retired_Craven

again i should have this in one post sorry, my mate who has done more czech than me says it is possible for 42 variations on the 1 word. Dont know if it is that many but... it is alot

kwchannell89

the baltic languages are more germanis than slavic. at least estonian and latvian are for sure (on house mate is latvian the other estonian, but both also speak russian)

finneys serbian is also similar to slovenian, at school there was a slovenian bloke and a bunch of serbians and a few croatians and they could all communicate with each other, but claimed they only knew their home languages.

and from what i have been told by housemates, polish is very different to other slavic languages, there are also two polish lads were i work and they told me the same.

retired_jabda

Remember I learnt Hungarian to a decent standard for a dirty foreigner, 42 variations of 1 word is child's play

Hungarian has 17 vowels ffs

Czech sounds good, but from what I understand from some Slavs I talked to before is that Slovakian is a little easier for the Balkan Slavs to understand, and as Budapest is closer to most of Slovakia than Bratislava, it may not be too hard to find classes in this city.

If I had a car, I could be in Slovakia in 45 minutes, even on a train it would just be an hour and a bit to the border, then I could try out my newly learnt language skills.

More suggestions are welcome though :thup:

retired_Craven

Strangely enough just look up the respective languages on wikipedia for help on closeness of each language.

retired_Siwash

It sortof depends on where they're from as well. I went to Prague with my family a few years ago, and my dad is from Poland (Moved to Sweden in '71 or so, so while he's fluent in Polish still, it's not something he speaks every day). He could have a conversation with most people, but it seemed to matter where they're from. A couple of people who were from areas near Poland understood him perfectly fine, and vice versa, whereas in some other cases they needed to repeat some stuff to eachother to make themselves understood.

From what I can tell Slovakian/Czech and Polish are further apart than Swedish/Danish/Norwegian, but still mutually intelligible (sp?), albeit requiring a bit of effort if you're not used to it.

retired_jabda

Uppage

retired_jabda

;u;

retired_boy_0429

I was reading Trask's Historical Linguistics last night and came across his brief description of the Slavic family. Basically there are three branches:

East Slavic - Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian
West Slavic - Polish, Czech, Slovak, Wendish
South Slavic - Serboian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Slovenian
Wikipedia provides a few more details. Within those groups Czech and Slovak are more closely related to each other than to Polish, and the South Slavic langauages are split into an Eastern group (Bulgarian and Macedonian) and a Western group that's basically the Balkan languages. Wiki also says that "enough differences between the various Slavic dialects and languages to make communication between speakers of different Slavic languages difficult".

My guess from all that is that you're not going to find a single language that gives you a good head start on everything. Ignoring the East Slavic group, I'd say go for Serbian/Croatian (which are almost the same language) if the Balkans is more important to you. If not, Czech would probably be a big help with Slovak and a lesser help with Polish.

retired_jabda

Yeah, I was aware of the 3 branches, I just hoped that one of the languages was a good bridge language.

Thanks anyway.

retired_amclin3

Polish would be the bridge. It's close enough to Russian/Ukrainian, and close enough to Slovak/Slovenian. Imo of course