Easiest Slavic language for an English/Romance speaker?

Guest   Wed May 21, 2008 6:01 pm GMT
''The man asked which was the easiest Slavic language, not dialect...''

Bulgarian government has recognized the existence of Macedonian language.
If some nations (like Croatia in the case of Croatian or South Africa in the case of Afrikaans or Pakistan in the case of Urdu) want to call their language independent, that's their right.
Guest   Wed May 21, 2008 6:03 pm GMT
Yup, Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian just like Dutch and Flemish are dialects of German.
J.C.   Sat May 24, 2008 5:09 pm GMT
Russian?
After having studied Polish in an intensive course back in 1993 I'm feeling that learning Russian in much easier, specially because the pronunciation is much easier. Maybe it's just an impression but Russian seems to have much more latin vocabulary that Polish.

Dowidzenia до свидониа!
Guest   Sat May 24, 2008 9:20 pm GMT
Nazdravlye!
Skippy   Sat May 24, 2008 9:51 pm GMT
Is it true that there are a lot of Polish words stem from German?

What is the easiest West Slavic language for an English/German speaker? Polish and Czech have had a lot of historical contact with German, and the Czech Republic has had a pretty high degree of contact with the West in general.

What is the easiest South Slavic language? Slovenian has had a lot of contact with German and Italian, though Bulgarian tends to be offered as one of the easiest Slavic languages...

What is the easiest East Slavic language? Apparently Russian has a relative amount of Latin and (more so) Greek influence...
Guest   Sat May 24, 2008 10:16 pm GMT
Ucranian is easier for SouthernSlavic speakers to understand than Russian, although Russian vocabulary is closer, but Russian complex muffled/shifted phonetics destroys all ''potential'' understanding.
K. T.   Sat May 24, 2008 11:51 pm GMT
I have read that Bulgarian is the easiest-well, at least its grammar.

I enjoy Russian and SCB and continue to enjoy them. I'm not a genius, but I don't find them daunting. I think it's "love" for me. I like how they sound, so I don't mind the hard parts of the language.

Unless you are under a deadline and HAVE to learn a language, just learn the Slavic language you enjoy the most.
Guest   Sat May 24, 2008 11:55 pm GMT
>>What is the easiest West Slavic language for an English/German speaker?

West Slavic languages are among the hardest Slavic languages. For an English/German speaker Russian would be easier than Polish/Czech.

>>What is the easiest South Slavic language?
Bulgarian/Macedonian

>>Slovenian has had a lot of contact with German and Italian...
6 cases, 3 numbers (including DUAL) - if you think is easy so be it!

>>What is the easiest East Slavic language?

All of them are equally difficult but Russian would be easier since are more resources to learn it.

Some Slavic difficulties:

- palatalization
- consonant clusters - here I think the hardest is Polish/ the easiest is Bulgarian
- vocalic "r" and "l" - like in Serbian twister "na vrh brda vrba mrda"
- stress and accents - here Polish is easy but Serbian has 4 accents
- noun case system - most of them have 7 cases, Bulgarian just vocative
- perfective and imperfective aspect of verbs.

>>Apparently Russian has a relative amount of Latin and (more so) Greek influence...

You will not encounter to much of these words in everyday conversation. See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadesh_list_of_Slavic_languages

In fact the Slavic language with the biggest amount of Latin and Greek influence is Bulgarian - Latin from the vlahs who lived there prior to slavic invasion and Greek from Byzantine.
Guest   Sun May 25, 2008 12:10 am GMT
what do you mean, for an English/ Romance speaker?
J.C.   Sun May 25, 2008 6:14 am GMT
"Unless you are under a deadline and HAVE to learn a language, just learn the Slavic language you enjoy the most."
K-Tさん:I guess that's why I didn't go any further in Polish or Russian. I started Polish because I used to have a penfriend from Jelenia Góra and Russian just because it was free to learn it here in Japan but NEVER really needed any of them...
It's been interesting to learn them but I doubt I'll ever use them.
But it's funny because one day I was watching a Polish program on TV here in Japan...
J.C.   Sun May 25, 2008 2:32 pm GMT
I found a website of a Bulgarian sumo wrestler in Japan. He is very famous!!

http://www.kotooshu.net/

The Polish program I referred before is "The wooden dog". Does anyone know it?

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/kaigai/magictree/01_woodendog.html

Dowidzenia!!
Xie   Sun May 25, 2008 2:47 pm GMT
What really is easiest?

Indeed, since my native script is in no way phonetic and I never have anything phonetic in my mind before I learned English and pinyin consciously two years ago, the only linguistic part that really troubles me in learning is orthography only. Yet, thanks to my mom and myself, I'm not dyslexic. And thanks to my native script, I often don't learn words letter by letter, but chunk by chunk. I learn any sorts of mute letters, badly xxxxed up words (such as -ough words and any words with s), and vowel reduction merely by remembering chunks. Shame on me, I'm still sort of proud to say I still don't know how to teach you to read in pinyin in my native, because I can't even read it, and only linguists can!
Xie   Sun May 25, 2008 2:52 pm GMT
Happiest is the man who has all sorts of reading materials and graded grammar books and dictionaries interesting to him. In that sense, or in any sense, actually I think Russian should be the easiest (for this question), and for me, too, in general, since they have a lot of resources to start with and keep myself going.
J.C.   Sun May 25, 2008 4:00 pm GMT
"Happiest is the man who has all sorts of reading materials and graded grammar books and dictionaries interesting to him. "
Xie先生:I'd be even happier if I had the time to study ALL the materials I have bought through the years including some AWESOME Chinese materials(Standard Chinese Course from Peking University Press and Intermediate Chinese Reader...) I bought in Beijing in 1999...
As for Russian I taped a whole year of a TV course in Japan that goes from the basics to a decent conversation.I wish I had studied more seriously that year...
再见!
K. T.   Sun May 25, 2008 4:46 pm GMT
"It's been interesting to learn them but I doubt I'll ever use them." J. C. さん

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. I'd like to know why they love it-especially people who have NO
Polish ancestry and are not married to a Polish girl/guy.