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Ukrainian v. Russian
Feel free to post links to previous topics on the question, I didn't really see any. What are some major differences between these two languages? How high is intelligibility between the two? If a Ukrainian met an American who spoke Russian, how willing would they be to adjust (same for a Russian with Ukrainian-speaking American).
Thanks ya'll!
<<If a Ukrainian met an American who spoke Russian, how willing would they be to adjust (same for a Russian with Ukrainian-speaking American). >>
Then you would speak English. Americans speak Russian so badly that Russians can't understand them in Russian, let alone Ukrainian. <<Oh, and of course, which is easier for an English speaker? :-) >> More or less the same. But what does it matter? They're both hard enough that failure is almost a given.
The intelligibility between Ukrainian and Russian is quite high. It's sort of like Spanish and Portuguese.
A random Ukrainian has quite a high chance of understanding Russian because most likely he learned it at some point in his life, and because Russian media has a heavy presence in Ukraine. Russians, on the other hand, will have more trouble understanding Ukrainian at first, because they'd have to get used to the language. Russian would be easier to learn because it's a major language that has more study materials and speakers who'd be willing to converse with you.
Also Russian has very few dialectic variants (someone from Vladivostok speaks more or less like someone from St-Petersburg). It has slang though. It's no easy language.
i am a native russian speaker. i was born and have lived all my life in ukraine. i can tell you russian and ukrainian are both difficult for native english speakers. ukrainian spelling may be easier than russian, thesaurus may be a little bit poorer, but ukrainian has 7 cases (russian - 6), an additional future form which does not exist in russian, 4 noun declensions (russian - 3). it will not be an exaggeration to say that all ukrainians have native or near-native command of russian, and if you speak intelligible russian you will be understood. more than that, seeing that you are a foreigner native ukrainian speakers whenever speaking to you will switch to russian. ukrainian is spoken in everyday life by the majority of people only in western ukraine and villages throughout the country, in kiev and central ukraine half the people speak russian, in cities in east and south russian is spoken, speaking ukrainian there means you are something of a hillbilly. to sum it up, i think, about 40% of people living in ukraine are native speakers of russian, 35% - of ukrainian and the rest - of so-called surzhyk which is a mixture of russian and ukrainian and is considered unacceptable. as to the last part of your question, if you speak ukrainian, native russian speakers, talking to you, as a rule, will not switch to it. russians that live in russia and never learnt ukrainiаn usually can grasp the general meaning but not the details of what is being said. besides, some words seem similar but mean different things.
Russian is ugly, full of impossible to pronounce consonant clusters.
Ucranian is beautiful, very vowel-friendly.
it is a legend we were told at school by ukrainian teachers when the ussr still existed. they tried to motivate us to learn a language which at that time was spoken even less than now. you know, then every schoolpupil in ukraine had the right to refuse to learn it. in fact, though i've heard such things many times, i don't think russian is an ugly language or that ukrainian is more beautiful. as to consonant clusters they are difficult only for foreigners. both languages have them.
Belarussian and Russian are mutually intelligible to higher degree.
The thing is, most Ukranians speak fluent Russian(at a native level) so Russians do not bother learning/speaking Ukranian.
I think Russian and Ukrainian share about 90% lexical similarity. Ukrainian has some Cryrillic letters that Russian does not use. I have never met a Ukrainian who could not speak Russian, but I think they will like it if you try to learn some Ukrainian. There is a Colloquial Ukrainian book and Penton Overseas/ Vocabulearn has a vocabulary booster with about 2,500 words. That should help you get started with Ukrainian.
I'm learning Russian with occasional exposure to Ukrainian. |