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Slavic Language Family Learning Sequence | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| solidsnake Diglot Senior Member China Joined 6822 days ago 469 posts - 488 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 17 of 51 19 January 2006 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm sensing this topic falling deeper into the nether-regions of this
forum, so I'm bumping while its still fresh. Can anyone offer any advice on my question? [see above post] 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| laxxy Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6900 days ago 172 posts - 177 votes Speaks: Ukrainian, Russian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 18 of 51 04 February 2006 at 12:10pm | IP Logged | ||
Apparently no one here is familiar with both :) and neither am I. People seem to say that Bulgarian is grammatically the easiest for an English speaker. Not sure about Serbo-Croatian, but Russian, Ukrainian and Polish are pretty much in the same ballpark with respect to grammar (Russian has probably the least phonetic spelling out of the three, though). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SteveP Tetraglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 6619 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English*, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian | Message 19 of 51 06 March 2006 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hmmm. Interesting thread.
I would take issue with the idea that Russian, Ukrainian and Polish are in the same ballpark with respect to Grammar. I learned Polish thoroughly and amassed a large vocabulary and a good level of grammatical competence. As for Russian, I only took classes in it for a few months and worked through some basic coursebooks, but it was enough for me to notice plenty of differences in the grammar - which made the experience more fun and ensured that I didn't get the two languages confused. I think a couple of big differences are in the way the two languages express the concepts "to be" and "to have" (in the sense of possession and more abstract senses.) Polish has straightfoward (although irregular) verbs for these concepts, whereas Russian does things rather differently - and thats all I'm saying, as I wouldn't like to "speak of what I know not". The Eastern and Western branches of Slavonic languages would seem to form seperate ballparks, although perhaps football pitches would go down better. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| laxxy Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6900 days ago 172 posts - 177 votes Speaks: Ukrainian, Russian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 20 of 51 07 March 2006 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, I've never really learned Polish formally (it's just naturally understandable to me). But the grammar really seems similar -- Polish sentences don't feel too ungrammatical, just somewhat unusual. Like possession that you mentioned: it is typically expressed in Russian (unlike Ukrainian and Polish, which both use a verb) through "u menja est'" ("by me exists") or similar forms, but it is still possible to say "ja imeju mashinu" (literally, "I have a car")in Russian, it's just not an expression that one often uses in common speach, and probably not the one they would have you drilled in a two-month course of Russian. Similarly almost all the vocabulary overlaps with either Russian or Ukrainian, but often not with the more common words of the other language, and the meaning may change quite a bit in the process. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| nox Diglot Groupie Croatia Joined 6642 days ago 62 posts - 62 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English Studies: German | Message 21 of 51 15 March 2006 at 7:06am | IP Logged | ||
It's the same for Croatian, Bosninan and Serbian. After thewar, and independence Serbo-Croatian stopped to 'exist'. Althiugh we all fully understand each other, because of national and political reasons, those are considered as the seperate languages. I could edit my profile and suddenly become a pentaglot (english, croatian, bosnian, serbian, serbo-croatian)! Differences are very small, but because of them, and because of nationalism, it is not Serbo-Croatian! In my personal opinion, Bosnian never existed. Bosna was effected by Croatia and Serbia (I mean linguistically). Bosna and Herzegovina is now a federation of Bosnians, Croatian and Serbians, and that is why they call 'their' language Bosnian (their antheme has no lyrics, only music - they couldn't agree - after all, there was a war, about 10 years ago..) I'm sorry if didn't see any sense in the text above, but I just wanted to clear that out.. I don't mind when you call it Serbo-Croatian, because the differences are small. My point in this is that if you learn any of those, you will understand the others ones. As much as I've heard, foreigns more prefer listening Croatian (accents are VERY differnet..) - it has a softer accent, and can sound like Italian. For those interested in learning 'the language', Croatian is a very complex one. Many tenses (but only 3 or 4 in colloquial use), 3 word genders, case system (7 cases)... Complex grammar, many rules etc.. Ifg you learn this one first, you may fing other easier. I understand most of Czechs, Polish and Slovenians (almost everything with Slovenians) speaking.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| msherl Newbie United Kingdom Joined 7012 days ago 14 posts - 14 votes Studies: Serbo-Croatian | Message 22 of 51 05 April 2006 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
I have studied both Russian and Serbo-Croat (though not to a fluent level) and can give you my opinion on the matter. I find Russian, undoubtedly, the most difficult of the two to learn, though not by a large amount. The reasons are both lexical and grammatical. Lexically, I find it harder to memorise Russian words (though I'm not quite sure why this is). Grammatically, Russian has a much more intricate set of verbs to describe motion and the gentive case is much more difficult in the plural. However, syntactically, Serbo-Croat is certainly more difficult as there are a set of rules to determine the order of words known as "enclitics" which appear in the language frequently. In practise though you should soon get used to what "feels" right. I'll try and post more on the matter when I have more time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| nox Diglot Groupie Croatia Joined 6642 days ago 62 posts - 62 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English Studies: German | Message 23 of 51 13 April 2006 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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What would it be like for me, a Croatian native speaker, to learn Russian? Are there any similarities in, say, declinsions? Or a noun gender? I'm not really interested in learning Russian, not for now, I'm just curious. If anyone has has time and knowledge about this, I'm looking forward to read it. Edited by nox on 13 April 2006 at 5:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| brumblebee Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6556 days ago 206 posts - 212 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese | Message 24 of 51 10 May 2006 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Is Croatian similar to Slovenian? Croatia and Slovenia border each other, so I always assumed that their languages would be very close in lexicon. How difficult is Slovenian? I always thought that it would be an interesting language to study, so I'm just asking.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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