# All Slavic languages: The degree of difficulty



## languageinterest

Which Slavic languages are hardest for English speakers to learn, in order? Which would be hardest out of them and why?


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## Ptak

I think all of them are hard for English speakers 

But Polish words always have a stress on the penultimate syllable, so *maybe* Polish is a little easier


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## Jana337

Ptak said:


> But Polish words always have a stress on the penultimate syllable


Czech words on the first one. And you don't have to learn a new alphabet. 

But learners should also consider the availability of resources; Russian is the most generous language, by a huge margin. 

Grammarwise, the differences between Slavic languages are rather minuscule.


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## Q-cumber

I guess the Russian and other languages that use Cyrillic alphabet are difficult for English speakers to learn.


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## Ptak

Jana337 said:


> Czech words on the first one.


Heh, it's not so easy to pronounce 

P.S. when the word is long.


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## Athaulf

Q-cumber said:


> I guess the Russian and other languages that use Cyrillic alphabet are difficult for English speakers to learn.



I think that for an English speaker, the issues of alphabet and orthography are trivial compared to the vocabulary and grammar.


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## Ptak

Athaulf said:


> I think that for an English speaker, the issues of alphabet and orthography are trivial compared to the vocabulary and grammar.


Yes. I learn Ancient Greek. The ALPHABET is nothing compared with the rest!!


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## Athaulf

Jana337 said:


> Grammarwise, the differences between Slavic languages are rather minuscule.



Except for Bulgarian and Macedonian versus the rest, I'd say.  The lack of noun inflections could perhaps make those languages somewhat easier for English speakers, at least at the beginner level.


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## Jana337

Athaulf said:


> I think that for an English speaker, the issues of alphabet and orthography are trivial compared to the vocabulary and grammar.


That's right but unless you learn a new script as a child, it's really hard to scan a page quickly to find a word you need (or is it just me?). It can be frustrating at times but it will hardly seal your decision to learn a particular language. 

The moral is: If you want to learn a Slavic language, let your heart make the choice. Your brain will hate you anyway.


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## Anatoli

Bulgarian/Macedonian don't have cases - a very difficult aspect of the rest of the Slavic languages but they do have definite/indefinite concept.

--
Learning a new alphabet like Cyrillic is not hard and would only take a week (maximum) to master. It's the least hurdle, IMHO.

Edit:
Sorry, other users already mentioned this.


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## Thomas1

I'd guess each has its particularities. I'd like to see what English-native speakers would say, though. 

Tom


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## Ptak

Jana337 said:


> but unless you learn a new script as a child, it's really hard to scan a page quickly


Oh no. I don't agree. I learn Ancient Greek for a year. I can quickly read texts and find words. I could do it as early as in September


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## Athaulf

languageinterest said:


> Which Slavic languages are hardest for English speakers to learn, in order? Which would be hardest out of them and why?



My hypothesis is that the hardest one would likely be Russian or Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian, because of the stress. I'm not aware of any significant complexities of, say, Polish, Czech, or Slovak that these ones wouldn't have, while their mindblowingly complicated stress rules greatly add to their difficulty.


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## niko

Ptak said:


> I think all of them are hard for English speakers
> 
> But Polish words always have a stress on the penultimate syllable, so *maybe* Polish is a little easier



This is a personnal feeling which worth what it worth (that is to say not much  ), but as a learner of Polish & Russian, I'd say that Polish is harder. Not from far though 
The accent is something (ok, not a little thing) but declensions and conjugation in Polish are so complicated !
Though in the end, I agree with Jana : whatever you'll choose, your brain will hate you


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## tom_in_bahia

My aunt's first husband was Polish, her second was Slovak, and her third is Polish. The second one we call Radek number 1 and the third husband is Radek number 2 (we don't talk about the second husband though because it was for greencard purposes and he was a jerk. Aside from that, at my father's restaurant we've frequently had Czech Czicks (excuse the pun) who worked as waitresses (usually under the table - without papers). So, I've had some interesting exposure to both Czech and (especially) Polish throughout my life.

In my opinion, I think every language has it's quirks that make it difficult for a speaker of a different language.

Anyway, when I was in college I wanted to take Polish, but it wasn't available, however Czech was. I took a little bit and got into the interesting differences from English (perfective and imperfective verbs, lack of articles, etc.). Having studied Spanish and Portuguese extensively, I found things like the 6-person verbal conjugations and concept of the reflexive particle easy to understand - if not altogether similar. Naturally, the cases were the hardest.

I couldn't continue after the first semester, but I picked up a Polish grammar (Teach yourself style) and ditched the Czech avenue - sorry to those of you who speak Czech, but since I had to choose, it made sense to go with the one that 2 of my uncles, 2 of my cousins and the wife of another cousin speak, cause I'd be able to practice more often.

I went to Poland this summer for 3 weeks. I went to Rybnyk, a small town near Stalowa Wola, and Ketrzyn (for my cousin's wedding). I had to spend a few days alone with my cousin's family, who didn't speak any English while he went off to visit his girlfriend and found myself understanding the case endings through context a lot easier than when I tried to memorize them one by one out of the grammar. I would really like to continue with Polish, because I think it's an interesting language - any suggestions for beginners: types of books, websites, programs, etc.?


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## Jana337

Welcome! 

Thanks for sharing. For suggestions, please join this thread and read our resources sticky. It would be off-topic here.


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## vput

Each Slavic language has its own difficulties for a native English speaker.

*Belorussian*: Somewhat similar to Ukrainian or Russian, but virtually no decent resources available.

*Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian*: Cyrillic (Serbian only) or Latin alphabet; free stress (but not on last syllable); pitch/tone distinctions; long and short vowels; 6-7 cases (the merging of the dative and locative make it arguable whether there are 7 cases as is traditionally asserted); 2 future tenses, 4 past tenses; vocabulary in Croatian is notoriously puristic and "international" loanwords are not as common as in other Slavic languages. Serbian on the other hand is less puristic and "international" loanwords are more common than in Croatian; a few decent resources available

*Bulgarian*: Cyrillic alphabet; free stress; all vowels are short; virtually no case inflections (except for pronouns and a few nouns) but many verb tenses and moods; part of the Balkan "Sprachbund" (i.e. definite suffix, no infinitive); certain similarities to Russian vocabulary (probably because of common Eastern Orthodox religion/culture); a few decent resources available

*Czech*: Latin alphabet; fixed stress; long and short vowels; 7 cases; vocabulary in Czech is quite puristic and "international" loanwords are not as common as in other Slavic languages; some decent resources available

*Macedonian*: Similar to Bulgarian EXCEPT that standard Macedonian has stress that's fixed on the third-last syllable and even fewer decent resources

*Polish*: Latin alphabet; fixed stress; all vowels are short; 2 nasal vowels; 7 cases; some decent resources available

*Russian*: Cyrillic alphabet; free stress; all vowels are short; vowel reduction (i.e. pronunciation of vowels depends on whether they are stressed or unstressed, but stress isn't indicated with diacritical marks in most Russian texts.); 6-8 cases (depending on how you look at it); many decent resources available.

*Slovak*: Latin alphabet; fixed stress; long and short vowels; 6 cases; a few decent resources available.

*Slovenian*: Latin alphabet; free stress; pitch/tone/length distinctions; 6 cases; regular use of dual (in addition to singular and plural); vocabulary in Slovenian is quite puristic and "international" loanwords are not as common as in other Slavic languages; certain similarities to Western Slavic languages that aren't shared by other Southern Slavic languages; virtually no decent resources available (Colloquial Slovene and Teach Yourself Slovene are inadequate and much less thorough than courses in the same series for other languages.)

*Sorbian*: Latin alphabet; fixed stress; all vowels are short; 7 cases; regular use of dual (in addition to singular and plural); no decent resources available (maybe there are some in German, but I haven't seen any in English)

*Ukrainian*: Somewhat similar to Russian, but seems to have quite a lot of loanwords from Polish, a few decent resources available.

Your choice of language may depend on what you find to be more difficult. Does unpredictable pronunciation cause more problems? Is your weakness in declension? Do you get frustrated by lots of conjugations? The presence of loanwords may also be helpful and some Slavic languages compared to others have stronger puristic tendencies as noted above.

e.g. airplane, car, computer, history, music

Croatian: zrakoplov; auto(mobil); kompjutor/računalo; povijest ("historija" is less common); glazba
Czech: letadlo; auto; počítač; dějiny; hudba
Polish: samolot; samochód; komputer; historia; muzyka
Russian: самолет (samolot); автомобиль (avtomobil'); компьютер (kompyuter); история (istoriya); музыка (muzyka)
Serbian: avion (from French); auto(mobil); kompjuter/računar; istorija ("povest" is less common); muzika
Slovak: lietadlo; auto; počítač; dejiny; hudba
Slovenian: zrakoplov; avtomobil/vozilo; računalnik; zgodovina ("historija" is rarely used); glasba

In general, Bulgarian and Macedonian on one end and Russian at the other can represent a type of contrast. Bulgarian and Macedonian have the most tenses, but the fewest cases; Russian has the fewest tenses, but the most cases (if you hold that Russian has 8 cases instead of 6).

Slovenian and Sorbian represent a different sort of difficulty because these languages use the dual regularly, while the other Slavic languages have lost almost all of the dual declensions. Thus in Slovenian or Sorbian, you need to decline or conjugate based on whether the subject or objects come as one, two or more than two.

Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian can be tricky because they use distinctions in tone/pitch/length to distinguish between different cases or conjugations. However, the spelling doesn't indicate such distinctions so you have to learn it "by feel". Athaulf is right in that it can be complicated for foreigners.

You can also consider the amount of resources as someone suggested. Russian's difficulty is alleviated by the fact that there are about 140 million native speakers and lots of good resources for foreigners. Sorbian is on the other extreme in that it has about 50,000 speakers, and the amount of decent resources for foreigners is next to nothing.

In my opinion, here are some suggestions for a learning sequence of Slavic languages.

1) Russian > Bulgarian/Macedonian > Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian > Slovenian > Sorbian > Czech/Slovak > Polish > Ukrainian/Belorussian

2) Czech/Slovak > Polish > Ukrainian/Belorussian > Russian > Bulgarian/Macedonian > Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian > Slovenian > Sorbian

3) Czech/Slovak > Sorbian > Slovenian > Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian > Macedonian/Bulgarian > Russian > Ukrainian/Belorussian > Polish

4) Bulgarian/Macedonian > Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian > Slovenian > Sorbian > Czech/Slovak > Polish > Belorussian/Ukrainian > Russian

5) Russian > Belorussian/Ukrainian > Polish > Czech/Slovak > Sorbian > Slovenian > Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian > Bulgarian/Macedonian

Of course, you can learn these languages in any order, but these suggestions reflect the idea of a continuum (sort of) where moving from one language to the next should be as "smooth" as possible, and you can see that the sequences are variations of each other.


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## Jana337

Thanks for this awesome review, vput. 

I suspect it will breed quite a few comparative discussions (please start new ones instead of hijacking this one!). One of them got moved here.


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## Kriviq

vput said:


> *Bulgarian*: ...but many verb tenses and moods...



I can list about 30 tenses


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## Athaulf

vput said:


> Each Slavic language has its own difficulties for a native English speaker.



An excellent list! However, I think there are at least two more factors that should be considered for each language:

*(1) Syntax *
Highly inflected Slavic languages generally have very free word order, but each one has some syntactic peculiarities that can be a real nightmare for the learner. Also, at advanced levels, it can be quite difficult to get the feel for subtle nuances of meaning that can be conveyed by the choice of word order. I guess there could be some differences in difficulty from an English speaker's perspective in this regard.

Furthermore, I've never learned Bulgarian and Macedonian, but I would bet that they have much more complex syntax rules than the other Slavic languages, because without cases the word order can't possibly be equally free. (Just like English got rid of nearly all morphology, but at the expense of maddeningly complicated syntax.)

*(2) Phonology
*Decent pronunciation of any Slavic language is certainly very hard for an English speaker, but I think that languages with larger numbers of consonants, like Russian, are much harder.  Personally, I find it enormously difficult to either hear or reproduce accurately the difference between a hard Russian consonant and its soft pair. It's also very hard for me to remember which ones are soft and hard when memorizing a Russian word. I'm pretty sure that for an English speaker, all this is even more difficult.



> Slovenian and Sorbian represent a different sort of difficulty because these two languages use the dual regularly, while the other Slavic languages have lost almost all of the dual declensions. Thus in Slovenian or Sorbian, you need to decline or conjugate based on whether the subject or objects come as one, two or more than two.


In other Slavic languages, however, things haven't really gotten much simpler after the dual disappeared.  Most Slavic languages have utterly bizarre complicated rules about the number and case of nouns preceded by different numbers, and the declensions of numbers can confuse even native speakers...


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## vput

That's true about the dual. The dual didn't go down quietly. While most nouns and adjectives today show few traces of the dual (e.g. some nouns for body parts, the old dual ending -ama is now used in plural instrumental of Czech, and plural of dative/locative and instrumental in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian) , virtually all of the declensions with numerals got screwed up by the dual's passing.

1 is singular, 2, 3 and 4 govern plural in Czech, Polish and Slovak but (genitive) singular in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Russian.

5 is genitive plural in almost all Slavic languages as far as I know.

In Slovenian, 2 is dual while 3 and up is plural.


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## Anatoli

Athaulf said:


> ...
> Furthermore, I've never learned Bulgarian and Macedonian, but I would bet that they have much more complex syntax rules than the other Slavic languages, because without cases the word order can't possibly be equally free. (Just like English got rid of nearly all morphology, but at the expense of maddeningly complicated syntax.)
> ...


I thought about this too. I don't know any Bulgarian but I noticed they used prepositions much more heavily, which substitute for missing case endings to show the relations in the sentence but it can't be just prepositions, the word order must be different as well.


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## Jana337

I know next to nothing about Bulgarian but I kind of think that a rigid word order is a blessing for learners. Advanced Czech learners I know have major difficulties with aspects and their mind boggles at the easiness with which we simply reshuffle words to convey a new shade of meaning. The problem is that however complex the word order is, it is still quite far from "anything goes". Now if a learner of Bulgarian is presented with just a few possibilities, I am not sure it is a bad thing. Unless the nature of rigidity is different from what I imagine.


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## Duya

Athaulf said:


> My hypothesis is that the hardest one would likely be Russian or Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian, because of the stress.



In addition, B/C/S has probably the most complex phone alterations (sandhi rules), which often lead to mind-boggling phenomena, e.g. _metak_ (bullet) has plural _meci, _genitive plural _metaka_ and dative plural _mecima_. When one adds numerous exceptions atop of that (e.g. _kutak_ (corner)->_kutkovi, kutaka, kutkovima_), the result is...


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## Athaulf

Duya said:


> In addition, B/C/S has probably the most complex phone alterations (sandhi rules), which often lead to mind-boggling phenomena, e.g. _metak_ (bullet) has plural _meci, _genitive plural _metaka_ and dative plural _mecima_. When one adds numerous exceptions atop of that (e.g. _kutak_ (corner)->_kutkovi, kutaka, kutkovima_), the result is...



Not to mention the neuter nouns ending in -o, which have three different stress patterns that are the sole thing distinguishing three cases (singular genitive, plural nominative, and plural genitive). For example, all these three cases for _jezero_ (_lake_) are spelled _jezera_, but the stress is different for each of them (short rising, short falling, and long rising). And this difference is largely imperceptible for an untrained English speaker. 

I sometimes wonder how I ever managed to learn this mess of a language.


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## Athaulf

Jana337 said:


> I know next to nothing about Bulgarian but I kind of think that a rigid word order is a blessing for learners. Advanced Czech learners I know have major difficulties with aspects and their mind boggles at the easiness with which we simply reshuffle words to convey a new shade of meaning. The problem is that however complex the word order is, it is still quite far from "anything goes". Now if a learner of Bulgarian is presented with just a few possibilities, I am not sure it is a bad thing. Unless the nature of rigidity is different from what I imagine.



However, in a free word order language, an English speaker can usually translate an English sentence mostly word-for-word and the result will be a valid (or at least nearly valid) sentence conveying the intended meaning, even if some shades are missed. On the other hand, beginner-level learners of English are usually unable to produce anything but a meaningless mess whenever they try anything more complex than a simple subject-verb-object sentence. I agree that at advanced levels, the supposedly "free" word order in fact turns out to be a complex device for adding subtle shades of meaning, but I think that it still makes things easier at less advanced levels, where the learner is still not worrying about such subtleties. The few possibilities for valid ordering of words are in fact another set of rules that have to be painstakingly learned and drilled, just like declensions and conjugations.

Also, besides the word order, I would expect that Bulgarian and Macedonian have additional syntactic complexities with prepositions and articles. If the rules for articles are half as complicated and bizarre as in English, I would gladly trade them for even the most complex declensions.


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## palomnik

Athaulf:

While I certainly don't dispute what you say about Croatian, it is also true that the pronunciation is generally easier for English speakers than most other Slavic languages, setting aside the issue of tones which personally I don't find so difficult to entune my ear to, and which don't exist in some dialects anyway.  Long vowels occur only in stressed syllables, which is similar if not exactly the same as English, you don't have to deal with the vagaries of a plethora of palatized vs. velar consonants, and personally I've always found the fixed accent on the first syllable in languages like Czech to be very difficult to get used to.  In general, I think that Croatian is one of the easiest Slavic languages for English speakers to learn.


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## Duya

palomnik said:


> Long vowels occur only in stressed syllables, which is similar if not exactly the same as English.



Heh. False Not quite so. Athaulf already gave the example of _jezero, _which has cases (among others)

['jezera] Gen. Sg.
[je'zera] Nom. Pl.
[je'ze:ra:] Gen. Pl.

AFAICT, every genitive plural form I can think of should have post-accented long syllables, at least in last two syllables.

Now, the said "post-accent" lengths are largely absent from much of Shtokavian-speaking area; they're best preserved in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Dubrovnik area and Western Serbia; in large parts of Croatia, they're absent from vernacular speech. I'm not sure how Croatian linguists treat the "correct" accentuation nowadays; after all, the accent in e.g. Zagreb area significantly differs from the "Vukovski" standard. (And, frankly, they're often not significant for understanding and disambiguation).


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## vput

palomnik said:


> In general, I think that Croatian is one of the easiest Slavic languages for English speakers to learn.


 
As I had posted, each native speaker of English has his/her bugbears. You find tones to be easier, but palatalization to be tougher.

Others may be relieved that Bulgarian and Macedonian have lost almost all of the case distinctions (outside pronouns), and don't mind the the fact that there are lots of tenses (a bit like English) and moods (indicative, renarrative, conditional, subjunctive/imperative).

I agree with Athaulf in that BCS can be mind-bogglingly tough. I don't mind conjugations and declensions as much since there are rules (more or less) so long as there's regular accentuation/stress. This explains why I picked up "proper" Czech and Polish more quickly than when I had to learn some Croatian and Slovenian. It's when I learn a foreign language with free stress, tones/pitch, and varying length - all of which are NOT marked in spelling that gives the most problems for me. I guess that my being a native speaker of English (whose spelling doesn't usually reflect the free stress and vowel length either) doesn't give much advantage when I tackle languages with similar characteristics.


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## Tolovaj_Mataj

vput said:


> The presence of loanwords may also be helpful and some Slavic languages compared to others have stronger puristic tendencies as noted above.
> 
> e.g. airplane, car, computer, history, music
> 
> 
> Slovenian: zrakoplov; avtomobil/vozilo; računalnik; zgodovina ("historija" is rarely used); glasba


 
I'd like to make a few corrections and clarifications. (Why are you inventing things, vput?)

airplane = *letálo* (http://bos.zrc-sazu.si/cgi/a03.exe?name=sskj_testa&expression=ge=letalo&hs=1)

car = *avtomobíl*  (http://bos.zrc-sazu.si/cgi/a03.exe?name=sskj_testa&expression=ge=avtomobil&hs=1)

*računalnik*, *zgodovina* and *glasba* are okey.

*zrakoplòv* (http://bos.zrc-sazu.si/cgi/a03.exe?name=sskj_testa&expression=ge=zrakoplov&hs=1) = airship
Nobody ever uses word _zrakoplov_ for an airplane. 

*vozílo* (http://bos.zrc-sazu.si/cgi/a03.exe?name=sskj_testa&expression=ge=vozilo&hs=1) = vehicle
Thus _avtomobil _(or _avto_ in short) is just a type of _vozilo_.

_historija_ is so oldfashioned that nobody under 70 uses it at all. I had to check it in the SSKJ to see if it is considered to be a Slovene word. 

You forgot a word *muzika* for music. It is used, through _glasba_ is prefered.


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## beclija

I think it also much depends on what other foreign languages you learnt before. If you know some Romance language (at least at a "just about communicative" level) Macedonian or Bulgarian may well be easiest - not only do they share the feature of having next to no case declinations but a lot of tenses and moods, even the behacior of mk/bg pronoun clitics is very much "Romance". Otherwhise, for an English speaker who until now doesn't know any language other than English, the difference will be small.

Also, Bulgarian has (like Russian/East Slavic and Slovenian as well as B/C/S formerly known as Serbo-Croatian) free accent, so if you find this difficult, you should go for the West Slavic languages or Macedonian.


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## vput

Tolovaj_Mataj said:


> I'd like to make a few corrections and clarifications. (Why are you inventing things, vput?)


 
Hey, hey, I didn't invent anything. "Zrakoplov", I must have been thinking of Croatian instead. Oops.

For Slovenian "vozilo/avtomobil", I ran a search on google and pieced together that "vozilo/avtomobil" could translate as English "car". Again, I apologize if you took offense to my faulty understanding.


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## Tolovaj_Mataj

vput,
everything's fine. 
Just be careful when mixing languages. Croatian is not a good choice, Polish or Russian would do better.  
And I see that when Croats want to separate with Serbian, they have turned towards Slovene instead. No wonder you've make a mistake.


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## palomnik

Admittedly, since I already speak Russian I don't find the cases of Croatian very difficult, so Bulgarian or Macedonian don't hold the same interest for me.

But I still think that Croatian is pretty easy for English speakers to pronounce.


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## Kriviq

Athaulf said:


> Furthermore, I've never learned Bulgarian and Macedonian, but I would bet that they have much more complex syntax rules than the other Slavic languages, because without cases the word order can't possibly be equally free. (Just like English got rid of nearly all morphology, but at the expense of maddeningly complicated syntax.)



You have a point here - unlike any other Slavic language, Bulgarian has undergone an almost full transition from a highly synthetic to an analitic language.


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## Athaulf

palomnik said:


> Admittedly, since I already speak Russian I don't find the cases of Croatian very difficult, so Bulgarian or Macedonian don't hold the same interest for me.
> 
> But I still think that Croatian is pretty easy for English speakers to pronounce.



However, I'm curious how well you are able to handle the infamous Croatian consonant clusters? A good example is the word _Hrvatska_; I've asked English speakers to try reproducing that name several times, and they were unable to produce anything close. Generally, I've noticed that any of the numerous Croatian words that use the rolled _r_ as a vowel are immensely difficult for English speakers. (The difficulty goes both ways, of course --  I can't produce anything resembling the way native English speakers pronounce, say, the words _true_, _sixth_, or _Toronto_.)

As a side note, interestingly, we pronounce loudly and clearly all consonants even in -_vstv-_ clusters that Russians can't stomach, e.g. in the word _zdravstvo_ (= _healthcare_).


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## tkekte

I think it's an interesting question, especially if the person's native language is slavic too.  Which do you find easiest to understand? What about speaking? (understanding and speaking are quite different )

I will grade mine...
1. Ukrainian
I am a Russian speaker born in Ukraine. Hearing and reading that language since childhood, I don't have much problems with it. 

2. Bulgarian
Hey, almost every word here is pretty much like russian.  Освен онези че на руския не преличат. The grammar is a bit different, but you get used to it. The verbs are... let's not get into it. :^D

Съществоването на определителен член ми харесва (макар че не сещам хубаво къде той трябва да се слага), щом дава на езика осещане подобно на английски. Извиняйте, моля, за лошата ми грамматика.. (с едно м ли се пише или с две?)

3. Polish
I can read it with relatively few problems, have to look in dictionaries once in a while, but same with Bulgarian. At least here we have the infinitive. 

Bizarrely enough, polish has some words  in common with Bulgarian which don't exist in Russian...

for example:

przegąrnąć (sp?) - прегьрна - hug

łudzić się - be confused
полудява - go crazy

przez - през - through



The hardest for me to understand is Serbian... probably due to Vuk Karadzic's orthography.  (no offense to Serbian speakers, but the phonetical orthography makes the language hard to understand by hiding the etymological cues)

Slovene is quite hard too... too many unknown words.

So basically, from a "Russian as native" viewpoint, Polish and Bulgarian feel the closest to me... I wonder what the picture is like for speakers of other languages?


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## Emmanon82

tkekte said:


> I
> The hardest for me to understand is Serbian...


You probably wasn`t motivated enough to understand.
To my mind , for a person, who speaks both Russian and Ukrainian, Serbian( Croatian, Bosnian) can not be difficult. 
But I can say, as I don`t speak Czech and Slovak at all, I had great problems with understanding and reading when I came there. I haven`t had such great problems in Bulgaria and Poland although I didn`t speak those languages either.


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## Athaulf

tkekte said:


> The hardest for me to understand is Serbian... probably due to Vuk Karadzic's orthography.  (no offense to Serbian speakers, but the phonetical orthography makes the language hard to understand by hiding the etymological cues)



Actually, I don't think the main problem is that the alphabet is phonetic, but rather the numerous differences between letters. I read the Serbian Cyrillic seamlessly just like the Latin alphabet (where I lived as a kid, we were equally drilled in both at school), and yet, Russian texts were almost incomprehensible to me before I learned what all those strange symbols like _ю_ or _я_ stand for.  

Once you figure out these differences, you should be able to get quite a lot of from reasonably complex texts. Additionally, if you take the minimal effort to learn a handful of extremely frequent, but totally different looking words (_уже _= _већ_, _только_ = _само_, _ещё_ = _још_, and the like), your understanding will quickly increase dramatically.

Also, Russians have a bit of a head start when reading South Slavic languages, compared to the other way around. There are many pairs of synonyms in Russian (e.g. _глаз_/_око_ or _лошадь_/_конь_), only one of which is understandable to the South Slavic speakers. The reverse is true nowhere as frequently. 



> So basically, from a "Russian as native" viewpoint, Polish and Bulgarian feel the closest to me... I wonder what the picture is like for speakers of other languages?


You'll find similar lists already posted by several people (including me) in this thread. Enjoy the reading, and comments are always welcome.


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## Piotr_WRF

tkekte said:


> przegąrnąć (sp?) - прегьрна - hug



The proper spelling is _przygarnąć_.



tkekte said:


> łudzić się - be confused


This means _to delude oneself_.


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## Tolovaj_Mataj

Athaulf said:


> As a side note, interestingly, we pronounce loudly and clearly all consonants even in -_vstv-_ clusters that Russians can't stomach, e.g. in the word _zdravstvo_ (= _healthcare_).


We, Slovenes, also have this particular cluster, but we are not that strict - the first v is usually pronounced like u. This reminded me on another cluster: -strstv- like in ministrstvo, mojstrstvo, sestrstvo. No cheating here.


----------



## Anatoli

> So basically, from a "Russian as native" viewpoint, Polish and Bulgarian feel the closest to me... I wonder what the picture is like for speakers of other languages?


To me (a native Russian) it's *Ukrainian *and *Belarussian*, despite rare exposure to Belarussian, I can say it's objectively easier to read and understand spoken in Ukrainian and Belarussian than Polish and Bulgarian. But that's me.


----------



## Kolan

I haven't seen this thread, so let me add some comments after all.

I had some exposure to a few Slavic languages while living abroad of the USSR, mostly Ukrainian (which is quite common), then Polish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, and always tried to learn the distinctions compared to my native Russian.

Well, the hardest so far I would consider the Czech (complicated accent system), then Croatian (can't reproduce the pronunciation), Bulgarian (but I love old, almost forgotten and lost Russian words commonly used there), Polish, Ukrainian. The last two are quite transparent to Russians and relatively easy to learn (phonetics, grammar, the most of vocabulary are very similar), at least in their written forms.

We almost forgot about the Belorussian language in this thread. It is basically Russian (the difference is like between Bulgarian and Macedonian), sounds more melodic, however, the spelling is purely phonetic, and it is sometimes difficult to guess on the first glance what is written. Looking at a text in the Belorussian you understand how far is the Russian phonetics from its own spelling in reality.

The number of native Russian speakers (including those truly bilingual from the ex-USSR) nears 300 millions people, not 140.


----------



## cyanista

Kolan said:


> We almost forgot about the Belorussian language in this thread. It is basically Russian (the difference is like between Bulgarian and Macedonian), however, the spelling is purely phonetic, and it is sometimes difficult to guess on the first glance what is written. Looking at a text in Belorussian you understand how far is the Russian phonetics from its spelling in reality.



I'm not even going to comment on that. Although that's what *many* Russians think their opinion mostly results from ignorance on the subject.


----------



## Kolan

cyanista said:


> I'm not even going to comment on that. Although that's what *many* Russians think their opinion mostly results from ignorance on the subject.


Please, don't get offended, Cyanista. We are not talking about the academic point of view. This is my personal experience from learning how to speak Belorussian. I traveled many times there, visited and stayed in Gomel, Ivanovo (Ivanava), Pinsk, Minsk, Borisov (Barysaw), Vitebsk and never had trouble communicating, easily picked the difference between the spoken languages, but still each time it is an effort for me to understand the written words in Belorussian. Well, the Belorussian words that are similar to Polish/Ukrainian, not Russian do not complicate the learning.


----------



## Duya

Crescent said:


> P.S. And what exactly is the ''renarrative'' mood, please? I know all the others of course, because of their direct relevance to French and Spanish, but I have never heard of the ''renarrative''.
> Is it a Bulgarian delicacy?



It is a Bulgarian delicacy indeed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood#Admirative_and_Renarrative


----------



## Kolan

Duya said:


> Heh. False Not quite so. Athaulf already gave the example of _jezero, _which has cases (among others)
> 
> ['jezera] Gen. Sg.
> [je'zera] Nom. Pl.
> [je'ze:ra:] Gen. Pl.


I have to add that in Russian it's almost the same, except of Gen.Pl, so that we have one complication less. The written forms also differentiate from each other, however, a commonly used written *е* instead of *ё*, I guess, would create certain confusion for a foreigner.

озера Gen. Sg.
озёра Nom. Pl.
озёр Gen. Pl.


----------



## Aleksey Groz

Well, by my experience ( I speak B/C/S and Czech and Slovak, and bit more...), B/C/S is the hardest because of stress, but I think that Czech and of course Polish are hard for pronanciation. That's what I think. Pozdrav


----------



## Kolan

Tolovaj_Mataj said:


> This reminded me on another cluster: -strstv- like in ministrstvo, mojstrstvo, sestrstvo. No cheating here.


I have to admit that the Russian phonetics tends to cheat on consonant clusters, however, this discussion reminds me also of a certain exception, where no one can cheat, *взбздн*уть. That's the only Russian example I could ever recall, but it gives another outstanding cluster (10 consonants) in a phrase like this one, Э*рнст взбздн*ул. No way you can cheat on it speaking Russian.


----------



## HaKeHa

Hi,

I am going to Russia in a year to learn Russian in an intensive course (for 9 months). Before then, however, I want to try and teach myself a language, preferably one that uses Latin but is similar enough to Russian that I have a grasp on the grammar and vocabulary. Does anyone have any ideas about what I should learn?

*I should also point out I currently know less than 10 words of Russian, much less pronounce them


----------



## Q-cumber

Hi *HaKeHa*!

You forgot to add one more voting option: None of the above.  In fact, all the languages (but Estonian) listed have some connections with Russian language; yet I doubt your spontaneous lessons in any of these tongues would give you any real benefits in studying Russian afterwards. All the above is IMHO, of course.


----------



## Kolan

HaKeHa said:


> I want to try and teach myself a language, preferably one that uses Latin but is similar enough to Russian that I have a grasp on the grammar and vocabulary. Does anyone have any ideas about what I should learn?


My best bet is that you'd rather learn Latin.  No-no, the closest would be *Polish*, then - *Czech *(more difficult, too).


----------



## Q-cumber

*Kolan*

Do you really think that learning Polish would help *HaKeHa* to have a grasp on the Russian grammar and vocabulary? I agree that for native Polish or Czech speakers Russian is much easier to understand. However, in these particular circumstances I don't think *HaKeHa* will get any real benefits of such preparations. Most probably, he'll get even more confused.


----------



## Kolan

Q-cumber said:


> Do you really think that learning Polish would help *HaKeHa* to have a grasp on the Russian grammar and vocabulary? I agree that for native Polish or Czech speakers Russian is much easier to understand. However, in these particular circumstances I don't think *HaKeHa* will get any real benefits of such preparations. Most probably, he'll get even more confused.


It's hard to draw a conclusion this way. I guess it may help, better than nothing, but not necessarily proportionally to the efforts required. At least, the grammar is quite close, but vocabulary - also. 

The main advantage would be to avoid learning the Cyrillic graphics, but this will have to be undertaken anyway, sooner or later. I remember myself learning Georgian, it is a sort of a similar gap, when I figured out that the graphics symbols first are not necessary, one can use the base of Cyrillic alphabet to start with. If you have a manual built in such a way.


----------



## beclija

Tolovaj_Mataj said:


> We, Slovenes, also have this particular cluster, but we are not that strict - the first v is usually pronounced like u. This reminded me on another cluster: -strstv- like in ministrstvo, mojstrstvo, sestrstvo. No cheating here.


You don't have syllabic "r", right? I mean, I can pronounce -strstv in the examples you gave, but only with a syllabic "r". It just becomes syllabic whatever I try to prevent it...


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## Grosvenor1

I think HaKeHa would be better off just trying to learn some Russian by himself/herself. The Cyrillic alphabet is not difficult to learn. Learning some Polish or Czech would just be confusing - they are close enough to Russian to help, but also to mislead, in my view. 

More often things are done in the opposite direction - people who have studied Russian use it as a basis to learn Polish, Czech or other Slavic languages.


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## Grosvenor1

Kolan said:


> I haven't seen this thread, so let me add some comments after all.
> 
> I had some exposure to a few Slavic languages while living abroad of the USSR, mostly Ukrainian (which is quite common), then Polish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, and always tried to learn the distinctions compared to my native Russian.
> 
> Well, the hardest so far I would consider the Czech (complicated accent system), then Croatian (can't reproduce the pronunciation), Bulgarian (but I love old, almost forgotten and lost Russian words commonly used there), Polish, Ukrainian. The last two are quite transparent to Russians and relatively easy to learn (phonetics, grammar, the most of vocabulary are very similar), at least in their written forms.
> 
> We almost forgot about the Belorussian language in this thread. It is basically Russian (the difference is like between Bulgarian and Macedonian), sounds more melodic, however, the spelling is purely phonetic, and it is sometimes difficult to guess on the first glance what is written. Looking at a text in the Belorussian you understand how far is the Russian phonetics from its own spelling in reality.
> 
> The number of native Russian speakers (including those truly bilingual from the ex-USSR) nears 300 millions people, not 140.


 
I have only seen Belarussian on the printed page, never heard it. It _ looks _ like phonetically written Russian with a number of Polish words added.


----------



## Kolan

Grosvenor1 said:


> I have only seen Belarussian on the printed page, never heard it. It _ looks _ like phonetically written Russian with a number of Polish words added.


It's a lovely language for a Russian ear.

BTW, please, note also, that 2 appropriate spellings exist, either *Belarusian* from Belarus (Беларусь), or *Belorussian* from Belorussia (Белоруссия). The first form is transliterated from the native, the second one - from the Russian spelling. You can choose any one of them depending on the context, but should avoid writing _*Belarussian_, since this is an illiterate form.


----------



## Grosvenor1

I used to work at the BBC and "Belarussian" was the spelling given in the style guide (I preferred "Belorussian" but had to follow the style guide).


----------



## Kolan

Grosvenor1 said:


> I used to work at the BBC and "Belarussian" was the spelling given in the style guide (I preferred "Belorussian" but had to follow the style guide).


Well, we can tell to the folks at the BBC that there is some room to improve their guide.


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## Grosvenor1

"Belorussian" it is, then. I left the BBC in 1998 but they were calling it Belarussian when I left. They may have changed the style guide since then. 
I listened to the songs. It sounds like a nice language, closer to Russian than anything else, but I caught a couple of non-Russian sounds, "h" and "w".


----------



## Kanes

In Bulgarian and Macedonian there is no dominant word order. In most cases the verbs agree for the subject and sometimes the object of the sentance as well. Also pronouns are rarely used.

Example:

-Иван поздрави момичетата. 
-Момичетата (ги) поздрави Иван. 
-Иван момичетата поздрави. 
-Момичетата Иван (ги) поздрави. 
-Поздрави Иван момичетата. 
-Поздрави (ги) момичетата Иван


----------



## sokol

Concerning degrees of difficulty it would also be important to take into account:

- the degree of variation, especially dialects and sociolects which is huge e. g. for Russian (sociolects there - a great difference between written and spoken language) and, for different reasons, for Slovenian (many local dialects, and virtually no speakers who speak 'only' and 'clearly' standard language as codified by the authorities)

- the possibility of using the language, the 'usability' (so not only the resources to learn it): usability of course always is rather limited for languages with less speakers as for example Slovenian (with two million speakers) and even more so Sorbian, of course (with only a few thousand speakers, all of them bilingual, who surely would be extremely surprised if you went there trying out your Sorbian on them), while Russian of course has an advantage

- the 'security' and 'stability' of the norm which could probably be problematic with Belorussian, due to Russian influence, to give an example

As far as variety is concerned I think that Czech is probably the easiest one: the whole Bohemian area of Czech as a rather unique colloquial variety, so it would be rather easy to fully participate in the linguistic community with active knowledge of Czech standard language and at least passive knowledge of Bohemian colloquial speech.

The dual of Slovenian, by the way, I would not consider as being extremely difficult; for a simple reason: the paradigm of dual conjugation is very regular. It doesn't make such a great difference to learn one extra paradigm, especially if you take it's regularity into account.


----------



## Setwale_Charm

I must note though that Russian is nothing like English or German with regard to the rich variety of regional dialects thet they can boast of. Russian is pretty uniform all across Russia.


----------



## trance0

Dual in Slovene is not really a problem. But it does demand some addittional effort on the part of non-native speakers, especially in spoken language if you want to speak correctly before you get the hang of it.


----------



## Tagarela

Ahoj,

I am not English native speaker, and then, I'll talk about from a Portuguese speaker point of view. 

Firstly, my real intention was to learn Russian, but for non-linguistic reasons, I changed my plans to learn Czech first. However, I have learned the Russian alphabet (ok, not the handwriting) and some words while my intention was really to learn Russian, even today when I listen to Russian music and search for their lyrics, I prefer to read them in cyrillic than to read in transliteration. So, indeed, I don't see that the alphabet is a problem or a matter that should really be taken in account when one wants do decide which language to learn. 
By the way, even those languages which use the same alphabet, use it in a little different way, so, you also have some alphabet features to learn. 

All textbooks I have teach basically what Sokol has pointed out - standard language and some Bohemian/Prague colloquialisms. About Moravia they usually say that people there tend to follow standard language. 

Case system, which is new to me, is not that scaring. Aspects seem to be a harder feature, but it's something that I haven't studied properly yet. 
Word order is not very easy, it can be told as free, but there are always some words that have to be in certain place and also the order that would sound better to a native and so on.
Pronunciation is so-so, some consonant clusters are really a task and my regional accent doesn't help very much in some situations. 

To sum up, certainly, it's not easy, but not so hard as some Czech would say, or as it is written in the article about Czech language in an encyclopedia. 

Na shledanou.:


----------



## sokol

Setwale_Charm said:


> I must note though that Russian is nothing like English or German with regard to the rich variety of regional dialects thet they can boast of. Russian is pretty uniform all across Russia.


Yes it is, of course - dialectal variation is rather little.

But the difference between spoken and written language, and between spoken styles (разговорная реч, просторечие, мать - I hope I haven't made any spelling mistakes there) is very pronounced, a teacher of mine (a decade ago) who was in Russia for a year when he was studying told us that he even was _shocked _about the difference (and that was before perestrojka), and he further added that most students of Russian are, when they come to Russia. (Where I have never been, by the way.)



trance0 said:


> Dual in Slovene is not really a problem. But it does demand some addittional effort on the part of non-native speakers, especially in spoken language if you want to speak correctly before you get the hang of it.



Yes, perfection in spoken language is the main problem with dual - to learn the conjugation paradigm really is not.

Even more easy than learning a paradigm is of course the Cyrillic script; as Tagarela I think that Cyrillic should be the least of all problems.


----------



## trance0

I learnt Serbo-Croatian in elementary school back in 1992/1993(the last generation who still had this language as a school subject in Slovenia), so I can still read Cyrillic in that language. Russian Cyrillic really isn`t too different from the SC variant, so I have little trouble reading Russian texts as well. Understanding Russian is another story.


----------



## Athaulf

sokol said:


> - the degree of variation, especially dialects and sociolects which is huge e. g. for Russian (sociolects there - a great difference between written and spoken language) and, for different reasons, for Slovenian (many local dialects, and virtually no speakers who speak 'only' and 'clearly' standard language as codified by the authorities)



For Croatian, these differences are also very significant. There is not only large dialectal variation, but also large differences in grammar and vocabulary between the literary and spoken language even in urban areas where people generally don't speak the local dialect. 

I have no idea what sort of language modern Croatian textbooks are teaching, but someone who was taught strictly according to the standard would be baffled by the colloquial language. He would, for example, be unable to understand most words for tools and household items, lots of inflectional morphology would seem strange to him (e.g. the conditional, which is not conjugated any more in the colloquial language, or different participle endings), and even syntax would be full of suprises (e.g. the use of _jel' _as the question marker).


----------



## Tagarela

Ahoj,




sokol said:


> Even more easy than learning a paradigm is of course the Cyrillic script; as Tagarela I think that Cyrillic should be the least of all problems.



Gracias por el apoyo

Now I remember that when I told my Slovak friend that I've decided to learn Czech, he told me "_Are you crazy? Learning a Slavic language is one of the most difficulties things one can do in his life_". 

A verrrry exagerated statement. 
Also, it seems that there is some sort between Slavic about which is harder to learn - as it was a matter of national pride having a hard language to learn. 

Anyway, I don't think that one should choose which Slavic language to learn based (or giving it too much importance, at least) on which is harder or easier to learn. 

Na shledanou.:


----------



## Kolan

Kanes said:


> In Bulgarian and Macedonian there is no dominant word order. In most cases the verbs agree for the subject and sometimes the object of the sentance as well. Also pronouns are rarely used.
> 
> Example:
> 
> -Иван поздрави момичетата.
> -Момичетата (ги) поздрави Иван.
> -Иван момичетата поздрави.
> -Момичетата Иван (ги) поздрави.
> -Поздрави Иван момичетата.
> -Поздрави (ги) момичетата Иван


In the examples above there is only nominative and accusative cases. Compare to Russian

Мать любит дочь.
Дочь любит мать.

It is all confusing.


----------



## Anatoli

Russian and other Slavic languages are only category 2 in difficulty for English speakers, meaning it takes *44 weeks (1100 class hours)* to become functional:

http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html

If it takes longer than that, review your studying methods.


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## Athaulf

Anatoli said:


> Russian and other Slavic languages are only category 2 in difficulty for English speakers, meaning it takes *44 weeks (1100 class hours)* to become functional:
> 
> http://www.nvtc.gov/lotw/months/november/learningExpectations.html
> 
> If it takes longer than that, review your studying methods.



Yes, but not too many people are able to invest 25 hours a week for almost a year in a language learning, even when it's more than just a hobby.  And I don't think the same method would work as well without so much constant work and practice...


----------



## Anatoli

That's true, Althauf but you will agree that correct methods are important and we are talking about the pure time you CAN invest in studies, even if it's spread over years.

I experienced myself and witnessed several times with different languages when hours or days of exposure made more than months and years of language learning, so the environment is critical too. If you are surrounded by the proper language and HAVE to use it to get by, you learn much faster...


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## trance0

Well, as far as I know, 1100 hours of intensive studying is only enough for basic functional knowledge of Russian according to CIA data. If one wants to understand and be able to use the language fully, it would take much more time and effort than that for an average English speaker.


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## trance0

I believe Slavic languages are amongst the most difficult indoeuropean languages for an English native speaker to learn fully. They are topped only by nonindoeuropean languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Arabic and especially Chinese and other Asian tonal languages which have completely different structure and demand a totally different way of thinking.


----------



## Anatoli

Trying to "learn fully" any language may be an impossible task, depends what you define it as. Normally, any (or most) foreign student in Russia are fully functional after a year at the preparation course. After this course, foreign students are able to follow lectures in Russian, communicate with teachers and fellow students and with people outside class.


> Well, as far as I know, 1100 hours of intensive studying is only enough for basic functional knowledge of Russian according to CIA data.


This has been tested (in my link above) on a number of students. You can search a bit more if you wish. 1,100 academic hours was enough for motivated students to conduct interviews in this group of languages, follow the media, read newspapers, conduct business correspondence and be functional in the environment without the need of an interpreter.  Level S3 -                                 "General professional proficiency".

IMHO, the best proof of language difficulty for another language speakers is exactly that - check how long it takes for a big number of students to become functional (listening, speaking, reading and writing) everything else is to subjective. No point saying how difficult the grammar/pronunciation takes to master but see how long it takes to overcome these problem provided all the quality resources are available (textbooks, listening, teachers, motivation, etc.), discarding students who drop out.

These estimates of degree of difficulty are important for training staff to work overseas and the analysis was a bit deeper than on this forum.  (Mind you, it's not the original language difficulty chart but a shortened copy).


----------



## trance0

Interesting. I would still say all languages are difficult, each in its own way.


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## Kanes

Kolan said:


> In the examples above there is only nominative and accusative cases. Compare to Russian
> 
> Мать любит дочь.
> Дочь любит мать.
> 
> It is all confusing.


 
I don't understand what you mean. We don't have other cases, relations i na sentance are determined by subject agreement of the verbs and particles.


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## JFman00

If you were to point a newcomer to Slavic languages, and inflected languages in general, where would you point them if their goal was to live and interact with others across the region? 

Obviously, Bulgarian is "easier" for a Romance speaker considering its lack of cases, but would a solid understanding of it allow one to read and understand other languages outside of its language family? 

Conversely, perhaps Russian would be best considering its "prestige" in Russia and Russian interests abroad? 

I have read many threads about the differing degrees of intelligibility among native speakers of various Slavic languages, however, for a learner who has no particular passion or interest in a specific Slavic country or culture, how are they to decide which language is both suitable and relevant for them?


----------



## Duya

JFman00 said:


> Obviously, Bulgarian is "easier" for a Romance speaker considering its lack of cases, but would a solid understanding of it allow one to read and understand other languages outside of its language family?



I think that the lack of cases is a red herring, mostly. It does simplify the learning somewhat, but it is a relatively minor point. Bulgarian "compensates" lack of cases with a handful of verb tenses in active use, many of which are archaic or totally absent in other Slavic languages.



JFman00 said:


> Conversely, perhaps Russian would be best considering its "prestige" in Russia and Russian interests abroad?
> 
> I have read many threads about the differing degrees of intelligibility among native speakers of various Slavic languages, however, for a learner who has no particular passion or interest in a specific Slavic country or culture, how are they to decide which language is both suitable and relevant for them?



Yes, I would recommend Russian, as it's 1) most widespread 2) most "middle of the road", in the sense that it involves relatively little "odd" innovations, especially in the field of phonetics. 

As for understanding of other Slavic languages, be aware of numerous "false friends" among them, due to slow semantic drifts of the original words in different languages.


----------



## WannaBeMe

JFman00 said:


> If you were to point a newcomer to Slavic languages, and inflected languages in general, where would you point them if their goal was to live and interact with others across the region?
> 
> Obviously, Bulgarian is "easier" for a Romance speaker considering its lack of cases, but would a solid understanding of it allow one to read and understand other languages outside of its language family?
> 
> Conversely, perhaps Russian would be best considering its "prestige" in Russia and Russian interests abroad?
> 
> I have read many threads about the differing degrees of intelligibility among native speakers of various Slavic languages, however, for a learner who has no particular passion or interest in a specific Slavic country or culture, how are they to decide which language is both suitable and relevant for them?



Bulgarian is not so easy as it seems, I recommand you Russian language.

_Bulgarian_ has reduced the cases, but it has the most complicated verbal system. Besides it is only in cirilic script.

_Russian_ has pretty common, let me say classic Slavic features. Not to comlicated but also not easy at all. It is written with cirilic script also, but it is very comlicated to read it because every letter can be readed in two ways and if you dont know accent you wont know how to read it correct way. But though Russian is the most widespread Slavic language (in Baltic, Turk countries, Rumania, also many people from Slavic countries speek or understand Russian)

Possibly _Serbocroatian_ - it is most widespread in Balkan, very easy to understand from an Slovenian, Bulgarian or Macedonian spaeker and otherways around. It uses both cirilic and latin scripts. It has a little easier declension of nouns as other Slavic languages. The most easiest Slavic language to read because one letter equates to only one sound.

But like said it realy depends on the purpose of the learning and ofcourse the region, East, Middle or South Europe.
If you want to make some business in East Europe then learn Russian, and if in Balkans then Serbocroatian would be better choice.

If you wnt to learn it just for fun, then it doesnt metter which langauge you decide for. You can easely convert and compare Slavic langaues with eachother. 

 My best regards and happy learning


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## mugibil

Several people have been eager to emphasize that Bulgarian, despite the lack of cases, is not easier than other Slavic languages. I think these assessments were made from the point of view of fellow Slavs rather than West Europeans and English speakers. This bugged me to the extent that I actually registered just to advertize the easiness of Bulgarian, although the thread is dormant. 

First, I think that people like Duya and WannaBeMe whose native languages (this time, B/C/S) have cases underestimate the degree to which the absence of case can make things easier for other people. In my experience, case is quite a headache for anyone unfamiliar with it, including Bulgarians, and presumably for West Europeans and English speakers. It is certainly not a "minor point", much less a "red herring". To mention just one thing, much of the dreaded complexity of the Slavic free stress systems is exhibited precisely in wild alternations throughout the nominal declension (e.g. in Russian, B/C/S); in Bulgarian, the stress alternations in nouns have been levelled out to a very large extent, so you need to remember only the stress of the base form, except for a few exceptional monosyllabic words.

Do the verb tenses make Bulgarian more difficult? Again, they may make it difficult from the viewpoint of another Slav, but shouldn't be so terrible for West Europeans. The system is pretty similar to Romance and Germanic languages. As in Italian, Spanish and French, there is a difference between the aorist past and the imperfect. As in Romance as well as Germanic languages such as English, there is a present perfect, past perfect, future, future perfect. The future and future perfect are as simple as in English, and, as in English, there is no real conjunctive mood. Finally, there is the famed "renarrative mood", which is in fact almost always the same as a present or past perfect. Of course, if you want to be able to talk like a native speaker, you do need to master the many intricacies of this system. But unlike noun cases, you don't need to distinguish all these forms from the start just to understand what is being said, who is doing whom etc.. For basic comprehension, all you need is to distinguish the present tense from the various past forms. 

Someone suggested earlier that syntax could make Bulgarian difficult; all I can say is that again, it is pretty much like Romance. Yes, we don't need an accusative, so we usually place the subject ahead of the object, no big deal there. I hardly need to mention that the article could only be a problem for a fellow Slav, not for a Western learner.

That said, part of the original question was "would a solid understanding of it allow one to read and understand other languages outside of its language family." I don't think any Slavic language meets that requirement; solid understanding of one language allows you to understand only a few immediate neighbours at best. A solid understanding of Bulgarian can make it very easy to learn to understand Russian (same "high-register" words: think English-to-French, except much easier) and B/C/S (same "low-register" words: think English-to-German, except much easier). The jump to the West Slavic languages is much harder, because both high-register and low-register words are often very different. I say this as a native speaker of Bulgarian who also uses Russian a lot and has been dabbling with both Czech and B/C/S for many years.

Finally: to be fair, if I were a Western learner choosing a Slavic language, I would always choose to learn Russian first, because there are many more speakers and there is much more to read - a huge amount of easily accessible decent-quality material of all possible kinds, even things that have nothing to do with Russia - translated detective fiction, treatises on dinosaur evolution, analyses of Shakespeare's plays, introductions to Egyptian hieroglyphics, you name it. It gives you a kind of freedom, because you can exercise the language without even thinking about it.


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## JFman00

Thank you all for your responses. My plan right now is to go ahead with Bulgarian just to get some Slavic vocabulary, then get Russian to the best of my abilities. As someone who comes from a Romance language dominated background, it is very discomforting to deal with Russian, given both the morphological difficulties and lack of cognates. Hopefully once I have some base exposure to Slavic words via Bulgarian, the difficulties of a language like Russian will not be so intimidating.


----------



## Anatoli

Russian doesn't lack cognates, especially with French and English, perhaps there are not so many as you would expect.

Here's a short list of Russian words of French origin, if they make your learning easier. 
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:ru:French_derivations

(Reading familiar names/words in a foreign script is also a good method to become more comfortable with a new script, e.g. Cyrillic).

Please be aware. Lack of cases in Bulgarian/Macedonian causes sentences to have a different from other Slavic languages word order, + the concept of a definite article (as a postfix) is introduced, no other Slavic language has definite articles.
Postfixes: –ът/–ят (m), –та (f), –то (n), –те (pl)

The endings may cause the words to change (words have many forms in Slavic languages):

indefinite: доб*ъ*р човек, "a good person"; definite: до*брият* човек, "the good person"

You will also find that the availability of reading, learning and practising resources  is very important for language learning, so I would recommend Russian over Bulgarian but it's up to you, of course. See also the previous post, I agree, there is much more to read in Russian and you can find bilingual books, etc, audio books and big forums with a large number of contributors.

You mentioned that you don't have any particular cultural interest in Slavic languages. Perhaps, if you watch some online songs, try to watch movies, you may have a different opinion or find an exchange partner. It's difficult to learn without motivation, you know.

As for Western Slavic languages, I found Polish much easier to understand and learn for a Russian speaker than Slovak and especially Czech. Still Czech is easier than Serbo-Croatian languages or Slovenian. So the gap is not that big (East-West).

(My opinion only)
East - West (Slavic language similarity compared to each other)
Russian - Ukrainian/Belarusian (equally) - Polish - Slovak - Czech

East - South (Slavic language similarity compared to each other)
Ukrainian/Belarusian - Russian - Bulgarian - Macedonian - Serbo-Croatian - Slovenian

I can't compare West and South similarly.


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## TriglavNationalPark

Anatoli said:


> The endings may cause the words to change (words have many forms in Slavic languages):
> 
> indefinite: доб*ъ*р човек, "a good person"; definite: до*брият* човек, "the good person"


 
Slovenian has also preserved the distinction between "long" and "short" adjectives:

*dober človek* = a good person (indefinite)
*dobri človek* = the good person (definite)

The same principle applies in BCS.


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## phosphore

Russian probably has more speakers than all other Slavic languages together so it would clearly be the most natural choice for anyone interested in the Slavic world. I don't think there is much difference in difficulty between different Slavic languages for someone not familiar with any of them. Russian phonology is quite difficult, much more difficult than that of Czech or Serbian, but in grammar all languages seem to be equally difficult.


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## sokol

Welcome to the forums, mungu. 


mungu said:


> In my experience, case is quite a headache for anyone unfamiliar with it, including Bulgarians, and presumably for West Europeans and English speakers.


You're spot on: case is a headache for anybody unfamiliar with them. I never managed to produce cases correctly in spoken Slovene (as you see I'm not a native speaker of any Slavic language), the best I ever got to was making only a few mistakes in written language.



mungu said:


> Do the verb tenses make Bulgarian more difficult? Again, they may make it difficult from the viewpoint of another Slav, but shouldn't be so terrible for West Europeans. The system is pretty similar to Romance and Germanic languages.


But you're wrong here: the Bulgarian system is completely different, and difficult to learn even for speakers of those Romance languages which still make distinctions similar to aorist and imperfect.
The point is that even aorist and imperfect aren't exactly the same as indefinido and imperfecto in Spanish, to give an example, and even more different to its equivalents in French, English and German.

But more importantly, there is Slavic aspect entwined with Bulgarian tenses, and uses which are completely foreign to native speakers of Romance and Germanic languages (like non-witness mood and the like).
If pressed I'd probably even say that it is easier to learn Slovene declension than Bulgarian use of tenses (but of course one still has to deal with aspect in Slovene - you're only spared aorist and imperfect).

Admittedly, in Bulgarian it might be easier to communicate successfully in everyday communication where one probably doesn't need to know about the fine detail of its tenses - while if you get cases wrong it is highly likely that misunderstandings occur.
Still, Bulgarian tenses indeed would give me headaches.


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## trance0

Well, cases are a problem even for native speakers of the so called 'case languages'. Of course not so much in their own respective languages but they do still present problems when learning a foreign language with a different structure. For example, I find Latin significantly more difficult because of its case system than I would if it didn`t have cases. Even a friend of mine who is learning German, a language with a simpler case system than Slovene, claims to be having problems with the German case system, because for example he has to remember which prepositions demand which case and there are of course quite a few differences in case usage between Slovene and German. 

(As a more advanced learner of German I still find it somewhat more difficult to remember all the differences revolving around 'Rektion' because of the case system, because there is always one more thing to remember in the 'formulas' as compared to languages which completely lack cases. I can give a couple of examples as to why I find it more difficult or what exactly I mean with the following examples: sich(*accusative*) gewöhnen +* an* + etwas(*accusative*) / jemanden = sich(*dative*) + etwas(*accusative*) / jemanden + *an*gewöhnen = to *get* + accustomed/used + *to* something/somebody; *zu* jemandem/etwas(*dative*) gehören = jemandem / etwas(*dative*) *an*gehören = to belong *to* someone / something; The bold parts show what information one has to remember in order to be able to correctly use these structures in praxis in both languages, English as an (almost) caseless language and German, a language that still uses cases. As you can see, there is always (at least) one more thing to remember in German and the same goes for other case languages).


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## phosphore

trance0 said:


> Well, cases are a problem even for native speakers of the so called 'case languages'. Of course not so much in their own respective languages but they do still present problems when learning a foreign language with a different structure. For example, I find Latin significantly more difficult because of its case system than I would if it didn`t have cases. Even a friend of mine who is learning German, a language with a simpler case system than Slovene, claims to be having problems with the German case system, because for example he has to remember which prepositions demand which case and there are of course quite a few differences in case usage between Slovene and German.
> 
> (As a more advanced learner of German I still find it somewhat more difficult to remember all the differences revolving around 'Rektion' because of the case system, because there is always one more thing to remember in the 'formulas' as compared to languages which completely lack cases. I can give a couple of examples as to why I find it more difficult or what exactly I mean with the following examples: sich(*accusative*) gewöhnen +* an* + etwas(*accusative*) / jemanden = sich(*dative*) + etwas(*accusative*) / jemanden + *an*gewöhnen = to *get* + accustomed/used + *to* something/somebody; *zu* jemandem/etwas(*dative*) gehören = jemandem / etwas(*dative*) *an*gehören = to belong *to* someone / something; The bold parts show what information one has to remember in order to be able to correctly use these structures in praxis in both languages, English as an (almost) caseless language and German, a language that still uses cases. As you can see, there is always (at least) one more thing to remember in German and the same goes for other case languages).


 
I don't find the use of prepositions and articles in English or French to be any easier than the use of cases in Latin.


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## trance0

Well, what one finds more or less difficult is subjective in any case.


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## mugibil

trance0:


> Well, what one finds more or less difficult is subjective in any case.


I think it partly depends on what your native language is like. If your mother's tongue is without cases, then you're likely to find them difficult, and vice versa. But I think things also have their own inherent degree of difficulty.

phosphore:


> I don't find the use of prepositions and articles in English or French to be any easier than the use of cases in Latin.



Even though your mother tongue has cases and mine doesn't, I still find it hard to imagine this. Are you saying that you speak and read Latin just as well as you speak and read French, and that you have just as many comprehension problems with nouns in both? IMO, Latin forces you to ponder what case the noun has each time ("What case is this?... Depends on which declension this word belongs to... That is, if I can guess which _word_ this is in the first place [e.g. _vir_ or _virus_]... Which depends on which case this is... Or on context..."). You never get such problems with French. And I'm not even saying that case is what I personally find the most difficult in Latin; on the contrary, I find it to be the easiest thing about it.

All in all, I think cases are inherently more difficult because, unlike prepositions, which tend to look the same in all contexts or at least vary only slightly, case endings in Indo-European can be very different depending on the word. There's a lot more to learn by heart: instead of the form of the preposition and, at worst, a few basic variations (French de, d', du, des) you have to learn dozens of completely different endings (Russian -ом, -ой, -ю, -ами) that may overlap with the endings of other cases. And once you've finally learned to expect grammatical information to be signalled by cases, you find out that some words look the same in several or almost all cases, so the grammatical information you expect just isn't there (jokes like смерть, смерти, смерти, о смерти; saga, sǫgu, sǫgu, sǫgu; cornu, cornu, cornu, cornu, cornu, cornu). If you are supposed to do without case expression, why have it at all? Sorry, I kinda like IE cases from an aesthetic point of view, but for practical purposes, I think a case is just a postposition that has been seriously screwed up (by phonological change).


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## mugibil

Anatoly


> Does anyone else learn a language based on degree of difficulty? Do you choose easy or difficult?



If one were to answer in detail, this would have to be moved to another thread. Personally, I like the mixture of familiar and unfamiliar in each new language or dialect. Both components are desirable and contribute to the pleasure of learning.


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## phosphore

mungu said:


> Are you saying that you speak and read Latin just as well as you speak and read French, and that you have just as many comprehension problems with nouns in both?


 
I am much better at French than at Latin, but that's because my experience with French is much longer. That doesn't have anything to do with grammar, does it? However, after years of learning French, every now and then I wonder if it's "de" or "du/de l'/de la/des", "à" or "de", "un/une" or nothing, etc. English - even worse. That's what I was talking about.


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## sokol

Mod note:
Discussion about Bulgarian tenses moved to a new thread - please let's concentrate here on the degree of difficulty, and continue over there on Bulgarian vs. Romance tenses.


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## mugibil

I think our discussion of Bulgarian vs Romance tenses are highly relevant to this thread, since the question was whether someone familiar with English and Romance would find Bulgarian tenses difficult. But never mind, anyone interested can follow it there.


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## mugibil

phosphore said:


> I am much better at French than at Latin, but that's because my experience with French is much longer. That doesn't have anything to do with grammar, does it? However, after years of learning French, every now and then I wonder if it's "de" or "du/de l'/de la/des", "à" or "de", "un/une" or nothing, etc. English - even worse. That's what I was talking about.



Well, I think this should make it difficult to compare Latin and French; the ambitions and expectations are different. I wonder about such things too, but they are about making the impression of being a native speaker and will practically never cause an actual misunderstanding. They are extremely minor, cosmetic problems. With Latin, you never even reach the level where you would try to actively pass off as a native speaker; the most ambitious aim is to be able to passively understand Suetonius' text in a relaxed atmosphere without opening a dictionary more than once per page, and boy, is that a challenging task.


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## phosphore

mungu said:


> Well, I think this should make it difficult to compare Latin and French; the ambitions and expectations are different. I wonder about such things too, but they are about making the impression of being a native speaker and will practically never cause an actual misunderstanding. They are extremely minor, cosmetic problems. With Latin, you never even reach the level where you would try to actively pass off as a native speaker; the most ambitious aim is to be able to passively understand Suetonius' text in a relaxed atmosphere without opening a dictionary more than once per page, and boy, is that a challenging task.


 
You are forgetting that only two centuries ago educated people had to know Latin practically like their native tongue, since all education was in Latin. And they did know it. It is not as impossible as you may think. Anyway, the most difficult characteristics of Russian for a non-native are the verbal aspect and its unpredicatable stress. As we all know, the verbal aspect is a category shared by all Slavic languages. If the stress patterns in Bulgarian are more regular than in Russian (in Serbian they are even more complicated), only then we could say that Bulgarian rather than Russian might be easier to master. The difficulties of mastering a case system are quite exaggerated.


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## Anatoli

phosphore said:


> ...Anyway, the most difficult characteristics of Russian for a non-native are the verbal aspect and its unpredictable stress. As we all know, the verbal aspect is a category shared by all Slavic languages. If the stress patterns in Bulgarian are more regular than in Russian (in Serbian they are even more complicated), only then we could say that Bulgarian rather than Russian might be easier to master. The difficulties of mastering a case system are quite exaggerated.


The stress in Bulgarian is unpredictable as well, like in Russian but taking into account that there are no cases, then it's much less headache to decide where to stress in the oblique cases - (предложный падеж): в сад*у* / о с*а*де, в год*у* / о г*о*де


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## mugibil

Anatoly:
Yes. Though "unpredictable" isn't quite accurate for any Slavic language stress system - there are sub-patterns and sub-regularities, they are just very, very numerous and complicated.

Phosphore:


> You are forgetting that only two centuries ago educated people had to know Latin practically like their native tongue, since all education was in Latin. And they did know it. It is not as impossible as you may think. Anyway, the most difficult characteristics of Russian for a non-native are the verbal aspect and its unpredicatable stress. As we all know, the verbal aspect is a category shared by all Slavic languages. If the stress patterns in Bulgarian are more regular than in Russian (in Serbian they are even more complicated), only then we could say that Bulgarian rather than Russian might be easier to master. The difficulties of mastering a case system are quite exaggerated.



About Latin - I never said it was impossible to master, but neither is French.

About case - I still disagree, but it seems we have nothing new to say to each other about this.

About Bulgarian stress - as I said, no case means fewer grammatical forms to have stress alternations in. In addition, unlike Russian and BCS, there are practically no stress alternations between the singular and plural forms of feminine nouns and of adjectives. For example Bul. главА - главИ vs Rus. головА - гОловы (in BCS this translates as tone: глаАвА - глАаве). Neuter nouns usually have a plural in -a, which is almost always stressed (правА, селА, правилА), which is again simpler than Russian, which has all the possibilities: правА, сЕла, прАвила. Definite forms (which are of course absent in Russian) don't move the stress either in masculine polysyllabic nouns, feminine and neuter nouns and in adjectives (except for feminine nouns in a consonant, which always move it). The masculine monosyllabic nouns are still a sordid group, though. I haven't looked so closely at verbs and can't claim with certainty that Bulgarian has simplified them more than the others; the principal nastiness is 20-something verbs that have an annoying alternation between the present and the aorist. One good thing I can think of immediately is that with the exception of the verb "to be", past active participles are always stressed on the stem, so stuff like Rus. разнеслА, вЫпила are out of the question. Likewise, the type Rus. пишУ - пИшешь is absent (пИша - пИшеш; this is levelled in BCS as well). Obviously, we don't alternate пиИсАти - пИишем like BCS either, b/c we have no infinitive. But of course, all these steps towards a "Lexical stress with a human face" can't compete with the fixed stress Slavic languages in terms of easiness.


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## Anatoli

mungu said:


> Anatol*i*:
> Yes. Though "unpredictable" isn't quite accurate for any Slavic language stress system - there are sub-patterns and sub-regularities, they are just very, very numerous and complicated.


The complicated patterns may apply to grammatical forms or derived forms, often to words having similar endings/forms (e.g. -ация) but very seldom to dictionary forms, the Russian letter "ё" being an exception (always stressed in native Russian words). Rare words may be mispronounced even by native speakers and there are words with more than one word stress, words that are commonly mispronounced.


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## mugibil

Anatoli said:


> The complicated patterns may apply to grammatical forms or derived forms, often to words having similar endings/forms (e.g. -ация) but very seldom to dictionary forms, the Russian letter "ё" being an exception (always stressed in native Russian words).



Yes, you're right that there is a lexical (unpredictable) component in that individual roots and affixes are "stress-attracting", "post-stressing" or "pre-stressing", dominant or recessive, etc., and you can't predict which is which. But I meant that there is also a predictable component in that once you know these lexical properties, you can predict the word's stress. In theory at least. In practice, for the language learner, it's very difficult to memorize all the patterns and I wonder if anyone has ever learnt them by memorizing the properties and rules consciously.


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## Anatoli

I am not sure what you mean. What's the difference between _ж*а*ба_ and _стран*а*_ in Russian? For example, why the first word is stressed on the first syllable and second on the second? Words like _т*о*рмоз_ and _мор*о*з_,  _туз_ (genitive _туз*а*_) and _стул_ (genitive _ст*у*ла_). I really don't think there is any predictable component here. I already mentioned some suffixes or word endings may have a predictable stress but the root words? I doubt it. You have to memorise the words with their stress patterns.

For learners - learn the word, learn its word stress at the same time (including its forms, if possible). Not unsimilar with the way English is studied and other languages for which the pronunciation is not always linked with the spelling.


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## Christo Tamarin

phosphore said:


> Anyway, the most difficult characteristics of Russian for a non-native are *the verbal aspect* and its *unpredictable stress*.


I agree. And now, please consider that Bulgarian has both *the verbal aspect* and the *unpredictable stress*. Plus, the cyrillic script.



phosphore said:


> As we all know, the verbal aspect is a category shared by all Slavic languages.


Yes. Including Bulgarian. The verbal aspect is the most difficult feature of any Slavic language for anyone except for native Slavs.

Conclusion: I cannot agree that Bulgarian is less difficult than Russian for a non Slav. On the other hand, for a native of former Yugoslavia, Bulgarian is easier than Russian, but for another native Slav, Russian is easier than Bulgarian.

Bulgarian could hardly serve as a bridge from a non-Slavic language to Russian. 

However, for any native Slav, Bulgarian could serve as a bridge from any other Slavic to any other Balkanic (modern Greek, Romanian, Albanian). 

Additionally, for a native Russian, Bulgarian could serve as a bridge to any Romance or Germanic language.



phosphore said:


> If the stress patterns in Bulgarian are more regular than in Russian (in Serbian they are even more complicated), only then we could say that Bulgarian rather than Russian might be easier to master.


Actually, the stress patterns in the literary Bulgarian are unpredictable in the same extent as in Russian. However, unlike Russian, there is vast variety in stress patterns among Bulgarian dialects. Therefore, violating the literary stress pattern is tolerated. 



phosphore said:


> The difficulties of mastering a case system are quite exaggerated.


Happy with the common lexical pool, some Bulgarians underestimate the difficulty of Russian as a foreign language and so they face later the case system of Russian as an impassable obstacle.


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## Anatoli

> Additionally, for a native Russian, Bulgarian could serve as a bridge to any Romance or Germanic language.


That's a first, do you think that Bulgarian has a much larger number of borrowings than Russian or other Slavic languages? 



> Actually, the stress patterns in the literary Bulgarian are unpredictable in the same extent as in Russian. However, unlike Russian, there is vast variety in stress patterns among Bulgarian dialects. Therefore, violating the literary stress pattern is tolerated.


True about Russian. Native are notoriously intolerant to other natives for their wrong word stress. Running the risk of being accused of generalisations here but I am Russian myself. It doesn't apply to foreigners.


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## Christo Tamarin

Anatoli said:


> Christo Tamarin said:
> 
> 
> 
> Additionally, for a native Russian, Bulgarian could serve as a bridge to any Romance or Germanic language.
> 
> 
> 
> That's a first, do you think that Bulgarian has a much larger number of borrowings than Russian or other Slavic languages?
Click to expand...

No.

Using Bulgarian as as a bridge from Russian to any Romance or Germanic language provides for the following:

Still in Cyrillic, still in Slavonic vocabulary, mastering the category of definiteness, facing a verbal system with more past tenses (and the extensive use of prepositions instead of noun cases).


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## Anatoli

Christo Tamarin said:


> No.
> 
> Using Bulgarian as as a bridge from Russian to any Romance or Germanic language provides for the following:
> 
> Still in Cyrillic, still in Slavonic vocabulary, mastering the category of definiteness, facing a verbal system with more past tenses (and the extensive use of prepositions instead of noun cases).



I see. Well, that's a theory, which may have some value for some but I don't agree with it.


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## mugibil

Anatoli said:


> I am not sure what you mean. What's the difference between _ж*а*ба_ and _стран*а*_ in Russian? For example, why the first word is stressed on the first syllable and second on the second? Words like _т*о*рмоз_ and _мор*о*з_,  _туз_ (genitive _туз*а*_) and _стул_ (genitive _ст*у*ла_). I really don't think there is any predictable component here. I already mentioned some suffixes or word endings may have a predictable stress but the root words?



You aren't following. Predictability comes from properties of roots and endings, which are lexical, i.e. you do have to know them in advance. And the stress shift examples you are citing aren't really "root words", they all contain suffixes/endings.

I'm afraid there's too much to explain here, I can only give you a couple of hints. In the previous post, I was citing one of the two approaches to prediction, let's call it the "morphemic" one. According to the morphemic approach, сторон- is an unaccented root, while -a is an accented ending, hence сторонА. -ы is an unaccented ending, so stress goes to the root: стОроны. жаб- is an accented root, so it wins over all endings, accented or unaccented: жАба, жАбы. A third type is the post-stressing root, which causes stress to always be on the ending: I'm at pains to find a good example that also ends in -a, but I believe мук- as in мукА, мукУ, мукОй belongs to this group. The other approach is the paradigmatic one, which simply groups words into stress paradigms such as "end-stressed, except nominative plural and accusative singular" (сторонА), "stress fixed on the root" (жАба), "stress fixed on the end" (мукА).

Please don't ask me for more explanations, it takes too much time. For an introduction to the whole issue, you may look at this (http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Webpage/Courses/HistoryOfPhonology/Yakubovich.pdf) and this (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~fasl8/milnes_etal.htm) for the morpheme approach, and at this (http://theheap.awardspace.com/stress_nouns_exp.html) for the paradigmatic approach.


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## mugibil

Christo Tamarin said:


> Additionally, for a native Russian, Bulgarian could serve as a bridge to any Romance or Germanic language.



If that's true, than one should be able to move the reverse way as well.



Christo Tamarin said:


> Actually, the stress patterns in the literary Bulgarian are unpredictable in the same extent as in Russian. However, unlike Russian, there is vast variety in stress patterns among Bulgarian dialects. Therefore, violating the literary stress pattern is tolerated.



I posted about this earlier in this thread; there are specific arguments that the Bulgarian stress patterns are not as unpredictable as the Russian ones, but I'm not going to repeat them.


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## Anatoli

Mungu, what you are describing are declension, plural forming, conjugation patterns, etc. They DO have some predictability in both writing and stress shifts, there are a few patterns, though. I already said I was excluding this, if you read my posts carefully and talked about the problem with roots of words.


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## mugibil

Anatoli said:


> Mungu, what you are describing are declension, plural forming, conjugation patterns, etc. They DO have some predictability in both writing and stress shifts, there are a few patterns, though. I already said I was excluding this, if you read my posts carefully and talked about the problem with roots of words.



OK, OK. Whatever you say. "Dictionary form", "root word", "root of a word", жаба... And which of these is which... OK, I really think this topic has been exhausted.


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## vianie

Anatoli said:


> As for Western Slavic languages, I found Polish much easier to understand and learn for a Russian speaker than Slovak and especially Czech. Still Czech is easier than Serbo-Croatian languages or Slovenian. So the gap is not that big (East-West).



That not big gap is in more or less similar pronounciation, but there is scarcely anything similar in accentuation of ES and WS.

I saw one American boy to mention in some other language forum: 

"When I was in Slovenia, Slovene sounds more like Russian than Slovak, but standard Slovene reminds me a bit Slovak without voiced H."

I don´t know, where exactly he was, just guess Ljubljana, because e.g. I rate Maribor speech as even closer to Slovak than standard Slovene.




Anatoli said:


> I can't compare West and South similarly.



Can I?

West - South: Polish - Czech / Slovak - Slovene / BCS - Macedonian / Bulgarian

Where Czech seems to be closer to Slovene in tone position, so like Slovak to BCS. However that all is obviously complicated a bit more.


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## Anatoli

vianie said:


> That not big gap is in more or less similar pronunciation, but there is scarcely anything similar in accentuation of ES and WS.


I wasn't talking about accents. The gaps are not huge or not overcomeable, anyway, like between any given two Slavic languages. Sharing many palatalised sounds is definitely a common feature, be it different Polish vs ES languages and Czech having less palatalisation compared to ES. 



vianie said:


> Can I?
> 
> West - South: Polish - Czech / Slovak - Slovene / BCS - Macedonian / Bulgarian
> 
> Where Czech seems to be closer to Slovene in tone position, so like Slovak to BCS. However that all is obviously complicated a bit more.



Thanks for comparison. I only meant I wasn't in a position to compare, since I am not as familiar with South Slavic languages as I am with ES (native Russian, functional in Ukrainian, partially Belarusian)) and WS (passively). I actually wanted compare vocabularies and grammar as a dialect continuum.

There are no obvious bridges here, perhaps, Russian/Bulgarian being the closest vocabulary-wise and any other ES or WS language /Serbo-Croatian (language(s)) grammar-wise. Serbo-Croatian also have borrowings from Russian but they are not as numerous as Bulgarian (including shared old Slavonic). I use my brief exposure to South Slavic languages. Slovenian, although phonetically easy, is quite remote vocabulary-wise from other languages.


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## Mithradates

Anatoli said:


> Mungu, sorry if I sounded like I was trying to put the Bulgarian language down. I know a guy who chose to learn a Slavic language (Polish) based on another language aspect - script and word stress. He thought Cyrillic was too hard to master! Plus the obvious obstacle - random word stress - this problem doesn't exist in Polish, Czech and Slovak. I guess some people choose languages based on their apparent easy aspect, not on the pragmatic need. I for one, like languages, which are difficult - complex scripts and grammar but what really puts me off is lack of good textbooks, readers, listening resource and other things. My long time hobby is Japanese, Chinese (both intermediate) and partially Arabic (upper beginner. I am learning some very basics of Thai, Hindi and Vietnamese - just dabbling (script, accent, basic phrases and words). It's quite different from my previous studies of German, English and French (lower intermediate), Polish (intermediate) but I am having fun. The degree of difficulty of Italian, Spanish or Swedish are not challenging enough for me, I have familiarised enough. Does anyone else learn a language based on degree of difficulty? Do you choose easy or difficult?



I'm learning Bulgarian (actually beginning to pick it up again after learning the basics in 2008) partly for that reason. I live in Korea and don't see myself going to Bulgaria any time in the near future, but I like the language itself more than other Slavic languages. Some of the reasons are:

-Easier to learn: pretty much for all the reasons mungu has given
-Next to Turkey: I'm fairly good at Turkish and am interested in the countries next to it as well
-Bulgarian is the descendant of Old Church Slavonic
-Bulgaria's warm. Kind of a silly reason but I'm originally from Canada and never liked places where winter takes up about half of the year.


Edit: I should also mention that I have a much easier time with verb tenses than noun cases. Verb tenses all exist for good reasons (each one of them corresponds to a different way of expressing an action) whereas noun cases are often pretty arbitrary.

Edit 2: One other note to add here is that complicated verb tenses are usually taken up when the student has reached the level where he is able to start talking about such subjects, and that doesn't usually come until later. In the beginning your task is to learn how to say things like I want that, I don't want that, I will go to X tomorrow, he likes you, I plan to work in Y, and so on. You can get by with simple verb tenses for quite a while. Cases, on the other hand, have to be mastered right away and each of those simple sentences still requires using them properly. I want that (accusative), I don't want that (accusative in some languages, genitive in some languages like Lithuanian). I will go to X (dative), I plan to work in Y (locative or dative depending on the language), etc. Nobody starts out saying things like "Had I had more, I would have been found to be a happier man" (complex sentence off the top of my head) when learning a language but you always need proper case usage in even the simplest of sentences. You can't even say "She brings coffee to Mr. Braun" (Sie bringt Herrn Braun den Kaffee) properly in German without knowing both the accusative (der - den) and that Herr is a special noun that requires an -n in the dative.


Moderator note: merged.
That other thread where you replied was split off from this thread, in order to have two different threads - each of which has a clearly defined topic.
As you answered on the Bulgarian tenses thread the question of easiness I've moved back this post to this thread. 




Christo Tamarin said:


> Conclusion: I cannot agree that Bulgarian is less difficult than Russian for a non Slav.



It is for me. The difference between Bulgarian and Russian or other Slavic languages is that I can use Bulgarian pretty much from day one without having to worry about cases. Bulgarian's a really easy language to start using properly for a non-Slavic speaker.


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## Awwal12

Well, if in Russian the problem in declension of nouns was only in 6 cases, it would be quite easy. Actually, the problem is in 3 different declensions that have numerous exceptions and nuances in addition. And furthermore, a learner should also memorize when one should use these different cases.

Of course, both Bulgarian and Russian have another difficulties - but the system of declension isn't one of them in Bulgarian.


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## kamak

My experience.  I speak french (native) and english.  I learnt bulgarian, finding it not as difficult as I was told it would be by its own speakers.   Its more flexible than french for word order.  I can now converse about many things in it.  And I am now learning russian.  As Mithadates said, verb tenses are not as complicated for me as russian cases.  So russian is proving a way more involved learning process.  Its a challenge to master the cases.  They are interesting, I love their logic, but its definitely harder to me.  Daily or simple conversation was comparatively easier to do in BG.  
Now as for mastering the language, every language is difficult.  I have spoken and read english for 30 years, and I can read complex text in it, as intricate as any french text, but still, after 2 words, every native know that I am a foreigner. I am still unsure of some usage. 
A note to the debaters who just love to disagree : please keep focus on what is important.  Forget the little ego squabbles. its useless to others.   Best to all.


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## trosheniorasi

I can't speak about grammar (because I don't know any), but I know a few foreigners who speak Bulgarian and to be honest they do a really bad job at it. On the other hand Polish I know some Mexicans who have a better pronunciation in Polish than in English. I guess the difficulty depends on whether you are just trying to learn the language for communication purposes or to have perfect grammatical skills. To be fair many natives don't know their own grammar and make mistakes when writing their own language, including Bulgarians. I don't know any grammar in any language yet I can read and write in three, so grammar shouldn't scare people away from learning a language.


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## LilianaB

I think Polish and Spanish are phonetically similar, this is why some Spanish people may have fewer difficulties pronouncing Polish words. As for Bulgarian and Russian, Bulgarian is for some reason classified as a language of level 2 difficulty in the US Defense Department classification, whereas Russian and other Slavic languages are classified as level 3.


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## trosheniorasi

Bulgarian is classified as level 2 because it has "simpler grammar" than Russian. I don't think that the classification system takes into account pronunciation, or at least not as much as grammar. Spanish does seem to be easier to native Slavic speakers than it is to English speakers at least when it comes to pronunciation from what I've noticed as well.


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## LilianaB

No, I am convinced Spanish is much easier to people who speak Polish than English is: the same may be true about people who speak Slovak and Czech. Yes, apparently Bulgarian has easier grammar.


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## trosheniorasi

Yes I agree with that! Spanish is easier for Slavs (it is for me ), I think Spanish is generally easier than English, it is classified as level 1.


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## Miacek

Never had much trouble with Russian stress, Serbo-Croat might really be different as tones come to play. I find Polish the most difficult Slavic language I've tried to learn due to the sheer number of sibilants + grammar is said to be even more complicated than Russian. 


Athaulf said:


> My hypothesis is that the hardest one would likely be Russian or Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian, because of the stress. I'm not aware of any significant complexities of, say, Polish, Czech, or Slovak that these ones wouldn't have, while their mindblowingly complicated stress rules greatly add to their difficulty.


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## petka111

vput said:


> Each Slavic language has its own difficulties for a native English speaker.
> 
> 
> 
> Croatian: zrakoplov; auto(mobil); kompjutor/računalo; povijest ("historija" is less common); glazba
> Czech: letadlo; auto; počítač; dějiny; hudba
> Polish: samolot; samochód; komputer; historia; muzyka
> Russian: самолет (samolot); автомобиль (avtomobil'); компьютер (kompyuter); история (istoriya); музыка (muzyka)
> Serbian: avion (from French); auto(mobil); kompjuter/računar; istorija ("povest" is less common); muzika
> Slovak: lietadlo; auto; počítač; dejiny; hudba
> Slovenian: zrakoplov; avtomobil/vozilo; računalnik; zgodovina ("historija" is rarely used); glasba
> 
> .


Slovenia: zrakoplov (is a ballon on air for transport people). Zrakoplov is not a plane in Slovenian!  Avtomobil and vozilo:  you will find the two words only in a dictionary. Nobody speak so.
Slovenian: avion/letalo; avto; računalnik/PC/compjuter; zgodovina; 

I know, I live here.


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## TriglavNationalPark

petka111 said:


> Avtomobil and vozilo:  you will find the two words only in a dictionary. Nobody speak so.
> Slovenian: avion/letalo; avto; računalnik/PC/compjuter; zgodovina;



*Vozilo* means "vehicle" in a broader sense and is commonly used in that specific context. I certainly wouldn't say that it's a word only found in a dictionary.

Also, the short form *avto* is certainly more common than *avtomobil* in the nominative case, but *avtomobil* is actually more widespread in other cases.

Consider this:

*Na tem parkirišču je veliko avtov.*

*Na tem parkirišču je veliko avtomobilov.*

Which sentence sounds more natural to your ears? I would always use the latter.

Furthermore, while *kompjuter* is found in dictionaries, it tends to be frowned upon in everything but the most informal speech. It's rarely encountered in written sources, where *računalnik* is the commonly accepted term. *Letalo* is also vastly more common than *avion* in standard Slovenian.


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## Azori

vput said:


> The presence of loanwords may also be helpful and some Slavic languages compared to others have stronger puristic tendencies as noted above.
> 
> e.g. airplane, car, computer, history, music
> 
> Croatian: zrakoplov; auto(mobil); kompjutor/računalo; povijest ("historija" is less common); glazba
> Czech: letadlo; auto; počítač; dějiny; hudba
> Polish: samolot; samochód; komputer; historia; muzyka
> Russian: самолет (samolot); автомобиль (avtomobil'); компьютер (kompyuter); история (istoriya); музыка (muzyka)
> Serbian: avion (from French); auto(mobil); kompjuter/računar; istorija ("povest" is less common); muzika
> Slovak: lietadlo; auto */ vozidlo*; počítač */ words like "laptop" and "notebook" are common, too*; dejiny */ história*; hudba */ muzika (colloq.)*
> Slovenian: zrakoplov; avtomobil/vozilo; računalnik; zgodovina ("historija" is rarely used); glasba


What was the point of this word list?


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## petka111

TriglavNationalPark said:


> *Vozilo* means "vehicle" in a broader sense and is commonly used in that specific context. I certainly wouldn't say that it's a word only found in a dictionary.
> 
> Also, the short form *avto* is certainly more common than *avtomobil* in the nominative case, but *avtomobil* is actually more widespread in other cases.
> 
> Consider this:
> 
> *Na tem parkirišču je veliko avtov.*
> 
> *Na tem parkirišču je veliko avtomobilov.*
> 
> Which sentence sounds more natural to your ears? I would always use the latter.
> 
> Finally, while *kompjuter* is found in dictionaries, it tends to be frowned upon in everything but the most informal speech. It's rarely encountered in written sources, where *računalnik* is the commonly accepted term. *Letalo* is also vastly more common than *avion* in standard Slovenian.



Ja, it's true. I mean for a car,... "vozilo" is not only a word for a car. 

The same as for "avtomobil" is for word "da"/yes. I never say "da"/yes  (I say "ja"/yes), but in the text is always "da"/yes. Always. 

Slovenia is very small country. In the past we were adopting words  from German, Italian and Hungarian languages but today we are adopting  words from Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian (from ex Austria (Vienna as capital  city) to Yugoslavia (Belgrade as capital city)). If you compare Slovenian with old Slovenian...or if you compare spoken Slovenian with official Slovenian.... it looks almost like 2 different languages.
Ah, never ending story. 
I realized that Slovenian language is a mix of German, Italian and  Hungarian language on "Slavic base". The reason is only one: History.  Official language in Slovenia (until 1918) was German..... etc. etc. You  can see so much in Slovenian language (in the chaos of Slovenian l. and  duality  inside)......


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## dzsobacsi

petka111,  

Please tell me a few words that are the same in Hungarian and in Slovenian.
I know already a few similarities between Slovak and Hungarian:
pohár/pohár, kabát/kabát, vacsora/večera, macska/mačka, tányér/tanier 
I am sure, that there are several more examples.


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## asifsound

*Song of Cyrillic*

I write this in English, now.
I show my method "How to learn by heart the Cyrillic letters".

1. /Ya:/ (,which means I/ me.) is the perverse "R /a:r/". ---- Я, я 
2. /I/ is Japanese "い /i/" (same sound). --- И, и
3. /Yu:/ is near shape Hangul "어 /eo/" (another sound). --- Ю,ю
4. /U/ is Greek "Υ υ /upsilon/". ---- Υ ,υ
5. /La/ is Greek "Λ λ /lambda    /". --- Л, л
6. /Ra/ is Greek "Ρ ρ    /rho/".  --- Р, р
7. /Ga/ is Greek "Γ γ    /gamma/".  --- Г, г
8. /Pa/ is Greek "Π π    /pai/".  --- П, п
9. /Na/ is Greek "Η η    /i:ta/", H = h ≒ η( ng mark). --- Н, н
10./Ha/ is Greek "Χ χ /kai/" -- /(k)ha:/ sound. --- Х, х
11./Fa/ is Greek "Φ φ /fai/".  --- Ф, ф
12./Zu/ is ending Alphabet  "Z /zi:/"  as "Zoo /zoo/" , its handwriting type "ʓ". --- З,з
13./ts/ is Hebrew "צ ץ  /tsadi/".  --- Ц,ц
14./che/ is Sibilant of /ts/. ---- Ч,ч
15./sha/ is Hebrew "ש /shin/", Greek "Σ σ /sigma/", Chinese mountain "山 /shan/". --- Ш,ш
16./zhe/ is dull sound of /sha/. ---- Ж, ж
17./ba/ is alphabet "B /bi:/" like a style "Number 6 /six/". --- Б,б
18./va/ is alphabet "B /bi:/" , but sounds /vi:/.  --- В,в
19./sa/ is alphabet "C /si:/".   --- C, c
20. Isolated vowel delimiter is alphabet small "b" mark. --- ъ,ь,ы


Tip:
(1) In fact, "И" comes from Greek "H  η  /i:ta/".
(2) Ц /ts/ is a shape, "|" is roof of the mouth (= palate), "L" is tongue.
Upper part is back of the throat. The tip of tongue touches the back of teeth part.
(3) Ч /che/ is smaller mouth space style than Ц. 
(4) ы is like a -y suffix. 

---- By this method, You can master the the Cyrillic letters in a 1 hour. 
--- I think so.


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## discipulus11

asifsound said:


> *Song of Cyrillic*
> 
> 
> ---- By this method, You can master the the Cyrillic letters in a 1 hour.
> --- I think so.


I don't think that learning an alphabet is a big problem at all. Once I learned Sanskrit Devanagari just for fun. It took me a couple of weeks.
And situation when a language switches to another alphabet is not uncommon, for example Azerbaijani and Romanian spoken in Moldavia, that I guess did not make native speakers illiterate.


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## jadeite_85

dzsobacsi said:


> petka111,
> 
> Please tell me a few words that are the same in Hungarian and in Slovenian.
> I know already a few similarities between Slovak and Hungarian:
> pohár/pohár, kabát/kabát, vacsora/večera, macska/mačka, tányér/tanier
> I am sure, that there are several more examples.



When I was in Budapest I remember utca/ulica and pentek/petek. They are slavic loanwords. Wiktionary gives "bunda", "cula", "gumb", "lopov" and "soba" as Hungarian borrowings in Slovene. But I think "soba" and "gumb" came from Turkish, since we find them also in Greek.


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