# Serbian (BCS) vs. Russian/Ukrainian: Mutual intelligibility



## effeundici

Hi all,

I'm interested, for practical reasons, to know how much an Ukraininian (probably highly fluent in Ukrainian and Russian) may understand and be understood in Serbia.

Thanks a lot for your answers.

Edit: with my poor knowledge of Serbian, it seems they are quite similar when translating serbian words into Russian. (Ex. napisati - jesti/esti)


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## sokol

I have only learned BCS as a second language and I've never learned Russian or Ukrainian properly, but I am pretty sure that a Serb without any prior knowledge of any of those two languages and no deeper knowledge of any other Slavic language and/or Old Church Slavonic will understand pretty much nothing of spoken Ukrainian or Russian - surely a word here or there will be familiar, but it won't be enough to even follow the basics of a spoken conversation.

In written language it will be different, many words will sound familiar - and a Serb with some patience and goodwill, and the help of a dictionary, should be able to follow the basics of a written text of Russian or Ukrainian; but this will take time (the more complex the text, the more time it will take).

Of course it will be different if a Serb is familiar with Old Church Slavonic and/or previous knowledge of any of those languages or even of Bulgarian (which has some OCS and Russian loans).


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## VelikiMag

As a native Serbian speaker who has some limited experience with Russians and Ukrainians, I will try to answer your question.
First of all, Serbian and Russian/Ukrainian are NOT mutually intelligible languages. Although they are all Slavic languages, and there is indeed a lot of similarities both in grammar and vocabulary, I personally believe that the greatest obstacle is the pronounciation. While Serbian is a tonal language the other two are not, and therefore the accentuation differs to a significant degree. One simply does not expect that words (which can be similar or even the same in writing) are pronounced so differently, which is often the case.

Prior to starting learning Russian, I wasn't able to understand it to any acceptable level. I could catch up few words now and then but I wasn't able to understand tenses, and because of that I could very rarely get the full meaning. I believe the situation is more or less the same when it's about Russian/Ukrainian person listening to spoken Serbian. So I guess if people are speaking very slowly and correctly some basic information could be exchanged, but for a successful conversation it would be far more better speaking in english (provided that both sides have some knowledge of it).

For a comparison of Serbian with Russian and Ukrainian, one has to have rather good knowledge of all of the three languages. But having in mind that it is not the subject of this topic, I can just say that for some things, Serbian is sometimes more similar to Russian, and for some other things to Ukrainian.
And here are few bizarre examples of similarity to Ukrainian which I can remember at the moment (in Serbian - Ukrainian - Russian - English order):

шунка - шинка - ветчина - ham
вечера - вечеря - ужин - supper
кравата - краватка - галстук - tie
etc.

P.S. For everything I said about mutual intelligibility I assumed that a person does not have any knowledge of the other language(s).


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## Sobakus

Yeah, I agree that the main thing that hampers the mutual intelligebility of all the Slavic languages is prosody, and the most difficult it is with Russian and it's vowel reduction. Ukrainian and Northern Russian dialects may be a better choice, or you may try to pronounce Russian clearly instead of mumbling  Also there are lots of common colloquial Balkan words in Ukrainian for obvious reasons. By the way, the most frequently used words tend to be the ones that differ, so if you want to understand another Slavic language's speaker, you'll most probably have to learn that basic vocabulary.


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## Orlin

I'm Bulgarian and speak both Russian and Serbian - they're the closest 2 languages to Bulgarian (if we ignore Macedonian ...) and thus are relatively intelligible to a Bulgarian speaker who hasn't studied them (I personally could understand them before I began studying them - it was long ago and because of this I don't remember many details what and how much I understood) and are relatively easy to learn for a Bulgarian speaker due to the fact that both languages are lexically very similar to Bulgarian (all 3 languages affected by OCS, a relatively high influence of Russian on Bulgarian in 19th-20th cc. and much less on Serbian due to important historical reasons).
Secondly, I think there are levels of mutual intelligibility - while the Bulgarian/Russian and Bulgarian/Serbian mutual intelligibility is relatively high or at least medium, Russian/Serbian is not higher than medium (most probably quitle low). I agree that the most important problem with spoken Russian is vowel reduction, which hinders recognizing similarly/equally spelt cognates. The differences in the verbal system are probably problematic too. In my opinion the tonal accent of Serbian doesn't affect the mutual intelligibility with languages with dynamical accent such as Bulgarian, Russian or Ukrainian mainly because the accent affects the pitch of the accented syllable even in non-tonal languages, where this effect is considered unimportant. And finally, Russian and Serbian vocabulary differs to a relatively significant degree and it seems that many common words are very different.
As for Ukrainian, it has basically Russian grammar, is much less affected by OCS and has some "South Slavic" words that are absent in Russian. I think Ukrainian is more difficult for South Slavic speakers to understand than Russian due to large presence of Polish vocabulary in it. Ukrainian is quite difficult for me to comprehend (especially spoken) although I know Russian quite well because I'm not acquainted with Polish at all.
Some practical advice:
1. It's best to make an attempt to learn the orthography and the basic words of the language that you try to understand - it'll help you a lot.
2. If you do want to communicate with someone everyone speaking his/her native language, it's not a problem to try such a conversation; but if it seems that you don't understand each other well enough, it's OK to turn to any language that is spoken by both participants in the conversation if such exists (of course, it needn't be English). Russian is probably still widespread in Central and Eastern Europe because studying it was obligatory in 1945-90.


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## Martin78

VelikiMag said:


> While Serbian is a tonal language the other two are not, and therefore the accentuation differs to a significant degree. One simply does not expect that words (which can be similar or even the same in writing) are pronounced so differently, which is often the case.



If I may comment on that, it is not really *tones* that make the accentuation and understanding difficult in this case. It could even be debated whether modern Serbian is a tonal language or not. The Vukovian standard of Vuk Karadžić, still in use, if of course tonal. Certain Serbian dialects, especially rural East Herzegovinan dialects, are still tonal, just as they were in the days of Luk. On the other hand, Serbian as spoken in Belgrade is not tonal, and has not been for a long time according to several linguistic studies on the spoken Serbian of Belgrade. The same thing goes for Novi Sad, and it is doubtful whether tones were used in Niš even in the days of Vuk. It could be said with some confidence that urban Serbian is not tonal.

The difficulty with accentuation, however, is that Serbian accentuation has been shifted backwards, and this makes it harder for Serbs to understand Russian/Ukrainian and vice versa. A Serb would say "Mòja vòda i mòja žèna" where a Russian would say "Mojà vodà i mojà ženà". Given how Russian threat unstressed vowels, it would sound as "Majà vadà i majà žinà" which is already quite different from the Serbian "Mòja vòda i mòja žèna", even though every word is the same. So accentuation certainly impedes mutual intelligibility, but tones play little or no part.


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## phosphore

Martin78 said:


> If I may comment on that, it is not really *tones* that make the accentuation and understanding difficult in this case. It could even be debated whether modern Serbian is a tonal language or not. The Vukovian standard of Vuk Karadžić, still in use, if of course tonal. Certain Serbian dialects, especially rural East Herzegovinan dialects, are still tonal, just as they were in the days of Luk. On the other hand, Serbian as spoken in Belgrade is not tonal, and has not been for a long time according to several linguistic studies on the spoken Serbian of Belgrade. The same thing goes for Novi Sad, and it is doubtful whether tones were used in Niš even in the days of Vuk. It could be said with some confidence that urban Serbian is not tonal.


 
Oh, Serbian spoken in Belgrade is very much tonal. In Novi Sad too. But the Niš accent was never melodic, that's true.

And it's true that it's not the _tones_ that make it difficult for a Serb to understand Russian, but exactly what you said about the place of accent and the vowel reduction.

I may say that after 200 hours of learning Spanish, having already known French, it was easier for me to understand Spanish, than to understand Russian after 200 hours of learning Russian. Mutual intelligibility with no prior exposure is, thus, practically next to none.


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## DenisBiH

phosphore said:


> Oh, Serbian spoken in Belgrade is very much tonal. In Novi Sad too.




For a moment there I was really confused by Martin's post, thanks for commenting on this.


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## Martin78

phosphore said:


> Oh, Serbian spoken in Belgrade is very much tonal. In Novi Sad too. But the Niš accent was never melodic, that's true.



Needless to say, you're a Serb and has a better knowledge about this than I do. I'm just a bit puzzled, as I've met several Serbs from Belgrade who didn't use tones. Several linguists have also pointed out that while the tones are alive and well in rural Herzegovinan dialects, they were unstable in Sarajevo and absent from both Belgrade and Zagreb already in the early seventies (_Magner and Matejka 1971. Word accent in modern Serbo-Croatian_). In their recent book on Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian (http://books.google.com/books?id=uP...n croatian serbian&pg=PA4#v=onepage&q&f=false) argue along similar lines.

Once again, this is most certainly not intended to suggest that I would know your language better than you do, far from it. I'm just a bit curious about this situation.


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## phosphore

Martin78 said:


> Needless to say, you're a Serb and has a better knowledge about this than I do. I'm just a bit puzzled, as I've met several Serbs from Belgrade who didn't use tones. Several linguists have also pointed out that while the tones are alive and well in rural Herzegovinan dialects, they were unstable in Sarajevo and absent from both Belgrade and Zagreb already in the early seventies (_Magner and Matejka 1971. Word accent in modern Serbo-Croatian_). In their recent book on Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian (http://books.google.com/books?id=uPxtwiVi6YsC&lpg=PP1&dq=bosnian%20croatian%20serbian&pg=PA4#v=onepage&q&f=false) argue along similar lines.


 
Well, as we have concluded in another thread, some things are here just copied from one to another linguistic work, seemingly without any critical judgement. That much I can say about the books you mention.

As to the real situation, it may be true that some people in Belgrade, who or whose parents are, quite often, I'd say, from Southern Serbia, don't have a melodic accent. And it is true there is a substandard variety of some young people in Belgrade that has an expiratory accent along with other non-standard phonetic features. But I may assure you that standard and most of colloquial Serbian spoken in Belgrade is tonal. 

Something regularly said of the Belgrade speech is that post-accent long vowels, that are regularly present in the East-Herzegovinian dialect, are lost, but that's not completely true either.


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## DenisBiH

Quoted from the link Martin provided:



> Many speakers of Serbian and Croatian no longer observe all the tone and length distinctions, in fact. Bosnian does observe them all, and this gives Bosnian a special, very melodic flavor. For more detailed discussion, see [165a-b].


Ok, but not observing all the tone and length distinctions and not being tonal at all are two different things. I've read a Croatian study about the 'mixing up' of tones, i.e. mistakes made in Croatian radio and television broadcasts, but I don't remember even that saying there are no tones at all. As for post-accent length distinctions, they're another matter.

Besides, I find it a bit strange that the speech of Sarajevo should go from tone-wise unstable in the seventies to modern Bosnian observing all tone distinctions according to the quote above.


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## Martin78

DenisBiH said:


> Besides, I find it a bit strange that the speech of Sarajevo should go from tone-wise unstable in the seventies to modern Bosnian observing all tone distinctions according to the quote above.



That is true. The reason is probably that Ronelle (the author of the recent work on BCS) hasn't done any empirical studies on her own.

Magner and Matejka, however, did very extensive field research on Serbo-Croatian tones in the late 1960s and early 1970s when they tested thousands of people throughout Yugoslavia (or rather in BiH, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia). Their results showed that post-accent length distinctions were neither used or perceived by people outside BiH. On the other hand, the place of the stress was both perceived and used everywhere (no surprise there, of course). The difference between long and short stressed vowels was both perceived and used to at least some extent everywhere except in Southern Serbia, although it was rather weak in Zagreb.

So the thing that remain, then, was the difference between falling and rising tones. What they found was people in Sarajevo perceived tones to a relatively large extent, people in smaller Bosnian towns perceived them perfectly well. People in Belgrade and Zagreb  showed considerable variation (both cities have of courses long received people from different dialect areas) but that even many speakers who perceived tones perfectly well did not use them much.

Those are, in short, the results of tests on a few thousand young people in Yugoslavia in the 60s/70s. Needless to say, I can pass no positive or negative judgement on these findings, so I only report the results as they have been presented.


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## DenisBiH

Thanks for the explanation Martin. I'd definitely like to read that study.

Going back on topic, if the place of accent is an important factor, would that mean that people who speak non-Neoshtokavian Serbian / BCS would do significantly better with understanding / learning Russian? Given how that speech is nowadays often looked down upon or even ridiculed here (at least in B&H, e.g. "Uzeše Nam Pos'o" on YT), that would be a nice thing to know for people speaking such dialects.


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## Martin78

DenisBiH said:


> Thanks for the explanation Martin. I'd definitely like to read that study.
> 
> Going back on topic, if the place of accent is an important factor, would that mean that people who speak non-Neoshtokavian Serbian / BCS would do significantly better with understanding / learning Russian? Given how that speech is nowadays often looked down upon or even ridiculed here (at least in B&H, e.g. "Uzeše Nam Pos'o" on YT), that would be a nice thing to know for people speaking such dialects.




I cannot answer that exact question, but I have friends speaking ikavian chakavian who thought it helped a lot with Ukrainian. Although the distinction is not really made in the same way, one of the differences between Russian and Ukrainian is that Ukrainian is more "ikavian". And as some non-neoshtokavian dialects, as you say, retain a more "slavic" accent-pattern, it should help with understanding and learning the correct place for the accent.

The same disclaimer as before: this is what I've been told (and the ikavian part is evident when reading Ukrainian) but as I've only learned BCS, I cannot comment from personal experience.


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## DenisBiH

An interesting anecdote told by a Russian (living in Montenegro) on a Croatian forum some time ago - apparently he is repeatedly admired by the locals in ex-Yu for his nice _Croatian_ accent, of all things. I'm not sure how that happened, surely some kind of interference of his native Russian. Of course, it's only one guy, and it may not be generalizable, and it's not exactly directly on-topic , but still, Russians and Ukrainians learning Serbian / BCS might find it interesting.


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## VelikiMag

Although the story here went a bit off-topic, I would like to add a few things to the discussion.
First of all, Serbian IS a tonal language and in my opinion it is pointless further discussing it. Second, not all people from Belgrade speak with an identical accent and it can be clearly seen among different generations. By 'people from Belgrade' I mean those who were born there are received there their first education. And I believe it is the same situation with other larger cities like Novi Sad, Zagreb, etc. So we cannot generalize the speech of one group of people or the speech of particular city to one language as a whole. It is quite hard I guess for someone who doesn't speak Serbian to completely understand its accentuation system, but that is exactly what enables us, the native speakers, to know from which region or city someone comes from. In different places different words can have different accents.
Back to Russian, words can only have one accent and it is clearly defined for each case where it is. And the most unusual thing for a Serbian speaker listening to Russian is when the accent is on the last-open syllable. Because in Serbian that is not possible, and if someone would talk like that, in my opinion, he is either joking or has some sort of speaking disability. Another thing is the quality of sounds. Not all letters have the same quality of sounds in Serbian and Russian. Plus, there are sounds in both languages that do not exist in the other one. Then, in Russian almost all consonants can be soft, whilst in Serbian only few can. In other words, as a native speaker of one language you simply don't expect all the differences with another, for which you have presumed in advance you should be able to comprehend.
Anyhow, when it is about mutual intelligibility there is also a human factor which is case by case dependable. Normally, not all people understand different things as fast and as well. Apart from intelligence and level of education, you can be more or less tired, more or less interested in the subject of conversation, have or have not a wish or motive to understand, etc.
All things which I mentioned above were those which I could identify as obstacles to understanding, and for others it doesn't necessarily have to be like that. I'm speaking there for myself only. It would be interesting to hear from someone else who also learned one of those two languages, what are his/her impressions.
Again, I want to point out that I was addressing the case where one has zero knowledge of the language in question and was never exposed to it.


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## phosphore

DenisBiH said:


> An interesting anecdote told by a Russian (living in Montenegro) on a Croatian forum some time ago - apparently he is repeatedly admired by the locals in ex-Yu for his nice _Croatian_ accent, of all things. I'm not sure how that happened, surely some kind of interference of his native Russian. Of course, it's only one guy, and it may not be generalizable, and it's not exactly directly on-topic , but still, Russians and Ukrainians learning Serbian / BCS might find it interesting.


 
Interesting indeed. I have the impression that it is virtually impossible to acquire the accent of "genuine shtokavian speakers" but a "Croatian accent" may be imitated pretty easily. In fact, most learners sound Croatian to me, even when they opted for the Serbian version of the language. I suppose some phonetic and prosodic features of the "Croatian accent" are more common in European languages than those of a "Serbian accent" are, but I doubt they make Croatian any more understandable than Serbian or Bosnian.


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## DenisBiH

VelikiMag said:


> And the most unusual thing for a Serbian speaker listening to Russian is when the accent is on the last-open syllable. Because in Serbian that is not possible, and if someone would talk like that, in my opinion, he is either joking or has some sort of speaking disability.




But doesn't half the territory of Montenegro have exactly that kind of accent? Or am I missing something?



> Akcentuacija kod ovog dijalekta je starijeg tipa, pa tako postoje samo dugouzlazni i kratkosilazni akcenti. Oni se mogu javiti na svakom slogu u reči, pa čak i na poslednjem što standardni književni jezik ne dozvoljava.


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## VelikiMag

> But doesn't half the territory of Montenegro have exactly that kind of accent? Or am I missing something?


I think this is just a rough and perhaps a bit obsolate picture of dialects. Anyway, I am from the seaside and my dialect may not be the one which other BCS-speaking people imagine as typical Montenegrin. About this map, I can tell you for sure that people from the coast speak a bit softer maybe than others. For example, in cities like Cetinje or Podgorica they speak more like those on the north, contrary to this map. But then again, having in mind that we are talking about relatively small number of people in this region and that many people move from their birth places to other (especially from north to the south), a clear separation line probably cannot be drawn.

About stress on the last and open syllable, the only things that come to my mind are genitive plural, where it can indeed sound like it, although the preceding syllable must also be stressed; and some demonstrative pronouns like: _ová, oná, ovó, onó, oví, oní_.
What I had in mind were Russian words like _водá, рукá, ногá, травá_ etc.
Maybe you can think of a serbian word that is somewhere here pronounced like that? Because I believe there is none, but maybe I'm wrong.


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## DenisBiH

To tell you the truth, I haven't been exposed to this dialect enough to say anything with certainty, the only perception of it I have is some sort of generalized feeling I guess many Neoshtokavian speakers have. My father was from Pljevlja and he sounded not too different (if at all) from the standard and the speech here in Sarajevo (of course, since that's Eastern Herzegovinian dialect area), but he did sound markedly different from people from (roughly) north-eastern Montenegro that I've (briefly) been exposed to. But again, as for knowing which words are accented on the last-open syllable, I'm not qualified at all. 

But in strictly theoretical terms - if the accent was originally on the last syllable there, and this dialect (presumably) did not undergo Neoshtokavian accent retraction, where is it then?


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## phosphore

I'm not sure about the Zeta-South Sanjak dialect, but in the Kosovo-Resava dialect, which also keeps the old place of accent, the accent has often been retracted from the last syllable, especially if open and especially in disyllable words. But the Prizren-Timok dialect still keeps _deté_, _žená_ and _čovék_.


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## DenisBiH

phosphore said:


> I'm not sure about the Zeta-South Sanjak dialect, but in the Kosovo-Resava dialect, which also keeps the old place of accent, the accent has often been retracted from the last syllable, especially if open and especially in disyllable words. But the Prizren-Timok dialect still keeps _deté_, _žená_ and _čovék_.




Ah, thanks.  So Neoshtokavian retraction did not happen, but some retraction did / could have.


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## VelikiMag

It may not be the best explanation, but we must keep in mind that we are talking about very small groups of people who live in areas which are in some way isolated. The towns may have less than 100 houses and villages less than 10. And if we know that young people almost always move to bigger cities, all irregularities and characteristics of speach in those places will disappear in no time.


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## sokol

Neoshtokavian (and with this standard language) moved accent more or less towards the top of a word, in not all but many words (by one or more syllables); in Staroshtokavian dialects the accent is different both in its tonemic value and in its position.

Still, I very much doubt that Staroshtokavian speakers would find it significantly easier to understand spoken Russian or Ukrainian - despite accent position, the accent still is tonemic (and even then accent position only might be similar to Eastern Slavic in more cases but certainly not in all cases).


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## Orlin

Здравствуйте! Я считаю, что сами написать тексты и/или поставить линки к другим "легитимным" текстам наилучший способ проверить понятность письменной формы некоторых языков (я решил написать этот пост по-русски, потому что этот подфорум посещают мало носителей русского языка; я прошу сербских членов форума что-нибудь написать на сербском). Мои сербские друзья, вы меня понимаете?
А для оценки понятности говоримого русского и сербского языка можно использовать эту очень специалную ветку (она столь специальна, потому что только на ней разрешается поставлять аудио- и видеолинки): http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1250126 - если я не ошибаюсь, русский и сербский язык уже представлены на этой ветке.


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## dovla

I would just like to clarify something a bit. When you say that Serbian is a tonal language, do you use the word 'tonal' in a sense that fully describes for example Mandarin as well? Because, if that is the case, I wouldn't call it a tonal language. All that matters (even if it's not hard mistake to make, except in a few cases when it shows the meaning) is the right combination of falling/rinsing melody and corresponding rhythm apart form any specific pitch. In any case, the eventual mistakes may produce less intelligibility mostly in spoken language.

To answer the question, so not to be off-topic, I learned some Russian in school, and although one can make some sense out of it without any prior knowledge, I personally think that you can not call Russian/Ukrainian 'mutually intelligible' with Serbian , but more like they look more 'familiar' in broad sense, or 'belonging to the same source' than for example Romance or Germanic languages. It may depend on individual skill of the speaker/listener but one can even understand maybe some simple sentences with common words, but definitely can't make more than non-trivial conversation.


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## sokol

Moderator note:

Please answer dovla's question about BCS accent in this new thread, as this discussion would be off-topic here.
Thank you!
sokol


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## WannaBeMe

Russian or Ukrainian, difficult question.

Russian is hard to understand when spoken.
Ukrainian is hard to understand because if its O>I changes (like in nič = night) and pronouncing g as h (kogo /koho/)

I think that the highest level of understanding for Serbians will be achieved by pronouncing Russian in the ukrainian way (exept maybe to read g as a g and not as a h).
That should maximize the comprehension.


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## Orlin

WannaBeMe said:


> Russian or Ukrainian, difficult question.
> 
> Russian is hard to understand when spoken.
> Ukrainian is hard to understand because if its O>I changes (like in nič = night) and pronouncing g as h (kogo /koho/)
> 
> I think that the highest level of understanding for Serbians will be achieved by pronouncing Russian in the ukrainian way (exept maybe to read g as a g and not as a h).
> That should maximize the comprehension.


 
Ja se slažem s tobom, samo bih hteo da dodam:
1. Sumnjam da li takav način izgovora ruskog na koji bi bilo najbolje razumljivo Srbima zaista postoji jer mislim da u ruskim govorima (južnoruski?) kod kojih nenaglašeno *о* ne prelazi u *а *glas *г* je frikativan (otprilike kao BCS _h_, samo zvučno).
2. Rekao bih da je ukrajinski relativno težak južnoslovenskim govornicima ne samo iz fonetskih razloga koje si naveo, a i pošto je prebogat poljskim posuđenicima, koje su većinom nepoznate srpskim ili drugim južnoslovenskim govornicima (meni ukrajinski nije lak iako ja dobro znam ruski većinom zbog poljskog vokabulara kojeg ukrajinski tako mnogo koristi).
* Ja sam krenuo na srpskom zato što ovaj jezik nije još predstavljen na ovom threadu, a radi se o njegovoj uzajamnoj razumljivosti s ruskim i ukrajinskim.


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## Awwal12

WannaBeMe said:


> and pronouncing g as h (kogo /koho/)


But in that specific word (and in all grammatical suffixes containing "-go") Russians pronounce [v] instead of [g] at all.


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