is certainly not the easiest and simplest of the Slavic languages. Although it lacks nominal declension, its verbal declension is far more complicated than that of Russian.
Byelorussian - the language is practically extinct. In towns everyone speaks Russian, while in the countryside perhaps only the older generation is using it. I have seen statictics that only about 37% of Byelarussians speak Bylarussian at home, but I think that even this figure is too high. Moreover, this language is hardly heard outside families, in public, in any case not in urban areas. What concern Ukrainian - the Ukraine could be divided into three large zones 1) Southern and Eastern Ukraine(Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzha, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Donetsk). Here practically only standard Russian is spoken 2) Western Ukraine(Rivne, Lutsk, L'viv, Ivano-Frankivsk,Ternopil', Chernivtsy, Zakarpattia) - here Ukrainian is spoken by the entire population and Russian is known only as a second language, sometimes quite imperfectly, since Ukrainians when they learned Russian to some degree when they can understand and somewhat to be understood, did not make any further effort. I had once a Western Ukrainian speaking to me in Russian or rather trying to speak me in Russian and I was barely able to follow him - he spoke with strongest Ukrainian accent with the admixture of many Ukrainian words. Of course native Ukranian of these areas also bears Russian influence, but it has not been so strong as to make it something other than Ukrainian. 3) Central Ukraine(Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, Poltava, Cherkassy,Zhytomyr, Vynnytsia, Khmel'nytsk) - it is the zone of Ukrainian/Russian bilinguism. Yet the language which is spoken here as the mother tongue is often not the Standard Russian and not the Standard Ukrainian, but a special dialect the mixture of both called "surzhyk" which is either Ukrainian with a strong admixture of Russian or Russian with a strong admixture of Ukrainian. If a person speaks "surzhyk", a speaker of Russian then is able to understand him quite easily, however understanding the standard Ukrainian for a Russian speaker is not so easy task, especially when it is spoken with the Western Ukrainian accent. Edited by Linas on 22 December 2005 at 8:00am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 6886 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes 2 sounds | Message 15 of 51 22 December 2005 at 11:38am | IP Logged | ||
Nice info about the Ukrainian language. I know from my studing Russian that the link between the two languages is sometimes small.
I've noticed that the Cyrillic cursive is much easier to write than printing for me. It's even spelt closer to English, like the zed sound in Russian is like English cursive. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| solidsnake Diglot Senior Member China Joined 6823 days ago 469 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 16 of 51 17 January 2006 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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If anyone out there could take the time to read this and answer by
giving your recommendation I would be most grateful! First a little background: I'm currently intensively studying mandarin and have reached what my native friends have called a high- intermediate nearing advanced level. I've been studying for only 8 months, with a 6 week immersion trip to china in the beginning. According to your breakdown, I would definitely fit into the lexically- talented, and grammatically challenged category. I am quicly nearing about a 4000 word vocabulary now and can effortlessly remember words i have learned a half-a year ago in passing. Yet grammar and essentially syntax is something I've put most of my strained energy towards (bear in mind mandarin is a relatively simple language grammatically) and still make occasional word order mistakes apparently. (incorrect placement of adverbs in the sentence, etc) Regardless, I'm nearing the point (4 more months) of moving on to my next language- which will either be russian or serbo-croatian. I plan to study both one after the other, and reach a comfortable, functional fluency in both. (to discuss art, politics, economic growth, trade, philosophy, etc) Bearing my particular language aptitude, which of the two (russian or serbo-croatian) will transfer more easily to the other (listening comprehension-wise) and which is grammatically, well syntactally at least, more simple and less stringent? Thank you for any insight. snake Edited by solidsnake on 18 January 2006 at 12:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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