In other words, Czech, Polish and Ukrainian in terms of their vocabulary are closer together. People with whom I went to school and with whom I grew up spoke Bosnian and Serbian. Russia, being a very multinational nation, has a number of accepted official languages that are taught and spoken in various republics of the country. Why you’ve deleted my comment? The Russian language include selements of Yiddish, French, Arabic, Dutch, English and many others. What about Russian, Ukranian or Bulgarian? The three are fused into one ending, as is the case in all Slavic languages. We only delete spam and comments with profanities. Basque and Uralic languages sound similar. The fewer cactuses/cacti, the easier. Nobody is saying that American English is identical to Australian English, and yet nobody says they speak “Australian” or “Canadian” or “New Zelandese”. If we look at a map of the world we see this area north of the Black Sea, this vast area of steppe land where the Proto-Slavic people apparently originated from. Geographically, they are located first and foremost in Russia, and there it’s not just ethnic Russians who are Russian speakers, but the many minority peoples of Russia. Poles and Russians share common traditions and a similar fate, especially for the forty years after World War II since they were living under a similar communist systems. I started learning Russian 10 years ago partly because that was the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, but also because I had been exposed to Russian literature as a teenager and wanted to read those books in the original language. difficulty of learning this language if you already speak Russian. SHARE: number of speakers times % The language I spoke. The successor to the southern part of the Kievan Rus’  was the Kingdom of Galicia-Volhynia, which subsequently came under the influence of Lithuania and Poland. My current area of concentration is the Middle East. What are you talking about? because, while Slavic language speakers are a large group of people, the Russian speakers are the largest group. Furthermore the similarities between Slovak and Polish are greater than the differences. Geographically, they are located first and foremost in Russia, and there it’s not just ethnic Russians who are Russian speakers, but the many minority peoples of Russia. Russian nouns are marked for gender, number, and case. In its place a new regional power, The Grand Duchy of Moscow developed in the north. The Russian language does not have the /ð/ and /θ/ sounds, so they find it difficult to pronounce words like clothes, then and thin. I am subscribed to it on my iPhone. As a Croat speaking Croatian I understood them 100%. I worked hard exploring these similar languages, (only a few words and grammatical constructions are different) before our visit. The Mongols largely broke up the original eastern Slavic nation built around Kiev, now known as Kievan Rus’. Personally, I’d say it is both. Polish is the official languageof Poland but it is also used throughout the world by the Polish diaspora. indication of the number of countries you can reach indirectly by learning I decided it would be cool to learn it, and I figured that with Russian under my belt,  it would be easier. Although Russian is typically the first thing that comes to mind when people think of Slavic languages, there are many other languages that can fall under this umbrella. These latter two languages – though they borrowed a lot of vocabulary from Chinese – are part of a different language family. © 2002-2019 The Linguist Institute, Inc. All rights reserved. Saints Methodius and Cyril used Greek as a basis to develop a written form of the Slavic languages, in order to facilitate the translation of religious texts. We all know Russian is hard. This is connected with the influence of Western culture. Czech is more distant. As a matter of fact, if you can convince me that I didn’t understand them, and that we spoke different languages, you should be equally able to convince me that the sky is greenish brown, and that the clouds are orange. no verb infinitive (! russkiy alfavit, IPA: [ˈruskʲɪj ɐlfɐˈvʲit] or, more traditionally, Russian: ру́сская а́збука, tr. Whatever the reason, the fact is they are all quite similar but completly individual languages with it’s own grammar and vocabulary. LitRes is a great resource for things Russian. There were a lot of kings that were common to Poland, Czech Lands and Moravia. It is similar as with use of Irish and English in Ireland. Refer to the image below, and you can see languages that are similar to one another. And it has been taught to generations of people for at least 100 years. The Part of Asia. With Czech I’ve found this history series Toulky českou minulostí and the political podcast Jak to vidí. There’s an abundance of books that you can download and import into LingQ. I am a Croat from Bosnia, I grew up in a town of Banjaluka. Many of the sounds and consonants of Chechen are very similar to those of Arabic and some of the indigenous languages of the Pacific … … It is like saying that American, Canadian and British English are completely on every level the same. This gets back to this idea that you can’t just have a few words. You’re the one who’s confusing people. GRAMMATICAL: Cactuses indicate the relative difficulty of learning this language if you already speak German. GDPNUMBER: Nouns, adjectives, pronouns. SHARE: The Today, we have a variety of Slavic It only takes a minute to sign up. Their grammars are at least as similar as the grammars of French, Spanish and Italian. If you feel the figures listed in this table are not correct and you have learned one of the languages listed above, please feel free to contact me and let me know how this should be improved and why. Speakers NUMBER: total number of native speakers of each By speak, though, I mean talk in malformed but somewhat audible sentences. GRAMMATICAL: Cactuses () indicate the relative I am subscribed to it on my iPhone. vocabulary that isvery similar in both languages. When I wrote my book on language learning, I referenced Zhuangzi and Taoist philosophy, and it was Laozi who said: “Without stirring abroad, one can know the whole world; without looking out of the window, one can see the way of heaven.”. I studied Russian first and I would recommend that because, while Slavic language speakers are a large group of people, the Russian speakers are the largest group. Lets get one thing straight once and for all: anyone who says that Serbian or Croatian or Bosnian or Montenegrin are different languages is either straight up lying or has difficulties perceiving reality. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian; while other significant languages are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt, Sami, and Komi, spoken in northern regions of Scandinavia and the Russian Federation. where the language is an official language or widely spoken. As a Croat speaking Croatian I understood them 100%. I have my group of romance languages with Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and, of course, Romanian, which is a bit of an outlier. Combined total nominal GDP in US dollars for each language. Grammar. If you search in Ukrainian you will find them, and more, as I did. Lol you don’t like that some language has more content than another. The purpose of this table is to list the most important languages This was intentional. If you’re interested in learning more about the Spanish or Russian languages be sure to browse our courses on Cudoo. How is it possible that Croat speaking Croatian can understand a Serb speaking Serbian 100% while only understanding about 85-90% of a Croat speaking Croatian from a different region? number of countries times % similar vocabulary (see above). I never understood any Czech when I was growing up. Russian is a richly inflected language with a grammar that is very similar to that of other Slavic languages, especially Belarusian and Ukrainian. Really fascinating language! History of Russian State. In terms of consonants, English and Russian have the same number but they are not similar in sounds. Thanks, Steve, The difference is similar to the difference between English (a West Germanic language) and Swedish (a North Germanic language). Surely it’s more less true – just to note that Bulgarian has surprising differences in grammar as well: e.g. Fact: In total, there are about 35 to 45 million Ukrainian speakers in the world. Today, we have a variety of Slavic languages and they differ from each other because of the different historical influences that affected their development. Vocabulary. 1. LingQ also has lots of content, audio and text, in its libraries for five Slavic languages. From Ivan III to Boris Godunov. While my exposure to Russian is entry-level at best, I’ve found it an easy language to speak. In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. If we look at a map of the world we see this area north of the Black Sea, this vast area of steppe land where the Proto-Slavic people apparently originated from. The most widely spoken Slavic languages are Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian in the east, Polish, Czech and Slovakian in the west and then the languages of the former Yugoslavia in the south: Serbo-Croat, Slovenian, Macedonian, and also Bulgarian. Chechen is the language of the ethnic group of the same name, whose members can be found mostly in the Chechen Republic/Chechnya, which is part of the Russian Federation. Well, it was easier. I was happy to see your recommendations on online resources for Russian learners. According to some researches, there are over 150 languages spoken in Russia. The two sounded so similar I felt as if I should understand Ukrainian. Similarly, there was a lot of interaction between the Czechs and the Poles. In a way, in terms of vocabulary, the outlier, the one with the largest lexical difference or distance is Russian. a phenomenal resource because every day there are new interviews on a wide variety of subjects, mostly with transcripts. They are quite similar in terms of grammar. If I were to start to learn Slavic languages I would begin by learning Russian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Literary_Agreement, Secretary Madeleine Albright — Optimism, the Future of the US, and 450-Pound Leg Presses (#437) – The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss, Secretary Madeleine Albright — Optimism, the Future of the US, and 450-Pound Leg Presses (#437) – Findobest, Secretary Madeleine Albright — Optimism, the Future of the US, and 450-Pound Leg Presses (#437) – The Great Self Improvement. . I actually learned Czech before Ukrainian because my parents were born in what became Czechoslovakia. I grew up in Serbia, and I’ve been to Croatia quite a few times. This gives you an indication of the number of Just one comment to: ... Russian is partially mutually intelligible with Russyn, Ukrainian and Belarusian. Statistics. People with whom I went to school and with whom I grew up spoke Bosnian and Serbian. All books are available in paper, ebook and audio versions. Printed from http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/similarities/index.html, Copyright 2009 François Micheloud - All rights reserved. Jeff Lindsay estimates that Russian has 85% intelligibility with Rusyn (which has a small number of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe). Audioteka has great resources for many languages, including a number of Slavic ones. Czech is more distant. Russian is also a lingua franca in Central Asia and some other countries of the former Tsarist Empire or the former Soviet Union, as well as some countries of Eastern Europe. Russian is not as commonly spoken, it’s the language of only four countries; These countries are Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Belarus according to BBC. The purpose of this table is to list the most important languages similar to Romanian and see how closely related they are. It doesn’t matter which Slavic language you learn first. CountriesNUMBER: Total number of countries The thing is why russian is good. This gives you an It is also one of the official languages of the European Union. I’m not that interested in free, I’m happy to pay for a decent…’ When you track back to the roots of the English language, it began from the Proto-Indo-European language family. In fact, at the time that Poland and Lithuania merged to form what was at that time the largest country in Europe, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, there were far more Ukrainians and Belarusians in the Commonwealth than Lithuanians. However, this decision is truly personal. Kajkavian has been wrongly boxed in as simply a dialect of Serbo-Croatian for decades, but it has finally begun to receive recognition few years ago. could learn more easily on the basis of your future knowledge of Russian. Table of languages significantly similar to Russian. Great resources. Similarly, with Polish I was able to find eBooks and audiobooks. My Germanic languages include Swedish, English, and German. The Part of Europe. The books are quite easy to read (and listen) – they are intended not for historians but for history enthusiasts. There were words there that were similar, but I just didn’t quite get the gist of what they were saying. Thanks for thoughtful article. Based on the current politically correct interpretation, I spoke Croatian. I recently visited Croatia as well as Bosnia, with my wife, on our 50th anniversary so I made sure that we had Serbian and Croatian on LingQ. Fortunately, for each one of the four Slavic languages I have studied I found ample resources via the Internet, whether it be audiobooks and eBooks for Russian. I’d like to recommend a series of books on Russian history written by Boris Akunin, contemporary russian author. It helps you select the The majority of these languages are Western European languages and include Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, German, Danish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Swedish, and Norwegian. Over time, as more of Ukraine came under Russian control, it became the turn of the Russians to impose their language on the Ukrainians. Anybody can ask a question Anybody can answer The best answers are voted up and rise to the top Russian Language . In a similar vein, some claim that mutual intelligibility is, ideally at least, the primary criterion separating languages from dialects. The differences between Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and so forth have more to do with vocabulary than grammar. Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Literary_Agreement So the fact that you have not heard of it speaks solely about your lack of basic education. I am a Croatian and I’ve never heard about the existence of Serbo-Croatian language. Здравствуйте! Similarity. Russia produces lots of excellent audio books, which can be found online. Sign up to join this community. Chechen is a Northeast Caucasian language and has at least 8 different dialects. Let’s start with vocabulary – the actual words we use and pass through generations. Home Public; Questions; Tags Users Unanswered … https://www.importanceoflanguages.com/importance-russian-language History of Russian State. In terms of vocabulary, Ukrainian language is the closest to Belarusian (16% of differences), and I usually have to ask my friends from Serbia to translate Serbian words for me because I do not have a clue their meaning and vice versa. Very often the most important words are just those words that you don’t understand. Besides Russian, there are other numerous languages which have been adopted as the official languages in Russia. The Mongols largely broke up the original eastern Slavic nation built around Kiev, now known as Kievan Rus’. The successor to the southern part of the Kievan Rus’  was the. Bulgarian and Ukrainian are the closest, with Polish and Serbo-Croatian having a largely similar vocabulary. Check it out. 3. verynice article. That makes me never write comments again. Russian has an alphabet quite similar to the Greek. (Case in point: SerboCroatian speaking Croat from Osijek would have much harder time communicating with a Slovene than a Kajkavian speaking Croat from Krapina). There are also non-trivial syntactical differences. Category 1: languages that are the most similar to English. It is well known that Interesting reading also for me (Slovak). The Croatians all spoke English so much better than I spoke their language thus I didn’t get much chance to use it. The grammar of Japanese is more similar to Korean (also distinct and unique writing system). 513 posts, read 1,063,431 ... engage a Czech or Slovak in casual conversation without having formally studied the grammar and other aspects of the language? At the same time, when I vacationed on Adriatic Sea in Croatia, or spoke to my relatives from Croatian Zagorje and Zagreb, I had trouble understanding them. History of Russian State. For me, in languages, exploration is the name of the game. It’s true that sometimes Serbian and Croatian are more similar than the standard language and it’s dialect BUT there is no such thing as Serbo-Croatian language. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, and … I agree that learning a language in your own alphabet is easier hence no knowledge of Russian or Ukrainian but some words are recognisable aurally in those languages. ), much richer verb tenses, limited noun cases. In fact, going back a thousand years there was even a common country, greater Moravia. partly because that was the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, but also because I had been exposed to Russian literature as a teenager and wanted to read those books in the original language. In learning languages, we create our own language worlds and we do that by finding things of interest, at least I do, whether it be in libraries, on the Internet or elsewhere. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. These three languages are not at all comparable to Slavic languages’ relationship to each other. The vocabulary is not shared at all, even the so called ‘Chinese readings’ (onyomi) of kanji. On a difficulty scale, many language learners rate Russian as being somewhere in the middle — not quite as easy for English speakers to learn as Spanish or French, but nowhere near as challenging as Chinese or Arabic. As a matter of fact, if you can convince me that I didn’t understand them, and that we spoke different languages, you should be equally able to convince me that the sky is greenish brown, and that the clouds are orange. These … Sara, Please name ONE difference in grammar. Russian. Here is an example: There are over 100 minority languages spoken in Russia today. Between Asia and Europe. Eaiser than english and much easier than all other languages in terms of finding content you like. When it comes to vocabulary, however, they are more different from each other than Spanish is from Italian or from French. You’ve NEVER heard about the existence of Serbo-Croatian language? Back in the times of Kievan Rus‘ — cradle of the modern Russian-speaking world — the dialects of the language were spoken by ancestors of modern Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians (which is, by the way, the correct name for people with Belarusian citizenship — Belorussianrefers to that country during the Soviet era). 3. As for now, the series consists of 3 books: language you want to learn by appraising you on what significant other languages you Bru you fine? Russian is an official languagein Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstanand several unrecognised countries, e.g., Transnistria. Out of those, 37 are recognised as official languages in republics of the country. History of Russian State. I have found the Ukrainian language version of Orest Subtelny’s history of Ukraine, in Ukrianian, both in ebook form and audiobook form. The map is slightly misleading. [4] The primary challenge to these positions is that speakers of closely related languages can often communicate with each other effectively if they choose to do so. Vocabulary in Russian and Ukrainian – How Different Are The Words? It helps you select the language you want to learn by appraising you on what significant other languages you could learn more easily on the basis of your future knowledge of Romanian. I have never learned as quickly or as enjoyably as I do now on LingQ. similar vocabulary (see above). Each language that we speak today, including English, has its own origin. I started on Turkish as well, and have some sense of it, but have decided to leave it for now to improve my ability to read in the Arabic script. However, while From the beginning until Mongolian Invasion. We all talk the same language.. I have found that once I started a Slavic language, whether Russian, Czech, Ukrainian or Polish, I discovered so much interesting content, often on the history of those countries, that I was just drawn more and more into the language and culture. The purpose of this table is to list the most important languages similar to Latin and see how closely related they are. But Russian does not have Greek roots. Russian Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for students, teachers, and linguists wanting to discuss the finer points of the Russian language. Thanks a lot for your article! is “hello” in one of the most famous of Slavic languages, Russian. The Part of Europe. However, most of them are still pretty different and, for example, Ukrainian orthography alters pretty quickly, from one year to another. Historically as I understand it (although I have not studied this question), the Orthodox Church and Old Church Slavonic had a major influence on the evolution of Slavic languages. Unfortunately, they no longer publish the transcripts for  Jak to vidí, but that series was very helpful to me. Any language definition that claims that the language I spoke as a kid is the same as the language a kid from Zagorje or Dalmatia spoke (regions of Croatia), but DIFFERENT from the language Serb kid from Banjaluka spoke is either idiotic or deceiving. The lack of commonality between Russian and English is a large part of what makes the language … Similarity VOCABULARY: Percentage of vocabulary that isvery similar in both languages. That would argue against Russian. It is true, however that there are differences between Serbo-Croatian and Kajkavian language, spoken in parts of Croatia. P.S. This gives you an indication of the economic importance You can find eBooks and audiobooks for Czech. The fewer cactuses/cacti, the easier. Based on the current politically correct interpretation, I spoke Croatian. LitRes is a great resource for things Russian. Russian is also a lingua franca in Central Asia and some other countries of the former Tsarist Empire or the former Soviet Union, as well as some countries of Eastern Europe. language. Russia produces lots of excellent audio books, which can be found online. You can dream of visiting the enormous, fascinating and sometimes enigmatic Russia and of communicating with the people. 08-05-2010, 08:24 AM moskiter : Location: Chicago, IL. What is debatable is the teritory covered by Kajkavian, as there are variants of Kajkavian that have fairly minor differences with Serbo-Croatian, and there are variants with significant differences. From the beginning until Mongolian Invasion. There are some different words and accents but it’s the exact same language.
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