# BCS-Polish mutual intellegibility



## Morsztyn

Hi everyone,

my native language is Polish and I'm going on a backpacking trip to Montenegro this summer with my scouts. How much knowledge of Serbian/Montenegrin do you think a Polish person needs for basic communication with Serbian/Montenegrin speaking people? What resources would you recommend for learning it?

Thanks!
M.


----------



## VelikiMag

Out of all Slavic languages, I believe that Polish is the least mutually intelligible language with Serbian/Montenegrin. When I was in Poland, it was quite hard for me to understand spoken Polish. There were moments when I could actually understand, but then again, at times I couldn't even tell which language it is. And Poles who I had contact with said that they hardly understood what we were speaking. In my opinion, it is not the grammar that is too different, but words and their pronunciation. In particular the Ł sound. Sometimes it makes even similar words hard to understand.
All in everything, I guess it wouldn't be so hard learning each others' languages, but it does take time. I'm not sure about resources, maybe some other people here who learn BCMS could help you with that. It's only that resources are mostly in English I think.

About those few lines, write them here and we'll try to help.


----------



## Vanja

Yep, I understood them almost nothing. Slovak is far more intelligible, for example. Try with Russian or Slovak, it may help....
Or write down what you want to say (or draw it ) , maybe they can guess the words.... But the best way - speak Polish, but using both hands, body movements, be as expressive as you can, communicate everything with lots of emotions, since we pay a lot of attention on facial expressions, voice etc  They will understand you!


----------



## qwqwqw

The guy wants to write them something.


----------



## ryba

Hi everyone,

I'd venture to say that, out of all the Slavic languages, BCS might be one of the easiest ones for a Polish native speaker to get a hang of. There are pronunciation and lexical issues, of course, but some exposition to BCS should give a Pole quite an accurate feel for the morphosyntax of the language, good enough to be able to succesfully improvise simple sentences. So, my advice would be try reading some basic conversational texts, get the basic vocab straight, and you should develop a certain feel for the language.  I've been using and can recommend you this Croatian dictionary, but take a tour of Resources, there are more helpful links I'm not even aware of.


----------



## sesperxes

If it can be helpful, three summers ago I went to Montenegro and found a couple of Poles who spoke Russian to local (old) people and English to the young ones (I'm talking in the less turistic areas of Tara river and Durmitor).


----------



## LilianaB

ryba said:


> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'd venture to say that, out of all the Slavic languages, BCS might be one of the easiest ones for a Polish native speaker to get a hang of. There are pronunciation and lexical issues, of course, but some exposition to BCS should give a Pole quite an accurate feel for the morphosyntax of the language, good enough to be able to succesfully improvise simple sentences. So, my advice would be try reading some basic conversational texts, get the basic vocab straight, and you should develop a certain feel for the language.  I've been using and can recommend you this Croatian dictionary, but take a tour of Resources, there are more helpful links I'm not even aware of.



I don't agree with you. It is almost incomprehensible to most people who speak Polish only, and don't speak Russian well. I only understand some of it because I speak Russian very well. It might be easier to communicate in Russian or in English there, or just learn some basic phrases -- the type they offer in various phrase books.


----------



## friedric

Food, bread, water, body parts, mama, tata, internationalized words (restaurant etc...) are more or less all I can recall of a words which are similar in Polska, Srbia and Montenegro. If you need more than that (and don't speak above mentioned english or russian), you better get a dictionary and take it very easy.


----------



## DarkChild

friedric said:


> Food, bread, water, body parts, mama, tata, internationalized words (*restaurant* etc...) are more or less all I can recall of a words which are similar in Polska, Srbia and Montenegro. If you need more than that (and don't speak above mentioned english or russian), you better get a dictionary and take it very easy.



Restaurant in Polish is restauracja which may not be recognizable. I once witnessed a funny story at Warwaw airport where the staff was explaining to some Bulgarian grannies that they had a voucher to use the restaurant. Since they didn't understand English, the lady kept repeating restauracja and they were like  . So after some body language, they realized it meant restorant (in Bg)


----------

