Easiest Slavic language for an English/Romance speaker?
"This is my issue with Polish.
Frankly, most people would think I had "lost it" if I started studying Polish
"seriously". I'm willing to listen to anyone who loves this language, though."
K.Tさん：Maybe we should support each other to study Polska because most people accused me of being "el loco" for studying a language rare in Brazil (There are some poles in southern Brazil).I had an intensive course(6 months) at UFRJ in 1993.
Did you use a specific book? How about dictionaries?
Djiękuję!
J.C. : 外语教学与研究出版社 and 上海译文出版社 are two giant publishers of language books. All that the Chinese don't have are 1) FSI, 2) Michel Thomas, 3) Pimsleur, 4) Assimil, and 5) courses for rarely learned languages in China. Chinese isn't much behind Japanese as an important language of instruction, even though I've been often out of luck to find some for European languages. The most significant missing part is ORAL courses, but it's been quite impressive for a country like this. In 3 decades they've already come up with so many....
Well, back to "Slavic": most language programs might only be for Chinese students, but they could certainly study quite a few of them there...probably except Belorussian. Popularity explains everything.... and Russian has always been somewhat known, at least by name... so, even for a very "homogeneous" (this is actually false) country, the typical hot regional languages are now more or less the same as they are. Russian is still a typical academic example among linguists there...
(I think googling Pittsburgh and Polish would offer some pleasing results) Ah, yes, I've dreamt of learning quite a few European languages, now that I've had a good start (and a vicious bottleneck) with German... as I may have written, I'd naturally start with the easiest target, Russian, as a representative of my fourth would-be known lang. family. Both Polish and Russian should be pretty exotic, at least in terms of sounds, but for natural reasons I can't see much of Polish things... in real terms, for the very enthusiastic learner, there are always some prerequisites... while the CJK might be in no way transparent to most of you, all the European biggies are transparent to me, even without English, but that would probably be overkilling my time if I didn't start with English first. People like me rarely have a different second language, but there should be one, it would be French.
J. C.さん,
I'm still at the "I wonder if I like this language" level. I usually go for what is practical and hope that the language is easy on the ears. I do look at Polish once in a while and I saw a good, inexpensive resource for it (TY for about five dollars-recordings and book), but I passed on it-thinking that my family would be talking about this for sure.
"外语教学与研究出版社 and 上海译文出版社 are two giant publishers of language books. All that the Chinese don't have are 1) FSI, 2) Michel Thomas, 3) Pimsleur, 4) Assimil"
Xie先生:Thanks for the hints on the Chinese published and other materials.
I never heard of FSI or Michel Thomas, though.
I just finished a book in Japanese from the エキスプレス（Express) series and will start studying with the "Russian in exercises" from the Russky Yazik Publishers. As for dictionary, I'm using a small Russian-English-Russian dictionary from Oxford and also have a HUGE Russian-Japanese dictionary from Kenkyusha. I also have a Japanese-Russian dictionary but have to find it somewhere in my messy room...
Cheers!!
FSI=Foreign Service Institute. They are available through Barron's and perhaps Audio Forum. They are available for free (many of them) on the internet. Use a search engine and look up "FSI". They are old US programs.
Michel Thomas. He was a Polish polyglot of Jewish extraction. His method is the Michel Thomas Method. He taught many celebrities. I have listened to some of his samples on Youtube (German) and I borrowed a recording for one of his advanced courses to see why they are so expensive and what his method was. He has some very good memory tools for learners, but his accent in English and Spanish did not sound quite like that of a native speaker imho. Still, I am interested in his new Mandarin course. He didn't create this new course, I understand. He lived a very long life, but primarily he taught Spanish, French, German, and Italian, I think.
How-to-learn-any-language.com had an interesting "discussion" about MT. Prof. "A" and one of the creators of the course didn't exactly see eye to eye.
How can anyone really know what method is best anyway? I test-drive many methods for fun. I use anything that works. Most of the time I can use even a "terrible" book and get something out of it now. While some courses try to make it "SUPER FUN" to learn a course, how many people who learn a language are going to stick with it? While some people are far too concerned with how difficult a language is, others greatly overestimate how easy language learning is.
Macedonian.
No cases, just like Bulgarian, but even easier.
Unfortunately there is a dearth of resources for Macedonian. So the next option would be Bulgarian.
The easiest Slavic language for an English/Romance language speaker is, naturally, Romanian. That is because Romanian is a Romance language with a shitload of Slavic words in it, and a whole shitload of Slavic words that used to be in it, but were expelled from the language and replaced with Romance language words by Romanian scholars in the 1800's, to make the language sound more Latin, and less Slavic.
Among the pure Slavic languages, Macedonian is the easiest one.
since English is completly different from romance languages I doubt that you can put its speakers together.
Most people who speak English or a Romance language and are interested in learning a Slavic language are likely to have some knowledge of the other.