I'm 73 years old and I'm learning Russian because it's good mental gymnastics. I find it to be a very logical language. I can read and understand some but speaking is hard for me. But I enjoy learning and I enjoy you videos.
If you want to understand all Slavic languages, you should learn Bulgarian. It is the origin of all Slavic languages and all Cyrillic alphabets/variations. Also, if you want to learn about the culture, Bulgaria was the first country to establish an autokephale orthodox church, about 300 years before the Serbs and 600 years before the Russians.... Please consider this, you will find historical evidence Incase you don't believe me....
@@ImperatorSomnium Bulgarian is actually the farest from other slavic languages, it even doesn't have grammar cases. There was civilisation in region early, but it doesn't mean it was slavic civilisation, but "slavic" is pretty much panslavistic propaganda created in 19th century and spreaded later in communism time, you can't really say what is slavic. Mosft of people say that Slovak is the lingua franca of slavic languages, so if he wants understand all other slavic languages, slovak will be probably more usefull than bulgarian.
@@Pidalin also, the majority you're talking about is most definitely the majority of ex-tugoslavian republics + the Russians....if you really study linguistics and anthropology you will understand....but I doubt it, now that I know your name...your people are not into learning and actual facts, but more keen on feelings....
I'm Mexican and I'm learning Serbian. It's quite tricky at some point but it's not impossible to learn it. Anyway, I still understand some things in Slovak, Czech and Russian and I've try watching videos in Interslavic Language, and it is very interesting, I can understand around a 30% to 40% of it, even when I don't speak fluent Serbian. I'm also interested in learning Slovak and Russia, but not yet, I need first to reach a higher level in Serbian. What I really like of Serbian is that people can easily speak with Croats and Bosnians without trouble. Greetings from Mexico to all my Slavic brothers and sisters!! 🇲🇽♥️🇷🇺🇧🇾🇺🇦🇵🇱🇨🇿🇸🇰🇷🇸🇭🇷🇧🇦🇲🇪🇸🇮🇧🇬🇲🇰
I do not know how to write it, but our language learning application is probably the best for Slavic languages and also for Serbian. Maybe it would help you learn it :)
Гоце Делчев, Даме Груев, Яне Сандански, Тодор Александров, Иван Михайлов и още много войводи умряха за да живеете свободни, но вие се оказахте слаби и предпочетохте да сте под Югославско робство ( балкански СССР).
To me, an Italian, South Slavic languages sound like an Italian trying to speak Russian (sort of). That's because their phonology is almost the same as ours, so they sound familiar and different from Russian, but words and grammar are unmistakably Slavic.
Whereas to us on the eastern coast of Adriatic, Italian sounds like South Slavs giving up on Russian centuries ago... :)) Jokes aside, I think you may have something here. I heard the same remark from a Japanese guy. To him the Croatian sounded like a strange mix between Russian and Italian, but I pointed out this might be more pronounced in coastal dialects of Croatian (Dalmatia, Istria). Many words and expressions in those dialects are borrowed from Italian language.
You are mainly speaking here about croatian. No other south slavic language, not even serbian, has this for of pronouncing words that may sound like an italian accent speaking slavic language.
You're talking only about Croatia mate and not the whole Croatia, about part of Croatia called Istria and Dalmatia cuz they have different dialect and a lot of words from Italian while you also have the Zagreb and around Zagreb where it sound a little bit more like a west slavic but still almost all south slavs will understand all of it... And you have Slavonia which is basically normal Croatian which every south slav will understand...
@@19PURGER86 I was talking about sounds, not words. Even Serbian vowel sounds are basically the same as Italian, while Russian ones are very different from both. Also the intonation (prosody) when speaking is very similar. Obviously words and grammar are totally different, but if you just listen to which sounds are used you’ll understand what I mean.
Hi Eli :) I'm from Slovakia and I´m always wondering that my Russian friends don't understand a word, but I can understand them pretty well..... if they speak slowly. The thing is that when you live in Slovakia for example, you naturally understand Czech, we were one country and even though our languages are quite different, up to nowadays when I read a book and someone asks me if it was in Czech or Slovak....I can't answer. We going for shopping in Poland because they have lower VAT and the prices are better and we go on holidays to Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria because Slovakia has no sea and it's really close. From each of these countries we bring some minimal vocabulary. You probably already know what I mean. When I hear "yesli" (if) from my Russian friend I wouldn't understand it at all because in Slovak it's "ak" , which is completely different......... but I automatically switch to Czech and czech word "jestli" is much closer to yesli makes sense to me immediately :) I´m think that its the same for the rest of western and southern Slavic Countries as well. .... thank you for your amazing channel , Bye! :)
@@cadicamo8720 no....might 60% of vocabulary is complete different. Sk and Cz people dont even realize it (as per my previous post) but comparing same text in both lenguages, you can find really just a few same words. Last, but not least both countries have its own dialects.....🤔 and for example sometimes im hardly understand the dialect commonly used in the east of Slovakia
My language is Serbian. Slavic languages are similar. I understand: - Serbian / Croatian - 100% - Macedonian - 70% - Bulgarian - 60% - Slovenian - 50% - Russian - 50% (I studied Russian for several years in school) - Slovak - 40% - Czech - 30% - Polish - 20% Approximately...
How much % you understand Moravian and Sorbian and Turkish? By the way Croatian and Serbian are two tongues not the same and not just because unlike Serbian, Croatian wasn't under Turkish influence.
There isn't Macedonian language bro. Macedonia is in North Greece and they talk Greek language. Macedonia is a city in Greece not a different country and Greek language has it's own nature, it's not slavic dialect.
You propably understand bosnian and montenegrin language as well but i know that the distinction is sensitive and political. Especially the montenegrin language. ;-)
@@crimsondragon5742 they're like 98% identical. Some words are different here and there and the accent is slightly different but that's about it. It's as different as English in Canada vs English in America for example
I'm learning Bulgarian right now, the most difficult part is finding content to be exposed to the language constantly and when it comes to the language itself I suppose it's the vocabulary. The alphabet so far doesn't seem to be that bad! The few Bulgarians I've talked to usually ask me "why?" lol I think the country is so underrated, seems like a hikers paradise plus I love sunflower seeds and roses and they are a thing in Bulgaria so I'm sold, don't need much else, can't wait to visit. Native Spanish speaker here
leaarning a foreign language is a massive investment in terms of time and effort. I am Czech and I would be also surprised you are learning Czech if you are not an immigrant. Within the Slavic group, Russian opens you 250 million+ people and territory from the Baltics to the sea of Japan, plus massively wider cultural and other contents than Czech or Bulgarian or Polish. I am just practical. If I wanted to learn some east asian language, I would probably not chosen Vietnamese if there is Chinese.....
@@letecmig That's how I view Bulgarian since I also want to learn Slovene and Macedonian but not Russian, so I would be closer to those two with Bulgarian than I would be with Russian
During my first trip to Europe back in 1997, my Polish mother, younger sister and I flew into Prague then took a train to Poland after a little sightseeing in Czechia. The Czech people understood my mother's Polish fairly well thanks to linguistic similarities in the West Slavic languages.
As a Slovak can only say that there are only small differences in Czech and Slovak and we perfectly understand each other speaking their native language fluently. For me the Czech is something like my second native language. And I can say that I understand Polish pretty good too but the differences are much bigger and sometimes Polish people needs to speak slowly to understand them.
Sorry to spoil the party but if you speak Polish and think you understand Czech (or the other way around), you're living in a world seen through a distorted mirror. Polish and Czech have so many false friends that you actually think you understand the other language but in fact, you're understanding something completely different, even opposite.
@@roboticbaboon3125 I don't really agree. You can normally, correctly understand the opposite language. You just have to watch out for certain words and not fall for them.
hello from croatia!🖐 can't believe someone from russia said that croatian or serbian are hard to learn to russians. I learn russian for two years and i found so many words that are similar to croatian. actually, russian is too easy to me. when i watch tv documentaries or news, i understand like every 4,5th word. as i said, there are many similar words with just small difference in pronouncing. we have so many similarities with russian language. ofc, we are in the same language group. Greetings from CRO!🖐🥰
Mogu to da ti potvrdim. Mađar sam, pričam ruski i srpski/hrvatski. Zbog toga što nisam govornik ni ruskog, ni srpskohrvatskog, mogu ti dati objektivno, nezavisno mnenje. Ruski jezik ima nešto komplikovaniju gramatiku, ali, ima manje izuzetaka. Srpskohrvatski ima jednostavniju gramatiku, ali ima gomila izuzetaka...
Serbo-Croatian is virtually impossible to learn for a Russian because you have tons of long vowels and tones that don't exist in Russian. Neither tones nor long vowels are marked with special characters, by the way, which makes it even more difficult to distinguish them for a Russian.
@@my_wifes_son I've met and talked to Russian guy who said he learned Serbian in 2 years living in Serbia and his pronunciation is perfect. No foreign accent , no grammar mistakes.
I am a Russian speaker. I was capable to communicate with people in Serbia and Macedonia. I understood them, and they understood me because of similarity of many words
@@geoeconomics3067 I take your point if a student is studying the language. However , in many short TH-cam videos there are often bitter complaints about a non-native speakers's pronunciation of say, place names. So if a native speaker compliments a TH-camr on getting it right or nearly right, that's an achievement.
@@paulohagan3309 First thing you need to learn is how to pronounce letters 1 voice 1 letter that is how you are going to read you will read every letter read every letter in a sentence name of city and so on ... BEOGRAD is capital of Serbia or Zagreb capital of Croatia You read every letter the same way you learn how to pronounce every letter People who can not pronounce names of cities or whatever are those people who did not learn how to pronounce letters When you learn how to pronounce each letter correctly than you will be able to read anything written in SerboCroatian for an English speaker pronouncing letter right way will be difficult probably because of 1 sound is 1 letter in English you have 26 letters and 44 sounds it is a mess to spell correctly
There is no such thing as 'Serbian', It's Serbo-Croatian. The Serbs and Croats speak a different dialect of the same language. Don't even get me started on people who claim they speak "Bosnian'.
Laughing in dual Btw kudos also for having both the schwa (ъ/') and vowel r/l - if I remember well that you have it. No other Slavic language does it, afaik.
Great choice, mate! I approve. I always found the Southern Slavic languages fascinating. You pronunciation is more close to ours than Polish or Russian is. And I also like Slovak. Even though I’m Czech, I personally think Slovak is the most pleasantly sounding Slavic language. It’s very melodic and a great language for songs. Czech is more flat, but it’s broader in expression: it can sound both very hard and very soft, depending on the circumstance.
I'm so glad that Czech language is your favorite language ( I 'm a native speaker of Czech language ) and one little explanation you can understand the Slovaks more due to our words taken from German language
@@lucyra56 Not really. The languages are so close, that most of the vocabulary is very similar, including the words of Slavic etymology. The amount of German loanwords in both languages is commonly overplayed for reasons beyond my understanding, while in reality the vast majority of Czech and Slovak vocabulary is of Slavic origin. Another thing, that’s typical for Czech language is, that to almost every loanword (German, Greek, Latin … it doesn’t really matter), there is an existing Czech synonym, that’s only being used less frequently, because many people believe, that overuse of foreign-sourced words would make them appear smarter. While people with truly thorough education in humanities (Jan Sokol, Tomáš Halík) could speak in incredibly rich Czech without ever having to resort to buttressing their speech with faux sophistication through overuse of unnecessary foreign words.
i suspect russian speakers may have a hard time understanding a south slavic person because here in the balkans almost everyone speaks in their local dialect. we got A LOT of different dialects cramped in such a small place, and many of them are wildly different from the official language.
And near the borders dialects can take some characteristics of the bordered countries. Sometimes i find it difficult to understand southern Serbian dialects
@@dimitar1443 Всеки приема диалекта на неговата област като официален език и няма друг. Умните Македонци вече взеха един диалект и си биха камшика 😆 Ако всеки диалект последва Македония, всеки град ще си е отделна държава
i remember when some boys from Senta in Serbia talked to me. I thought that they were speaking Hungarian, but no, they were just speaking in very very weird dialect
well, if you are a foreigner and learned russian - yeah, probably czech and slovak would be a whole new world for you. But as a native russian speaker who learns czech now I must say it helps a freaking lot to speak russian. Same for slovak because they are basically the same with czech. When I moved to CZ I could already understand something when I was reading a menu in a restaurant or some street signs. Spoken language was a nightmare for quite a long time though. But once you start learning it just clicks at some point. The structure of slavic languages is the same, so intuitively I can guess the right word ending before I learn the rule. And regarding vocabulary - roughly 30% of words are the same or very similar (zub, smetana, klobasa instead of kolbasa, kochka instead of koshka). Another 50% you can guess just thinking what this word would sound like in old russian, centuries ago (thanks to classic literature), so you end up with 'usta' - lips, 'chelo'- forehead, 'zhivot'- life, 'semafor'- traffic lights and so on. And true, 20% is mostly german influence. But overall its not that different.
Man, I am Czech learning Russian language and I can pretty much understand almost everything in news after a year but movies are way more difficult for some peculiar reason. Some are just little harder but something like Преступление и наказание is "nightmare" difficulty. I can catch few sentences and here and there but there are so many words I just dont know. Very humbling experience.
I'm Czech and I learned Russian for four years. I have to say that I have forgotten a lot, because in the Czech Republic I don't have such an opportunity to speak Russian every day, rather English or German, but when there is an opportunity to speak Russian, I feel that if I didn't know Russian, I would understand 5% of it.
Hello, from all slavic polyglot :) To speak all slavic languages? Sure, it is possible. I must say though, that for me, even from my childhood, no slavic language had a foreign sound to me. I would say sooner it was like "they speak "corrupted" version of our language. I'm glad this video and this channel got recommended to me. Cheers!
Some days ago a guy asked me how do I differentiate Slovak and Slovenian. "By 1 letter," I said. "How's that possible," he asked. I replied: "It's simple. Slovaks call their language slovenčina, while Slovenians call their language slovenščina."
Slovak has the most letters in their Latin alphabet from all Slavic languages so this another thing is how you can differenciate it. And by reading it is closer to Czech and Slovenian to Serbo-Croatian.
My studies include Russian, mostly because of an interest in Russian culture, but also, as you describe, as a means to learn other Slavic languages. My main difficulty now is remembering the rules as I've not used it in about 20 years, since working with the United Nations. I'll look into your channel as a way to refresh my knowledge! Thank you for posting this wonderful episode!
Traveled to Belgrade as it’s still open to USA passport holders. Good place to meet Russian speakers and they even had a Russian Festival (bought a St Petersburg made telnyashka there) in the pedestrian shopping area on the way to the National Museum. It’s also safer to travel as there are too many uncertainties within Russian visa process for US passports. Serbians very helpful in fostering competency in their language and could use Russian as Serbs can travel to Russia without visa.
@@ElifromRussia Russia has been shut down for most of foreign visas longer than any country except for New Zealand maybe, due to the ‘situation’ despite Putin and Lukashenka claiming nothing was happening with a bit of their “flu” (well, Belarus is shut down for other reasons though…)
@@Got-lander Really? A friend of mine came to Russia from Munich with his wife. He was vaccinated and his wife nent. They entered Russia without any problems. After spending 21 days, they flew back. But according to the rules established by Germany, his wife was not allowed back on the flight, having been delayed for a day in Moscow due to the unavailability of the test. At the same time, they had to pay extra for an air ticket.
@@arsenic5249 Падежи все още има в българския език, но почти не се използват и най-вече са в местоименията като *кой - кого/кому,* но дали има вече и един падеж останал в тях... И относно за турските думи - това леко зависи. По принцип хората, които живеят в Пловдив, Кърджали, Разград - там можеш по-често да срещнеш повече турци. И там може по-често да се използват турски думи, отколкото в други региони в България. Даже има един език, който се говори в Източните Родопи от мюсюлманското население от така наречените ,,помаци" - помашки език, който за съжаление този език умира и е съчетан от български (най-вече) с турски и гръцки думи.
I am native speaker of the westernmost slavic language: Czech. And I learned the eaternmost slavic language: Russian. With this background, knowledge of both vocabularies and grammar on the 'extremes', I am able to 'decode' any slavic language inbetween;)
I was native speaker of Slovak and Czech language, because i was born in Czechoslovakia :) But i knew all the dialects in slovak and czech language, + thanks to my grandparents, some very old slavic words. I discovered that i can learn Polish very quickly thanks to this base and my new Polish coleagues. With CZ+SK+PL .. Ukraine language was not so difficult and very similar. Now im learning Russian and i understand pretty well most of it. Side quest, i speak english from my childhood, thanx to cartoon network, and german thanx to prosieben :D I never really learned in school any kind of language, all was by ear and reading. I live in Switzerland where i use german language daily.
I'm learning Czech because to me it's the most beautiful and unique language I've ever heard❤ but I always have been fascinated by Slavic cultures. Russian folk music was a huge part of my life since I was 3 years old. And since I became aware of the Czech culture I've been listening nonstop to Czech/+Moravian, Slovak and Rusyn music and been fascinated by folk music and dances from almost all Slavic cultures and tried to understand all those connections between them, especially the west Slavic ones. This is such an interesting video, thank you for doing it! And much love from my home country Germany😊❤
@@HeroManNick132 sadly I don't know much about it, even though I live in the Wendland area. I don't know how I can learn more about that culture, but I would love to! You're right, I'll try to find out more about it :) thanks for making me aware of which should be so obvious to me actually..🙈🤣
I am Croatian, and when hear Russians speaking, I recognize some of the words and they mean the same thing, but they are pronounced differently in Croatian
Hi, I am from Czechia, and I want soon make video about these differences between our slavic languages by my czech view, because as you said, we have completely different way of slavic language. You also helped me to understand more about east slavs, So I hope I will just add an other view about this interesting topic And help you to more understand West slavs :). Really nice video, Zdravím z Česka 😁 (I believe you understand this xD)
zetkniesz się z szowinizmem wschodnich Słowian... i zdziwisz się jak bliski będzie ci język ukraiński... jest tego parę przyczyn jedna to to że Ruś podbiła również zachodnich Słowian (te mapy z zasięgiem wschodnich Słowian to taki dzisiejszy szowinistyczny teatrzyk polityki historycznej) a po drugie wasz język odrodził się w podobnym czasie gdy język ukraiński powstawał czy raczej powstawały jego normy i forma literacka... a i jeszcze jedno czy wiesz że Bułgarzy nie są Słowianami??? oni przejęli język i kulturę ale Słowianami nie byli...
@@wielblad1344 Here is a linguistic forum. You are spoiling it with politics and your petty pathetic village-like nationalism in EVERY your post. You are an ill man.
@@pskovityanina8549 jestem chorym człowiekiem... no cóż choć zastanawiałeś się dlaczego akurat ty natrafiasz na moje komentarze? nie ciągnie cię do nich czasem??? choroba?
I learn 4 Slavic languages right now (Russian, Czech, Polish, Slovak) And I must say, learning Russian and Polish made me understand Czech and Slovak a lot better (I am currently trying to get fluent in Czech, it goes very well)
Good luck with your czech studies I'm czech 🇨🇿 and wish you warm welcome to learn this unique language and it is very interesting you want to learn it. Good luck and keep learning !
For us Poles Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian sound almost the same eventhough the Ukrainian and Belarusian language use most of Polish words, but the way they pronunce the Polish words resembles the pronounciation of Russian language.
Linguistics say: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin are one and the same language. You can give it whichever name you like but it is always the same language. Politics say: they are different languages.
In the 19th century, some people considered Slovakian as a dialect of Czech language. Silesian language is also something specific, it is a scale from Czech to Polish dialects which can be considered together as a separate Silesian language (German Silesian is a different thing). Similarly Ruthenian is a fuzzy concept, covering West-Ukrainian, East-Slovak and South-East Polish dialects of Transcarpathia, Galicia and Bukovina. The official national language is always somewhat artificial, politically enforced, displacing authentic dialects and minority languages. And even if we look away from politics and from the transience and variability of power and constitutional units, also linguistically it is difficult to determine what is a separate language and what is just a dialect. What about so-called Moravian Slovaks? Historically and culturally, the belong inseparably to Moravia, yet the name refers to it as if it were a branch of Slovaks. The authentic west Slovak language arround the Trnava city has some Czech (Moravian) features, and fonetically, it resembles also Polish (ł). Linguistic terminology also changes over centuries.
@@breznik1197 I am not talking about dialects but about the same language. Differences are so minimal, almost imperceptible. Structure, grammar, syntax, phonetics, all the same. But, if you say that they are different they I am a native speaker of all of them.
@@Enks77 So I admire you if you can really master all the variants at the level of Serbo-Croatian-... as a native speaker. Although I am a native speaker of Czech, I do not speak any of its dialects as a native speaker - only the Common Czech and the Standard (Literary) Czech. The question of whether a similar language form is considered a dialect of the first language or a separate language is seldom unambiguous. I doubt that Serbo-Croatian is a completely homogeneous language without regional differences.
@@breznik1197 , of course, there are regional differences. But they are not so accentuated to define any of them a language. In 🇷🇸🇲🇪🇭🇷🇧🇦 we all perfectly understand each other without any difficulty. There is less “regional” difference in our language than between English spoken in England, Scotland, Ireland and US. And we always call it English.
@@Enks77 If two languages are close to each other, it is only a matter of terminology whether we think of them as two languages or as two dialects of one language.
The cyrilic alphabet is the bulgarian alphabet. It was developed in the area of Preslav, Bulgaria. Also called Veliki Preslav or Great Preslav, which was the cultural center of the First Bulgarian Empire and all slavic nations. The cyrilic script was made in Bulgaria after the bulgarian Tsar Simeon I the Great replaced the Glagolitic script made by the brothers Cyril and Methodius, with the cyrilic script. Nowadays all the countries you have mentioned use the cyrilic alphabet as the main foundation of their alphabet. Furthermore the cyrilic is the 3rd official european language, also written in bulgarian cyrilic on every euro bill. Sadly you didn't mention any of this. Bulgaria deserves more credit and you all should be more appreciative and greatful.
My father was born and raised in Slovakia. However, he was an American citizen by birth since his father, my grandfather, was born in the U.S. My grandfather traveled around the world in the merchant marine and ended back up in Slovakia (which was part of Czechoslovakia back then). My grandfather later moved back to America with the intent of bringing my grandmother, father and uncle and aunt over. It was April 1938 when my father, the eldest, came on the S.S. Europa to America. The manifest listed him an American citizen even though he couldn't speak a word of English. Unfortunately, a few months later Hitler took over Czechoslovakia and then started WW II the next year. This effectively split the family. During the War, my father was drafted by the American Army and was sent back to Europe. By this time, Germany had surrendered and my father was assigned to the army of occupation near the demarcation line between the Allies and the Soviets. I found this video very interesting because my father would talk about his interaction with troops from other nations. Apparently, the American mess was known for having the best food and officers from other armies could eat there. Russian officers were of course allowed to eat in the American mess of which they happily partook. Polish troops, as allies, were also allow to eat at the American mess. My father would speak in Slovak to the Polish troops. He said he could understand about 50% of what they said though it wasn't real clear. As far as the Russians, he said he could understand nothing.
I'd be interested in a video on the influence of Old Church Slavonic on Russian. Old Church Slavonic is still the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, my understanding is that it is much closer to Bulgarian and Macedonian since it was originally based on the south Slavic dialect that eventually became these two languages. Over time the Russian Orthodox Church has made recensions (извод) to the Old Church Slavonic texts to make them easier for Russian speakers to read, but I would still that these religious texts would have a great influence on the speakers of Russian.
@@HladniSjeverniVjetar maybe. I don’t know how close is modern servo-Croatian to old Bulgarian. But it was the only literary Slavic language and thus influenced other languages with words and grammar.
@@johniewalker4356 Could be. There is one little flaw in that thinking. Unless you swapped Glagolitic with Cyrilic we had written stuff a century before you in Croatia. So how do you explain this? Saying that Old church Slavonic was old Bulgarian doesn't make much sense if you didn't speak like this before as well and continue speaking like this today. "Otče naš iže jesi na nebesih sveti se ime Tvoje. Pridi cesarstvo Tvoje budi volja Tvoja jako na nebu i na zemlji. Hlib naš vsegdanji daj nam ga danas i otpusti nam dlgi naše jakože i mi otpuščaem dlge dlžnikom našim. I ne vavedi nas v napast na izbavi nas od neprijazni" This is how Croatian sounded like back in the time when Glagolitic script was in common use in Croatia. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the dialectal language spoken on the coast will understand it even today with no problems. So how does Bulgarian sound today? Similar?
@@HladniSjeverniVjetar The thing is firstly that Glagolitic was also used in Bulgaria as well before Cyrillic was created. Also your argument is flawed since your assumption that a language is the same only if it stays the same for 1000+ years is wrong. Numerous counter examples exist to your “argument”, one is English. Most modern English people will have quite a hard time understanding even Middle English much less older versions of it. Yet it’s still English. Therefore you can’t base any claims on this. Moreover at the end of the second Bulgarian empire Bulgaria was split in three and after the ottomans conquered it Bulgarians split it different regional identities and the language evolved separately in different regions. For example a dying dialect in the Rhodope mountains is much closer to old Bulgarian than the official version which was created from the dialect in Veliko Tărnovo (old capital). After that the alphabet and languages was reworked two times again, and was further distanced from its roots (last time was by the communists). So the language is a living thing and the 500 years of no centralised official Version exacerbated that effect.
I am Bulgarian and here is what I think: For a person from the Slavic peoples, with our languages it can happen as with the Morse code. If you listen carefully to the melody, with a little intuition you can understand enough to communicate.
From the scientific and language fan points of view, the best way is to start with Old Church Slavonic (or even with its more tough ancestor Proto-Slavic) and then only go through historic changes in grammar, phonetics, vocabulary etc. There have been many attempts to create a new common Slavic language as a kind of Slavic Esperanto (because with the return to Proto-Slavic you would break your tongue and nose). From those attempts you can find up Inter-Slavic on wiki. However, I cannot imagine that without political support the semi-artificial language can flourish. From the practical point of view you can start with Serbian (I myself am Slovak). The "official" Serbian language was standardized somewhere in the middle of 19th century. Probably this is reason it has a relatively simple grammar (said relatively but posses thousand pages text-book): - you do not need to worry about tough sounds - nasals (Polish), ř (Czech), dark L (Polish), - you do not lack noun cases (which were lost in Bulgarian and Macedonian), - you are still in touch with aorist (simple past) and other tenses of Proto-Slavic, - you are not sentenced to overuse personal pronouns (Russian), - you can use both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets and the language is very close to "official" Croatian, Montenegrin and Bosnian languages, - you write as you hear (mostly), - similarly to Russian, you have to cope with the floating syllable stress (sometimes even more than one) but it is not so strong as in Russian and therefore the pronunciation is very close/almost identical to the written form (no akanie, minimally swallowed unstressed vowels, which are monsters in spoken Russian), - you can watch Kusturica's movies without subtitles. :-D My estimate is that a Slav from one nation can be fluent in other Slavic language in 3-6 months if he/she practices it daily. It is because of the common word roots, suffixes and prefixes. If we omit nowadays English, and old Latin and Greek, here are the biggest non-Slavic contributors: East Slavic - borrowings from Turkic languages, South Slavic - borrowings from Turkish, Italian, West Slavic - borrowings from German.
as a Turk learning Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, I find this a quite useful summary, but as a non-native speaker of a Slavic language, I find my Serbian gets in the way more as an obstacle when I try to learn Russian for example and vice versa. Maybe I should only confine myself to BCS until I reach roughly B2 level
@Валерий С You are correct since one of your more "enlightened" rulers took words and customs from French and some German and implemented them in the present day Russian. It was Petar Veliki if I am not mistaken. Before that time common Russian was different.
My wife is Polish, so I've been learning Polish along with my ancestral Lithuanian. What is difficult for me about Polish are all the conjugations. What is easier is the Latin alphabet which makes it easier to recognize the appropriate phoneme when pronouncing words. Same with Lithuanian. Learning the Cyrillic alphabet is problematic, but hey!, if Russian kids can do it, it's nothing sufficient exposure can't resolve, amirite or am I right?
Slavic languages have the advantage that their writings are very phonetic, especially compared to English. In fact, almost all European languages have a phonetic writing, except English and French. If you want to learn Cyrillic, start with the Greek script. Everyone who had physics and geometry at school should be able to do that. Friedrich Nietzsche helped me with a fluent reading of Greek, in his works the Greek words in the original are used. But I don't know if it's customary in English translations as well. Declension and conjugation in Slavic languages are also based on the same principles as in classical languages, Latin and Ancient Greek. In this sense, Slavic languages are archaic, grammatically preserved.
I am an extremely passionate language enthusiasts and Slavic languages are my “specialty “ !:) As per proficiency I speak the languages following this order .....Bulgarian, Croatian/ Serbian , Macedonian, Slovenian, Polish , Russian , Czech.......looking forward to expand my linguistic knowledge in Ukrainian &Belarusian 🙂! Thanks for your informative video :):)
Я очень рад услышать о вашей беглости, связанной с полиглотом. Я изучаю русский язык последние 306 дней и хотел бы узнать больше о славянских языках. Ich lerne auch Deutsch, wenn auch nicht so “wild” wie Russisch. L’altra lingua che sto affrontando al momento è l’Italiano. È motto più facile per me, dato che parlo già spagnolo, quindi confesso che non mi impegno tanto. No sé si hablas otros idiomas basados en el latín que los que ya mencionaste, pero tu inglés es excelente, Amigo? Do you happen to speak or have familiarity with any other linguistic branches, i.e. Asiatic, Middle-Eastern, etc? Feel free to correspond with me, Ardit. Also, have an excellent day!
Ой, я как украинка, свободно говорю на украинском (так как он родной), свободно на русском (так как учила его со школы) и так же я хорошо понимаю польский и белорусский, так как много слов похожи на украинский, русский и английский.
I'm Brazilian, my native language is Portuguese. I've been studying English since 2015 and now I'm trying to learn Russian. But the long words in Russian made me get discouraged. Great video. Thanks a lot!
You can do it. Just listen to native speakers a lot and pronounciation will come more easily. It can be tricky, but you’re at advatage since portuguese sometimes sounds like russian..especially the way Brazilians pronounce the endings of words like “genTE” “saudaDE” and the “nh” sound in like “maoziNHa” which is also very present in russian. Good luck😊
Privet Eli. My original language is Macedonian but English is my language in use (live in the west). I heard the song Daghestan and understood about 25 %, later I found the lyrics (in Cyrillic) and reading it I understood about 75%. That inspired me to learn Russian ( casually ). I am amazed how many words we share and our alfav(b)et is 95% same as Russian. Polish I barely understand 5%.
@@HeroManNick132 Razbiram mnogu Italianski .. da sum vo Russia sigurno za 3 meseci bi nauc'il mnogu. (kolku poveke jazika c'ovek znae polesno se uc'i nov jazik) pozdrav brat.
@@skelet8337 every language is hard to master, english is one of the easiest languages in the world, and probably the easiest in all of Europe, the only difficulty is that English has no rule for pronunciation, that is why you have to memorize every word pronunciation and spelling
Hi Eli, I’m from Poland and I love watching your videos from traveling through Russia. What a beautiful person you are and the way you present your country makes me want to go there right away. Listening here about similarities and some differences between Slavic languages makes me nostalgic and wondering why we Slavic people cannot form a closer union where we would support each other. We have so much in common. Best to you, Eli!😊
@@followyourideas But it has quite decent amount of Slavic influences so? You could say how the EU Portuguese sounds like Slavic but it doesn't have any Slavic influences lol.
I'm a native English speaker learning Ukrainian, but I'm able to understand bits and pieces of Russian (I think listening to a lot of Russian music helps). Belarusian is more similar to Ukrainian but it still sounds very confusing to me because the vowels are so different.
Elina, are you by profession a Russian language teacher or a linguist? The reason I ask is that you are so conversant in the mechanics of language. Here in USA, that was taught in grades 6-12 50 years ago, but no longer, which explains why many Americans do not speak English properly. Love your videos-- you exhibit such joy at new experiences and sharing that with us---across the world. Hopefully, soon, this terrible unpleasantness across Europe will subside. I wish you all the best and take care. Will keep watching as long as you are able to post.
In fact the Bulgarian and the Russian use the same alphabet. The Bulgarian have all letters except three - [э] [ы] [ё]. For the sound [ё] we in Bulgaria use a combination of [ьо].
One important aspect was missed in this discussion (probably for the lack of experience). If another language belongs to your native group of languages, you INTUITIVELY can understand the meaning of words even out of the vocabulary of your language and get the working of grammar rules even if they are not existent in your own language. However, if you learn a language out of your language group, you wouldn't have that sort of natural intuition helping you to understand another language of that group. And even if in time, especially when you live with that foreign language, you would get some of that intuitive feeling, it will never be as strong and instinctive as with languages of your native group!
Very interesting. The Cyrillic alphabet is tough to learn as is the pronunciation of words. I have a Russian friend who told me that “the Russian language is even hard for them”.
@@HeroManNick132 Because of Russian influence and because of tsar Peter the second Russian is native to 160 million people. The next is Polish with 40 millions (only one forth) and then Ukrainian, I think. In internet most resources are available in Russian, also for learning Russian. Earlier Russian was important for scientists too. The influence is fading because former Soviet countries do not want to use Russian anymore and English is nowadays the language of science with the most resources in the internet and so on. And it is one of the United Nations languages too.
When I was in the US Army and studied Russian in 1980, I was under the mistaken belief that all Slavic speakers could converse with one another - at least at a basic level. I know better now. Thank you for the tutorial.
It depends. With my knowledge of Serbian and Slovenian it was easy for me to learn Russian and now after speaking fluently Russian and a very good understanding of Ukrainian (because of reading a lot of books) I understand all other in video mentioned Slavic languages very good.
As I am a native speaker of a Slavic language it is a bit difficult for me to learn other Slavic languages. There are a lot of words, that sounds the same but have totally different meanings. Úžasný in Czech is amazing but very similar word in Croatian is terrible. In Czech život is a life in Russian it is a belly and there are many and many others... I can remember a situation from the school years ago... I told my Russian friend "ty máš krásný život" which ment you have a nice life. But she understood that she had a red belly. Same words different meanings 😀
actually in Russia from the literature we know that Krasny is also can be Beautiful (for example the Red Square - Krasnaya Ploschad means not red but beautiful square), same for zivot, we have a saying "polozhit zivot za druga svoya" - means "to sacrifice life for friends" or, which is quite common, "ne zhaleya zivota svoego" - "not sparing your life"
I want to learn Russian.I want to read Pushkin,Nabakov,Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.I love the sound of Russian compared to other Slavic languages and when a woman speaks Russian It is very good.I use to do Cossack dancing when I was young and my favourite story as a young boy was Peter and the Wolf which I saw at a concert.I never put all my likes together as being Russian. Now I would like to learn the Russian language. I would be able to listen to Russian radio here in Australia. I am also thinking of joining the Russian Orthodox Church. So plenty of reasons to learn this beautiful sounding language. Do svidaniya.
@HeroManNick132 Бугарски језик јесте словенски,али звучи као да га говоре странци без много талента за језике.Уз то,никада нису научили граматику(падеже)😂! По свему,тако и јесте!
Крутое и весьма познавательное видео! Но, как жительница Беларуси, хотела бы заметить, что Belarusian читается через "с" (беларусиан). Нас в школе за произношение через "ш" морально бьют, потому слух уже автоматом ловит такое)
@@marynavesialukha2891 Я ваш "восточный сосед" и впервые "беларашн" услышал из уст англоязычных. Чтобы никого не разгневать, я просто никак не называю ту страну где столица Киев и никак не называю ту страну, где столица - Минск. Я стараюсь вообще не упоминать эти места всуе. Я точно также называю их "наши западные и юго-западные соседи". Очень нейтрально, политкорректно и безопасно для жизни и здоровья. За "НА Украине" вместо "в Украине" и за "Белоруссия" вместо "Беларусь" сегодня могут убить бутылкой от пива или тупым напильником средь бела дня.
Спорный вопрос. Как знаете сочитание звуков /s+j/ в английском дает /ш/. Music - musician, Belarus - Belarusian. Miss - miss you (mishya), so in best terms it could be optional but very hypercorrect. It would like saying "mission" as мисйон, not мышн. English has its own rules despite political correctness.
Eli, your videos are simply wonderful. I enjoy the craft of language and my greatest challenges are: a) perfectionism that makes me shy to speak and b) the ideas I wish to express are far beyond my capacity in all languages, sometime even with a considerable vocabulary in English! Languages I work on periodically include Russian, French, Guangdonghua, Spanish, German, Italian and Dutch (in order of familiarity and effort ;-) I mostly claim Russian and French as second "rusty" languages. Sending best wishes for much success, John James from Canada
i found out that i can understand so much written bulgarian by just knowing russian, feels like i can understand more bulgarian than any other slavic language (except ukrainian and belarusian of course)
On my 4th trip to Croatia on summer vacation I noticed that I can understand speech on radio pretty well (not that I didn't do it before, it's that I never made a notion), the same goes to writings, most of which I cound understand from the beginning. After Croatia I went to Czechia where I literally couldn't understand almost a single word, it's incredible.
I am a Croat and I have never studied Slavic languages in school. But I understand and speak all Slavic languages, not perfectly, but I get along with everyone. All Slavic languages are similar, when people speak slowly you will understand at least 80%. I work with tourists, so I have experiences with Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovenian, Slovak ... you can talk to everyone. The only difference is in the alphabet, we Slavs from the west write in Latin, and those from the east write in Cyrillic. I studied Cyrillic at school in ex YU, so I manage in Russia, I can read everything, even though I can't write in Cyrillic.
I'm most interested in learning Croatian cause I think it has the prettiest phonology. I'm also interested in the cultural and linguistic influences the Mediterranean has had on it
@@HeroManNick132 Maybe. But I'm most interested in the Croatian variety. there are also loads of endangered local languages in Croatia I find fascinating
@@Sandalwoodrk Not really loads. Just two, Chakavian and Kajkavian. Shtokavian, the third language/dialect isn't endangered as it is the basis for the standard of both Serbian and Croatian. All these are named for their word for 'what' (I'm using English orthography). Chakavian is spoken in Istria and Dalmatia, mostly the islands, whereas Kajkavian is spoken in the mountainous areas north of Zagreb. An interesting fact is that in Dalmatia the old Glagolytic alphabet was used well into the 20th century for religious writings/services of the Croatian version of the Catholic church.
@@mitchyoung93 I was thinking of the local romance languages spoken in Istria. Like Istriot and Istro-Romanian. there's even an Istrian dialect of Venetian spoken there
Currently I am learning both Ukrainian and Russian. I am learning Ukrainian because it is my maternal family's ancestral language, and Russian because it is so widely spoken. They are difficult to use mutually. Sometimes, they are very much the same, and sometimes, they are wildly different.
However, over the centuries, the two languages have diverged due to different external influences. For instance, Ukrainian has been influenced by Polish, while Russian was influenced by Church Slavonic and, to a lesser extent, by Tatar and other Turkic languages.
The article at the end of the word is how Swedish works, too- experiencing that helped the article on the end for Bulgarian makes more sense. Thanks for such a detailed video!
I'm originally from Romania and have considered learning Interslavic (or equivalent0) which is an invented language made to allow slavic people from all over to understand each other. The reason is because Romania is sorounded by slavic countries.
Romania is also a Slavic country. Serbia is a Slavic country. Serbs have Slavic origins, but also nomadic, Illyrian, Asian-Caucasian, then indigenous-Balkan origins. Romania was deliberately expelled from the circle of Slavic peoples by Vienna! Vienna allowed the Vatican to influence Romanian Christians to eliminate the Cyrillic alphabet from any use. Today only Latin is used. Romanians are a mixture of natives, Slavs, Avars, Huns, Illyrians ... In order to stand in the way of successful unification of all Slavs, who would be under the rule of Moscow in Russia. Britain and Austria never wanted to allow Russia to occupy half of Asia, and more than half of Europe. The Russians were subjected to revolutions, so-called communists, misery ...
@@mildanialekvasil2872 Romanians are technically vlachs rather than slavs. However Vlachs and Slavs have a long shared history. Minus the language the culture is very similar to Serbians or Bulgarians. Balkan people. Western Europe has never really liked us historically.
I am a native speaker of Czech and it helps when learning other Slavic languages. There's always some vague similarity. All other Slavic languages sounds like somebody is making fun of Czech in different ways. You know, they make up bizarre words and switch the meaning of some words at random. And twist the sounds in bizarre ways along the way. But there are some basic rules that you can apply and some words that actually are the same. Take Croatian, for instance. When a Croat says "piča", it means "cunt" in Czech. But it isn't incomprehensible that they use the word to say "drink", because the Czech word for drink is "pití" which isn't that far away. And that's about how it works with all Slavic languages.
The "piča" is very similar the Bulgarian word "пичка" (same pronounced except we add 1 extra k and it means the same thing as in Serbo-Croatian). The only difference in some context it may mean very cool woman because the word "пич" means dude in Bulgarian and adding ka makes it the female counterpart of "dude". But if you add 1 O to "piča" - "опича" it means to bake/to burn something in Bulgarian. Also drink is again as you said similar and in Bulgarian is "пия" (we replace the ti sound with ya at the end but it is the same meaning).
Yea we say "piti" for "to drink" in Croatian, what i find interesting is for example you say "rikati" and we say "reći", for us "rikati" means to "roar" or to "yell". For the drink itself we say "piće", for example "Ja pijem piće" > "i am drinking a drink" .
Is it funny that I want to learn all Slavic languages one day. I am Serbian and I learned a little bit of Russian by myself, I realized that I don't even need subtitles for Russian videos anymore most of the time (I do need them when people are talking very fast tho 🤣 ). I think all Slavic languages are beautiful ♥️ love you all 💞
I'm Macedonian and the town I live in has a dialect that when I was in the army, I had to speak official Macedonian so we can communicate with other Macedonians from other towns, they didn't understand everything I say. I am from Gevgelija which is located to the south on the border with Greece, and if I speak fast even Macedonians don't understand me.
@@HeroManNick132gevgeliyskiya dialekt na makedonskiya ezik e trudno razbiraem otnosno vokabularya i morfologiyata, syshto kakto kumanovskiya edni s drugi izkluchitelno trudno se razbirat, osven ako govoryat na literaturen makedonski (bitola-prilep-veles dialekta) samo v takyv sluchay se razbirat napylno. Primerno kakto v bylgarskiya ezik dialektite ot Vidin i Rodopite obache vsepak razlikata e pomalka otkolkoto pri kumanovakiya s gevgeliyskiya v makedonskiya ezik.
I am from scandinavia. And I know advanced german. it got some similar words with russian. Do wanna learn some Russian though since I got a friend from Saint Petersburg. She knows english but I wanna talk to her friends. Russian is beuitful :) really nice video by the way. Keep it up :)
German here , do you mean German loans into Russian ( quite a few ) or Russian loans into German , because for the latter I can’t think of any right now , except Samowar and Babuschka
@@Mike8827 yeah I meant German loan words into Russian. Think rucksack/which is backpack in English and Kartoffel which is potato is the same in Russian. Not sure though
As a Bulgarian I can say that we learn Russian relatively easy while it is quite difficult for Russians to learn Bulgarian. I am not sure why but it is a known fact in our country. Also while listening to Russian I can understand a lot of the words. My father has made numerous business trips to Russia and some ex USSR republics knowing only Russian that he learned in school many years ago without knowing English and without having a translator etc.
I think it might be that a lot of Russian words are either old Bulgarian words or synonyms. So it’s easier for us (Bulgarians) to make associations and it kinda “clicks” Where Russians can’t connect some of the words we use today with anything, so their only option is pretty much to memorize the word😅 Like the word “trap” in Bulgarian “капан” is “ловушка” in Russian. Obviously it’s not the same😂 but we can make the association with “лов” (hunt) and we good for the next time😅, where for Russians it’s a complete different word since they don’t have “капан” in their dictionary (as far as I know)
@@vg1408 Actually there is a synonym of trap in Russian that is closer to the word "капан" - "капкан". Also there are some synonyms in Bulgarian for trap like "трап, клопка, примамка" and etc. But the closest word to the word "капан" is "капкан". There are other words which can reffer for trap that are exactly the same in both languages like: "яма, подкоп" and you get the idea I won't write the whole dictionary of similar/exactly the same words in Bulgarian and Russian. But 1 thing that mostly confuse the Russians is the grammar (like the articles in Bulgarian) and some false friends like: "направо" in Russian means right but in Bulgarian straight which can be a lot confusing for some who don't know the meaning of this word in both languages.
@Khan Krum Все пак, ако си учил руски това ще е бонус. Е, аз не разбирам руски перфектно, но поне четейки мога да разбера 70% без да съм учил кой знае колко, но говорейки там 40-50%.
Dear Eli! I have a question about Russian conditional sentences. I never quite figured them out because it doesn't seem to be a difference between English second (present) and third (past) conditional sentences. An example: If you were here, I would kiss you. / If you had been here, I would have kissed you. How are these two sentences said in Russian?
Если бы ты был сейчас здесь, я бы тебя поцеловал. The third conditional does not work in the same way in Russian. I guess the closest version would be: Если бы ты тогда был здесь, я бы тебя поцеловал.
2 ปีที่แล้ว +1
Just a sidenote: in Czech, like in Serbian R and L can be tautosyllabic, so there are many words without consonants where R or L have its function like in: vlk - wolf krk - neck smrt - death smrk - spruce tree hrb - hunch (like in hunchback) drn - turf drž - (iperative of hold - držet) blb - fool krb - fireplace hlt - swig or gulp prd - fart and many more :D
In Bulgarian these words ALWAYS have consonants here is an example Ъ which is your schwa sound that you love to swallow: vlk - вълк (vălk) smrt - смърт (smărt) prd - пръдня (prădnya) hlt - глътка (glătka) blb - тъпак (tăpak) drž - дръж (drăž) smrk - смърч (smărč) krk - врат (vrat) hrb - гърбав (gărbav) drn - торф (torf)
Большое спасибо, было очень интересно :) 57 old French guy here, who learns Russian, because it is music to my ears, and because some Russian friends, a very long time ago made me fall in love with their country and its culture (I am not in contact with them, but I keep them in my heart). I speak German (and I am old enough to have learnt Latin and Greek at school), so the case system is not a real problem, what I find difficult is memorizing the vocabulary (the roots who enjoy "mutating" and often becomes barely recognizable, at least when you start learning). The real problem for met though, is the spelling of words, not because of the Cyrillic alphabets which is not that hard to learn, but due to the fact that when a letter is unstressed, I never remember if it is a "а" or a "о", a "и", a "е", or even a "я", sometimes it drives me crazy :) (Not a critic of the Russian language btw, French spelling is a mess :) ) On a side- note, I was really surprised to learn that the common vocabulary between Ukrainian and Russian is "only" 60% and it made me understand how different both languages (French and Italian share 85% of their vocabulary for example).
You'll be surprised how Bulgarian and Russian are very close in words. Not to mention these 2 languages are using almost the same alphabet. Sure they may not be the closest languages but I feel like Russian as Bulgarian is closer to the South Slavic languages (in terms of words compared) to the East Slavic ones (Belarusian, Ukrainian) that are actually closer to Polish than Russian. And Russian is somehow understandable to me (of course I don't understand every word but sometimes Russian is even more understandable than the Serbo-Croatian languages). And also I haven't even studied that much Russian. But most Russians find Bulgarian challenging to understand because of the "odd" grammar of all Slavic languages (with Macedonian) when it is spoken but in written form it is more understandable to them. As you know Bulgarian and Macedonian are the only Slavic languages that use "foreign" grammar just like the Romance, Germanic languages with the definite articles at the end of the word. Bulgarian and Macedonian still have some case remnants but they are barely even used so we use caseless system. I know it maybe like that because Romanian, Albanian and Greek don't have cases either so that might be the reason why these 2 languages have "odd" grammar compared to the other Slavic languages. But again as being French most things will make sense there in the grammar but the hardest part of learning Bulgarian is that we have 3 times more verb tenses than Russian (total of 9) so good luck with that. And to compare "большое спасибо, было очень интересно" will be "много ти благодаря, беше много интересно." It will look pretty different but actually most of the words are in Russian too but less commonly used like for thanks instead of "спасибо" you may find "благодаря" too in Russian. The word "много" for "очень" is kinda archaic there even if for the word little "немного" that is still pretty commonly used you can think of what "много" means. "Большое спасибо" translates are big thanks so we rarely say "big thanks" and if you want to say in Bulgarian it will be "С големи благодарности". Again 80% of the words in Russian you'll find pretty much the same in Bulgarian but again some words in other languages may be considered "archaic" even if in the dictionaries or in the literature are used. For example "eyes" in Russian is "глаз" while in Bulgarian is "очи". "Очи" is in Russian too but it is archaic word despite if you read some literature in Bulgarian and Russian you'll spot these words. So vise-versa for Bulgarian the word for door is "врата" while in Russian is "дверь" and in Bulgarian there is almost the same word "двер". "Двер" in Bulgarian is archaic word and used mostly in the literature but you can see how both languages are very similar but the grammar is way too different. So that's what makes Ukrainian and Belarusian similar - the grammar but the words not really. And since the alphabet is almost the same (except Bulgarian doesn't have Ы, Э and Ё) despite Ы and Э are still on the Bulgarian keyboards but we don't use these letters since the 1930s while Ё is not there at all. And there are some minor differences in the pronunciation of the letters like: Е in Bulgarian is read like the Russian Э (or the Ukrainian Е not the Ukrainian Є) Щ in Bulgarian is read like ШТ (which is pretty different from the Russian and Ukrainian ШЧ sound of this letter). Ъ (Here it comes the biggest difference that distinguishes Bulgarian from Russian). This letter in Russian doesn't have any sound in Russian but in Bulgarian is like something between Ы + A. Imagine like pronouncing Ы as hard И sound but instead it is a hard A sound like in the word "rubber". This sound is not in Russian despite the closest sound to it is Ы despite they are different sounds. Usually when Russians speak Bulgarian they tend to pronounce this sound as Ы. I mean it is not wrong to pronounce it like that if it is hard just it will be bit "weird". Ь in both languages this letter itself don't have a sound but the use is different. You know in Russian is used as soft letter but here is used as most the Russian Ё sound - ЬО. But you'll rarely see words with these 2 letters. Hopefully I was helpful here :)
@@charlesdegaulle4463 This is not a propaganda channel and yes I still love the Russian culture since it has absolutly nothing to do with what is currently happening. BTW, don't you think your nickname is a couple of sizes to big for you?
I'd like to learn Croatian or Poland. As a Peruvian, I find these languages not only to sound beautiful to my ears, but also they are pretty exotic and brand new to my mindset. So the initial challenge would turn out to be a pleassnt rewarding task if I were to take up Croatian or Polish. I really hope I can learn one of these languages someday.
Learning Croatian is like saying "I'm learning American English instead of British English or I learn the Latin Spanish instead of the Castilian one." Basically if you learn Croatian you'll automatically learn Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin too. And with that knowledge you can kinda also learn/understand Slovene, Macedonian and Bulgarian which are still similar but actually the Slovene language is the most exotic from all South Slavic languages even though it shares the same accent accent as the Croats and kinda the similarities with Serbo-Croatian but it is more distinctive than the rest of South Slavic languages. Bulgarian and Macedonian are like Czech and Slovak or like Hindi and Urdu. 99% the same language, different influence. If you know Polish you might also understand Ukrainian, Belarusian as well Czech and Slovak better than Russian but I don't like how many clusters of consonants and weird pronunciation Polish has. And as Bulgarian it is impossible to understand it in normal conversation unless if it is spoken REALLY slowly I can understand something but not all of it. Vise-versa also for them. I mean the weirdest part of knowing how some words can unite us and understanding how similar all of them are just like the Romance languages but at the same time very different. And Polish to most people feels like "the French" language of the Slavic languages. Weirdly how Slovak is much clearer than Czech and almost all of the Slavic speakers can understand Slovak better than Czech. There also excist the so called "Esperanto of the Slavic languages" - Interslavic which basically takes the most common words that connect us and make it into 1 language but unfortunately it is not used or taught anywhere.
As someone who speaks no Slavic languages but is interested in languages in general, I really appreciate this breakdown. Super helpful and fascinating!
Thank you for this video! I come from Ukraine and I live and work in Germany. On many occasions I have to explain people that Slavic languages are not all the same. This is very annoying. Moreover, many times at my work I was asked to translate from Slovenian or other Slavic languages. My boss and colleagues could not understand that I do not speak those languages. Many times I was in a very unpleasant situation, when my boss asked what something in Polish or Slovak meant during the client meeting and I was forced to say that I do not know. I really hope that the awareness about the Slavic languages will grow, since this is very frustrating.
For the Slavic languages which aren’t standardized as any national language , one could also mention Rusyn, which is spoken in the Carpathian Mountains and kind of functions as a transitional language between Slovak and Ukrainian ; and Sorbian , which is the only Slavic language remaining on today‘s Germany territory , from a past when the Germanic - Slavic „border“ was around the Elbe river, to name just 2 of them.
Rusyn is the same ukrainian with a dialect dude , ukrainian used to be called ruthenian , and ukrainians used to be called ruthenians/rusaks from those exact places of todays ukraine , can google it up
Great video! Bulgarian is an analytical language and there are no cases (phew) :) Bulgarian is quite a modern language in this sense and easier to learn. Greetings from Bulgaria :) I also love Slovak and Czech as my second languages.
Bulgarian is a phonetic language, which makes pronunciation very easy to understand. Each letter of the alphabet has only one sound with just a few exceptions and it always sounds the same no matter where it appears in a word.
I am interested in Czech because my boyfriend's family is from Brno. It's actually quite fun, but the declensions are so difficult. My native language doesn't have any declensions. I now understand the system of cases a bit, like when to use which case. But memorising the endings... it's hell.
Eli, I am trying to learn Russian, but I have occasionally seen it written with accent marks like you would see in Spanish or Italian. Is this an official part of the Russian language, or something that is done to help people with the correct vowel stress? I also read and speak Hebrew, which is an alphabet with no characters for vowels. Instead, Hebrew uses a set of dots and dashes around the letters (called “niqqud”) that indicate what vowel should follow the letter-although once you become fluent in Hebrew you do not need the vowels written out to read.
Bulgarian is not the easiest, you don't even speak it to tell it even if it is easy or not. Technically it's ''Macedonian'' but again no Slavic language is easy.
I'm Russian and I have a totally different experience and feeling about it. Ukrainian feels to me almost the same, the official Ukrainian news - I understand practically everything. In Poland I understand what are they talking about and if I stay there more then 3 days it gets really easy. Czech is a bit more far but I've been there a lot and I can understand more or less what is the subject they are talking about. In Bulgarian - the same, even easier. So I really feel different about all this topic.
Ukrainian feels for you the same? You must to know that russian is dialect of ukrainian as of bulgarian. We have not that awful pronunciation as you have in russian. And so why the Russians don't understand ukrainian? If you learn it's other thing
@@andrewshepitko6354 1) I don't get your statement, what do you actually wanna say here? 2)Modern Russian is initially developed from a mix of Church Slavonic (close to Bulgarian) and Novgorod dialect with the roots of east Slavic language which was spoken in Kiev Russ as well. Then - inreached by mongolian and Turk influence, then a lot of latine (from Italian and French), and Geman, which as a result made it to be one of the reachest world languages, a basis for a brilliant literature, which actually developed and develipong the language as well. 3) i won't go to the dialect topic cause it's mostly political and not lingual, everywhere. Especially since the War is going on now (and I'm as a Russian totally against it as well) and saying stuff like "aweful pronunciation" is 100% emotional...
@@TenorDmitry я не пишу це для того, щоб когось образити. Від цього нічого не зміниться. Але оскільки я знаю всі 3 східнослов'янські мови, можу сказати, що більшість подібних слів просто взяті з української та білоруської мов. Більшість тих слів не мають коріння в російській мові. Тобто ви самі не розумієте від чого походить певне слово. Як ви сказали, російська основана на церковній мові, тобто староболгарській. Це свідчить про те, що не розмовляли в Московії до того часу слов'янською мовою.
@@andrewshepitko6354 Начнем с того, что я понял 90% того что вы написали, что и доказывает то о чем я говорил выше. Далее , подчеркивая в очередной раз факт того что я, как русский человек, категорически против этой войны, развязанной нами против суверенной Украины, постараюсь ответить объективно, не вдаваясь в политику и национализм. История это наука и в ней есть факты. Говоря о прошлом - Украина большую часть своей истории существовала в составе Российского царства а потом и империи, и видилась она многим украинцем и миру в целом как часть России а Русский был языком империи. Для сравнения - Франция и парижский французский, или Италия, где возобладал Тосканский диалект, хотя в Сицилии есть свой (сицилийцы называют его языком, все остальный - диалектом, к слову) как и в каждом регионе. Горячие споры о том, что такое "настоящий итальянский" бушуют и там, но факт, что каждый сицилиец говорит на общем итальянском, в то время как другие не говорят на сицилийском опять же доказывает - кто оказался исторически сильнее, хитрее, мощнее, иногда и умнее - тот и правит,и на его языке и говорят. Если говорить про культуру - фактически все знаменитые ( и являющиеся частью мировой, а не локальной культуры) произведения этих мест написаны именно на русском языке, не важно где родился автор. Это и литература, и научные работы и опера, и кино, и это факт. Я уважаю суверенитет украины с 1991г., Но я против мифологизации и демагогизации истории, пытаясь подогнать ее под современные реалии и взгляды, и выглядят такие попытки инфантильно и убого (как а России с вычеркиванием киевской руси из учебников, так и на Украине с попытками придумать историю великой независимой украины, якобы существующий в прошлом). P.S - Допустим что будет доказано то, что сицилийский древнее тосканского (главного диалекта всей италии). И что? Что это меняет? Факт остается фактом - Беллини (сицилиец) писал свои оперы на общем (тосканском) итальянском, на котором писал и Данте, и все те, благодоря кому мы знаем эти имена, и это единственное что реально, по факту важно. Мир всем!
@@TenorDmitry Ви хвора нація своєю ординською імперією. Вам щось казати марно. Видатні українські твори писалися і російською, бо московити забороняли українську мову. Тому Гоголь писав на діалекті. Ви угро-фінські племена, які з часом почали говорити слов'янською мовою зі своїм східним акцентом ніяк не відноситеся до русичів. Русичі і московити то зовсім інші народи. Київська Русь існувала кілька століть до появи Московії. Після об'єднання Московії з золотою ордою, була підкорена Русь. 1721 року Петро перший перейменовує Московію на росію. Тобто просто переклали слово Русь грецькою мовою. Навіть такий нібито сходи діалект на східнослов'янські мови, він всеодно дуже відрізняється від двох справжніх східнослов'янських мов.
Thank you for this video. I speak Russian and I am starting to learn Bulgarian. Much of the vocabulary is similar but I am lost with the grammar. Romanian attaches articles to the end of words also. I studied for awhile. I am finding that Latin based languages come quicker and easier. Slavic languages are for those who want a real challenge 😎
Well, Bulgarian has vocative case too (like Macedonian) which doesn't exist in Russian, except some sort of neo-vocative in Russian. Bulgarian has few leftovers from instrumental, accusative and dative cases like: един - едного - едному свое - своего - своему друг(и) - другиго - другиму всякой - всякого - всякому всеки - всекиго - всекиму кой - кого - кому който - когото - комуто някой - някого - някому никой - никого - кому мое - моего - моему наш - нашего - нашему стар - старому твое - твоему ново - новому настояще - настоящем ход - ходом род - родом тежко - тежком горко - горком път - пътьом вкуп - вкупом дар - даром кръг - кръгом ден - денем нощ - нощем утро - утром ходещ - ходещем на него - нему на нея - ней/неи на нас - нам на вас - вам на тях - тям на них - ним And good luck with the 9 vern tenses, 4 moods and 3 voices. :D
I am Ukrainian and I understand slow spoken Polish and Belarusian well as for person that have never learned them especially Belorussian. Also I understand all other Slavic languages on minimal level A1 at least, even thought I am bad in linguistic. So if you want to understand all Slavic languages you have to learn Ukrainian!
@@vladimirnikolskiy nice, apart from "Нахрена иностранцу" I could understand what have you written - why learning Ukrainian speech, which you can only speak in Ukraine, when there is Russian - which is an official language (or tongue, język), greetings from Poland
@@mateuszt661 Zdravstvuyte! Witam! Dobrze rozumiem również polski tekst. Jeśli chodzi o „Nakhrena inostrantsu”, to jest to żargon, przyimek „na” i słowo „khren” (po polsku chrzan). Cóż, słowo inostranets to obcokrajowiec. Hello to you. Hello Poland!
@@vladimirnikolskiy wow, może to znaczy coś w stylu obcokrajowcy chrzanią naukę ukraińskiego, w sensie chrzanić jest tu równoznaczne z olewaniem, pomijaniem. Очень мило, pozdrawiam :)
I'm 73 years old and I'm learning Russian because it's good mental gymnastics. I find it to be a very logical language. I can read and understand some but speaking is hard for me. But I enjoy learning and I enjoy you videos.
If you want to understand all Slavic languages, you should learn Bulgarian. It is the origin of all Slavic languages and all Cyrillic alphabets/variations. Also, if you want to learn about the culture, Bulgaria was the first country to establish an autokephale orthodox church, about 300 years before the Serbs and 600 years before the Russians.... Please consider this, you will find historical evidence Incase you don't believe me....
@@dk2428 руския език произлиза от Българския ....както и кирилицата
@@ImperatorSomnium Bulgarian is actually the farest from other slavic languages, it even doesn't have grammar cases. There was civilisation in region early, but it doesn't mean it was slavic civilisation, but "slavic" is pretty much panslavistic propaganda created in 19th century and spreaded later in communism time, you can't really say what is slavic. Mosft of people say that Slovak is the lingua franca of slavic languages, so if he wants understand all other slavic languages, slovak will be probably more usefull than bulgarian.
@@Pidalin hahahahahah bullshit 🤣🤣🤣👍
@@Pidalin also, the majority you're talking about is most definitely the majority of ex-tugoslavian republics + the Russians....if you really study linguistics and anthropology you will understand....but I doubt it, now that I know your name...your people are not into learning and actual facts, but more keen on feelings....
I'm Mexican and I'm learning Serbian. It's quite tricky at some point but it's not impossible to learn it. Anyway, I still understand some things in Slovak, Czech and Russian and I've try watching videos in Interslavic Language, and it is very interesting, I can understand around a 30% to 40% of it, even when I don't speak fluent Serbian. I'm also interested in learning Slovak and Russia, but not yet, I need first to reach a higher level in Serbian.
What I really like of Serbian is that people can easily speak with Croats and Bosnians without trouble.
Greetings from Mexico to all my Slavic brothers and sisters!!
🇲🇽♥️🇷🇺🇧🇾🇺🇦🇵🇱🇨🇿🇸🇰🇷🇸🇭🇷🇧🇦🇲🇪🇸🇮🇧🇬🇲🇰
Hello from Serbia! Kako ide učenje? :)
Одлично!
because Bosnians and Croats speak Serbian which they call differently. It is one language
I do not know how to write it, but our language learning application is probably the best for Slavic languages and also for Serbian. Maybe it would help you learn it :)
Saludos desde Polonia ❤
love from Bulgaria to all Slavic countries 🥺🇧🇬
Те трябва да ни благодарят и плащат авторски права за Азбуката .
yes, russians are sending a lot love from Bucha !
Momče🐺 ... momčinata .... 🌙 momčina ..🐥. meçečinata 🐣
Гоце Делчев, Даме Груев, Яне Сандански, Тодор Александров, Иван Михайлов и още много войводи умряха за да живеете свободни, но вие се оказахте слаби и предпочетохте да сте под Югославско робство ( балкански СССР).
@@uabjurivina1798Бедненькая, тебя отбучили буряты? Если понравилось приезжай к нам, но продолжение только за деньги.
To me, an Italian, South Slavic languages sound like an Italian trying to speak Russian (sort of). That's because their phonology is almost the same as ours, so they sound familiar and different from Russian, but words and grammar are unmistakably Slavic.
Whereas to us on the eastern coast of Adriatic, Italian sounds like South Slavs giving up on Russian centuries ago... :)) Jokes aside, I think you may have something here. I heard the same remark from a Japanese guy. To him the Croatian sounded like a strange mix between Russian and Italian, but I pointed out this might be more pronounced in coastal dialects of Croatian (Dalmatia, Istria). Many words and expressions in those dialects are borrowed from Italian language.
I agree, I'm Polish.
You are mainly speaking here about croatian. No other south slavic language, not even serbian, has this for of pronouncing words that may sound like an italian accent speaking slavic language.
You're talking only about Croatia mate and not the whole Croatia, about part of Croatia called Istria and Dalmatia cuz they have different dialect and a lot of words from Italian while you also have the Zagreb and around Zagreb where it sound a little bit more like a west slavic but still almost all south slavs will understand all of it... And you have Slavonia which is basically normal Croatian which every south slav will understand...
@@19PURGER86 I was talking about sounds, not words. Even Serbian vowel sounds are basically the same as Italian, while Russian ones are very different from both. Also the intonation (prosody) when speaking is very similar. Obviously words and grammar are totally different, but if you just listen to which sounds are used you’ll understand what I mean.
Hi Eli :) I'm from Slovakia and I´m always wondering that my Russian friends don't understand a word, but I can understand them pretty well..... if they speak slowly. The thing is that when you live in Slovakia for example, you naturally understand Czech, we were one country and even though our languages are quite different, up to nowadays when I read a book and someone asks me if it was in Czech or Slovak....I can't answer. We going for shopping in Poland because they have lower VAT and the prices are better and we go on holidays to Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria because Slovakia has no sea and it's really close. From each of these countries we bring some minimal vocabulary. You probably already know what I mean. When I hear "yesli" (if) from my Russian friend I wouldn't understand it at all because in Slovak it's "ak" , which is completely different......... but I automatically switch to Czech and czech word "jestli" is much closer to yesli makes sense to me immediately :) I´m think that its the same for the rest of western and southern Slavic Countries as well. .... thank you for your amazing channel , Bye! :)
Shouldn't we consider Czech and Slovak as two dialects of the same language?
@@cadicamo8720 no....might 60% of vocabulary is complete different. Sk and Cz people dont even realize it (as per my previous post) but comparing same text in both lenguages, you can find really just a few same words. Last, but not least both countries have its own dialects.....🤔 and for example sometimes im hardly understand the dialect commonly used in the east of Slovakia
@@robosas6114 Thanks. I wonder if there also some politics in the mix like the the case of Serbo-Croatian.
@@cadicamo8720 no, I dont think so. We are ok 😊👍
@@chetzdunchien hovorím slovensky
mluvim česky
Sending many regards to Slovenia 😊👍 I like your country a lot 🥰 have a lot of good friends over there 🫠
My language is Serbian. Slavic languages are similar. I understand:
- Serbian / Croatian - 100%
- Macedonian - 70%
- Bulgarian - 60%
- Slovenian - 50%
- Russian - 50% (I studied Russian for several years in school)
- Slovak - 40%
- Czech - 30%
- Polish - 20%
Approximately...
How much % you understand Moravian and Sorbian and Turkish? By the way Croatian and Serbian are two tongues not the same and not just because unlike Serbian, Croatian wasn't under Turkish influence.
There isn't Macedonian language bro. Macedonia is in North Greece and they talk Greek language. Macedonia is a city in Greece not a different country and Greek language has it's own nature, it's not slavic dialect.
You propably understand bosnian and montenegrin language as well but i know that the distinction is sensitive and political. Especially the montenegrin language. ;-)
@@ultravioletdream102 Macedonian is actually Bulgarian. Slavic Macedonians are actually Bulgarians.
@@crimsondragon5742 they're like 98% identical. Some words are different here and there and the accent is slightly different but that's about it. It's as different as English in Canada vs English in America for example
I'm learning Bulgarian right now, the most difficult part is finding content to be exposed to the language constantly and when it comes to the language itself I suppose it's the vocabulary. The alphabet so far doesn't seem to be that bad! The few Bulgarians I've talked to usually ask me "why?" lol I think the country is so underrated, seems like a hikers paradise plus I love sunflower seeds and roses and they are a thing in Bulgaria so I'm sold, don't need much else, can't wait to visit. Native Spanish speaker here
leaarning a foreign language is a massive investment in terms of time and effort. I am Czech and I would be also surprised you are learning Czech if you are not an immigrant. Within the Slavic group, Russian opens you 250 million+ people and territory from the Baltics to the sea of Japan, plus massively wider cultural and other contents than Czech or Bulgarian or Polish. I am just practical. If I wanted to learn some east asian language, I would probably not chosen Vietnamese if there is Chinese.....
@@letecmig That's how I view Bulgarian since I also want to learn Slovene and Macedonian but not Russian, so I would be closer to those two with Bulgarian than I would be with Russian
Thank you for the kind words, regarding my country
@@nikolakrastev8880 :D
I'm from Bulgaria, but I'll agree the Bulgarian language is hard.
During my first trip to Europe back in 1997, my Polish mother, younger sister and I flew into Prague then took a train to Poland after a little sightseeing in Czechia. The Czech people understood my mother's Polish fairly well thanks to linguistic similarities in the West Slavic languages.
Im from balkans and with me also knowing Czech I was also able to understand polish and they were able to understand me
As a Polish speaker I can read articles in Czech.
As a Slovak can only say that there are only small differences in Czech and Slovak and we perfectly understand each other speaking their native language fluently. For me the Czech is something like my second native language.
And I can say that I understand Polish pretty good too but the differences are much bigger and sometimes Polish people needs to speak slowly to understand them.
Sorry to spoil the party but if you speak Polish and think you understand Czech (or the other way around), you're living in a world seen through a distorted mirror. Polish and Czech have so many false friends that you actually think you understand the other language but in fact, you're understanding something completely different, even opposite.
@@roboticbaboon3125 I don't really agree. You can normally, correctly understand the opposite language. You just have to watch out for certain words and not fall for them.
Thanks!
All three words (vrt, brk, grk) you spoke were corectly pronounced, good job Elina, hi from Serbia.
hello from croatia!🖐 can't believe someone from russia said that croatian or serbian are hard to learn to russians. I learn russian for two years and i found so many words that are similar to croatian. actually, russian is too easy to me. when i watch tv documentaries or news, i understand like every 4,5th word. as i said, there are many similar words with just small difference in pronouncing. we have so many similarities with russian language. ofc, we are in the same language group. Greetings from CRO!🖐🥰
Mogu to da ti potvrdim. Mađar sam, pričam ruski i srpski/hrvatski. Zbog toga što nisam govornik ni ruskog, ni srpskohrvatskog, mogu ti dati objektivno, nezavisno mnenje.
Ruski jezik ima nešto komplikovaniju gramatiku, ali, ima manje izuzetaka.
Srpskohrvatski ima jednostavniju gramatiku, ali ima gomila izuzetaka...
Serbo-Croatian is virtually impossible to learn for a Russian because you have tons of long vowels and tones that don't exist in Russian. Neither tones nor long vowels are marked with special characters, by the way, which makes it even more difficult to distinguish them for a Russian.
u pravu si. učim hrvatski i primjećujem mnoge sličnosti. veze u jezicima nisu izravne ili eksplicitne ali zanimanje je zanimljivije.
@@my_wifes_son I've met and talked to Russian guy who said he learned Serbian in 2 years living in Serbia and his pronunciation is perfect. No foreign accent , no grammar mistakes.
Hrvatska❤ rusky
I am a Russian speaker. I was capable to communicate with people in Serbia and Macedonia. I understood them, and they understood me because of similarity of many words
já zase rozumím polsky taky máme mnoho slov společných když s nimi jsem naposled mluvil tak jsme si rozuměli
@@mirafranka8364 You see, I understood everything what you wrote here but I'm not sure I would have been able to understand it if I heard it instead.
Because russian is based on bulgarian
@@andrewshepitko6354Church Slavonic. It’s different.
@@dl8909 yes, it is the dialect of Bulgarian.
You pronounced words in Serbian very nice! Greetings from Belgrade! :)
Anyone can pronounce Serbian words it only needs to learn alphabet Letters 1 letter 1 voice
and you can start reading books in 30 minutes
In Croatian too 😋
@@geoeconomics3067 I take your point if a student is studying the language. However , in many short TH-cam videos there are often bitter complaints about a non-native speakers's pronunciation of say, place names. So if a native speaker compliments a TH-camr on getting it right or nearly right, that's an achievement.
@@paulohagan3309
First thing you need to learn is how to pronounce letters
1 voice 1 letter that is how you are going to read
you will read every letter read every letter
in a sentence name of city and so on ... BEOGRAD is capital of Serbia or Zagreb capital of Croatia
You read every letter the same way you learn how to pronounce every letter
People who can not pronounce names of cities or whatever are those people who did not learn how to pronounce letters
When you learn how to pronounce each letter correctly than you will be able to read anything written in SerboCroatian
for an English speaker pronouncing letter right way will be difficult probably
because of 1 sound is 1 letter
in English you have 26 letters and 44 sounds it is a mess to spell correctly
There is no such thing as 'Serbian', It's Serbo-Croatian. The Serbs and Croats speak a different dialect of the same language. Don't even get me started on people who claim they speak "Bosnian'.
Slovenian getting dropped as always lol
Slovenian couldn't come, it was busy climbing on Triglav :)
@@mehanikal5639 lol
@@mehanikal5639 😂
Laughing in dual
Btw kudos also for having both the schwa (ъ/') and vowel r/l - if I remember well that you have it. No other Slavic language does it, afaik.
Slovenia is switzerland of east greetings from PL
I m Serbian and my favorite is Czech ( also Slovak wich I can understand more as native serbian speaker)
Great choice, mate! I approve.
I always found the Southern Slavic languages fascinating. You pronunciation is more close to ours than Polish or Russian is.
And I also like Slovak. Even though I’m Czech, I personally think Slovak is the most pleasantly sounding Slavic language. It’s very melodic and a great language for songs. Czech is more flat, but it’s broader in expression: it can sound both very hard and very soft, depending on the circumstance.
@@JTM1809 czech is more suited for men and slovak for women i think
@@ghregoryk4830 I agree. Women speaking Slovak sounds so good.
I'm so glad that Czech language is your favorite language ( I 'm a native speaker of Czech language ) and one little explanation you can understand the Slovaks more due to our words taken from German language
@@lucyra56 Not really. The languages are so close, that most of the vocabulary is very similar, including the words of Slavic etymology. The amount of German loanwords in both languages is commonly overplayed for reasons beyond my understanding, while in reality the vast majority of Czech and Slovak vocabulary is of Slavic origin.
Another thing, that’s typical for Czech language is, that to almost every loanword (German, Greek, Latin … it doesn’t really matter), there is an existing Czech synonym, that’s only being used less frequently, because many people believe, that overuse of foreign-sourced words would make them appear smarter. While people with truly thorough education in humanities (Jan Sokol, Tomáš Halík) could speak in incredibly rich Czech without ever having to resort to buttressing their speech with faux sophistication through overuse of unnecessary foreign words.
i suspect russian speakers may have a hard time understanding a south slavic person because here in the balkans almost everyone speaks in their local dialect. we got A LOT of different dialects cramped in such a small place, and many of them are wildly different from the official language.
And near the borders dialects can take some characteristics of the bordered countries. Sometimes i find it difficult to understand southern Serbian dialects
@@ridleyroid9060 I'm from Bulgaria and to be honest very few people can speak Bulgarian here. Different dialect in every single city :D
@@dimitar1443 Всеки приема диалекта на неговата област като официален език и няма друг. Умните Македонци вече взеха един диалект и си биха камшика 😆 Ако всеки диалект последва Македония, всеки град ще си е отделна държава
i remember when some boys from Senta in Serbia talked to me. I thought that they were speaking Hungarian, but no, they were just speaking in very very weird dialect
well, if you are a foreigner and learned russian - yeah, probably czech and slovak would be a whole new world for you. But as a native russian speaker who learns czech now I must say it helps a freaking lot to speak russian. Same for slovak because they are basically the same with czech. When I moved to CZ I could already understand something when I was reading a menu in a restaurant or some street signs. Spoken language was a nightmare for quite a long time though. But once you start learning it just clicks at some point. The structure of slavic languages is the same, so intuitively I can guess the right word ending before I learn the rule. And regarding vocabulary - roughly 30% of words are the same or very similar (zub, smetana, klobasa instead of kolbasa, kochka instead of koshka). Another 50% you can guess just thinking what this word would sound like in old russian, centuries ago (thanks to classic literature), so you end up with 'usta' - lips, 'chelo'- forehead, 'zhivot'- life, 'semafor'- traffic lights and so on. And true, 20% is mostly german influence. But overall its not that different.
Man, I am Czech learning Russian language and I can pretty much understand almost everything in news after a year but movies are way more difficult for some peculiar reason. Some are just little harder but something like Преступление и наказание is "nightmare" difficulty. I can catch few sentences and here and there but there are so many words I just dont know. Very humbling experience.
I'm Czech and I learned Russian for four years. I have to say that I have forgotten a lot, because in the Czech Republic I don't have such an opportunity to speak Russian every day, rather English or German, but when there is an opportunity to speak Russian, I feel that if I didn't know Russian, I would understand 5% of it.
tak přijeď do Prahy, v mhd, v obchodech, na ulicích je kolikrát více ruštiny než češtiny. Můžeš si tu procvičit i ukrajinštinu, polštinu a slovenšinu.
@@jansvoboda6198 To z tym ukraińskim to prawda, jak byłem w Pradze to dość często było go słychać
@@mateuszt661 a tu je krásne vidieť ako si Čech,Poliak a Slovák dokážu rozumieť
@@scaredpaul540 ano, teraz będzie ich słychać więcej, ale trzeba im pomóc, to wciąż nasi słowiańscy bracia i siostry
@@mateuszt661 Sestry beriem, bratov nepotrebujem.
Hello, from all slavic polyglot :) To speak all slavic languages? Sure, it is possible. I must say though, that for me, even from my childhood, no slavic language had a foreign sound to me. I would say sooner it was like "they speak "corrupted" version of our language.
I'm glad this video and this channel got recommended to me. Cheers!
Just as for me ! Pozdrav iz Niša Antone ! :) )))
@@goranjovic3174 Pozdrav Gorane! Ovaj put iz Rusije :))))
I aways can understand at least a few words and can peace what they meant.
Dobar večer
What's your native language is? and from what language you started to learn other slavic languages?
Some days ago a guy asked me how do I differentiate Slovak and Slovenian. "By 1 letter," I said. "How's that possible," he asked. I replied: "It's simple. Slovaks call their language slovenčina, while Slovenians call their language slovenščina."
Slovak has the most letters in their Latin alphabet from all Slavic languages so this another thing is how you can differenciate it. And by reading it is closer to Czech and Slovenian to Serbo-Croatian.
If you see any sentence in Slovak, there is 90% chance they will include / over their vowel(á, é...)
Slovenians don't use this
Slovenian use the word otrok to speak about children, slovak use word otrok to speak about the slaves.
My studies include Russian, mostly because of an interest in Russian culture, but also, as you describe, as a means to learn other Slavic languages. My main difficulty now is remembering the rules as I've not used it in about 20 years, since working with the United Nations. I'll look into your channel as a way to refresh my knowledge! Thank you for posting this wonderful episode!
Traveled to Belgrade as it’s still open to USA passport holders. Good place to meet Russian speakers and they even had a Russian Festival (bought a St Petersburg made telnyashka there) in the pedestrian shopping area on the way to the National Museum. It’s also safer to travel as there are too many uncertainties within Russian visa process for US passports. Serbians very helpful in fostering competency in their language and could use Russian as Serbs can travel to Russia without visa.
@@ElifromRussia Russia has been shut down for most of foreign visas longer than any country except for New Zealand maybe, due to the ‘situation’ despite Putin and Lukashenka claiming nothing was happening with a bit of their “flu” (well, Belarus is shut down for other reasons though…)
@@Got-lander
Really?
A friend of mine came to Russia from Munich with his wife.
He was vaccinated and his wife nent. They entered Russia without any problems.
After spending 21 days, they flew back.
But according to the rules established by Germany, his wife was not allowed back on the flight, having been delayed for a day in Moscow due to the unavailability of the test. At the same time, they had to pay extra for an air ticket.
@@ElifromRussia he ment - During covid lockdowns Anericans could enter Serbia without any restrictions
Petrograd
Serbian is the most beautiful one to my Russian ears.
А хърватския, босненския, черногорския език? Нали знаеш, че те са почти едни и същи езици? Също ти какво мислиш за българския език?
@@HeroManNick132 болгарский на мой взгляд звучит очень странно, так как много турецких слов и падежей нет.
@@arsenic5249 Падежи все още има в българския език, но почти не се използват и най-вече са в местоименията като *кой - кого/кому,* но дали има вече и един падеж останал в тях...
И относно за турските думи - това леко зависи. По принцип хората, които живеят в Пловдив, Кърджали, Разград - там можеш по-често да срещнеш повече турци. И там може по-често да се използват турски думи, отколкото в други региони в България.
Даже има един език, който се говори в Източните Родопи от мюсюлманското население от така наречените ,,помаци" - помашки език, който за съжаление този език умира и е съчетан от български (най-вече) с турски и гръцки думи.
@@mehanikal5639 I know lol but what does he think?
@@HeroManNick132 Čovek je rekao srpski. To je jezik. Ovo ostalo što si nabrojao su politički nazivi istog tog jezika.
I am native speaker of the westernmost slavic language: Czech. And I learned the eaternmost slavic language: Russian.
With this background, knowledge of both vocabularies and grammar on the 'extremes', I am able to 'decode' any slavic language inbetween;)
How about Bulgarian?
@@RositsaPetrovarjp7 Probably won't understand much, because of the difference in the grammar like ceaseless system, articles and complicated tenses.
How about Polish?
I was native speaker of Slovak and Czech language, because i was born in Czechoslovakia :) But i knew all the dialects in slovak and czech language, + thanks to my grandparents, some very old slavic words. I discovered that i can learn Polish very quickly thanks to this base and my new Polish coleagues. With CZ+SK+PL .. Ukraine language was not so difficult and very similar. Now im learning Russian and i understand pretty well most of it. Side quest, i speak english from my childhood, thanx to cartoon network, and german thanx to prosieben :D I never really learned in school any kind of language, all was by ear and reading. I live in Switzerland where i use german language daily.
@@katarzynaporoszewska3204 "Also, what does the "I am the westernmost" mean" - look at the map, maybe? Before you offend people for nothing?
I'm learning Czech because to me it's the most beautiful and unique language I've ever heard❤ but I always have been fascinated by Slavic cultures. Russian folk music was a huge part of my life since I was 3 years old. And since I became aware of the Czech culture I've been listening nonstop to Czech/+Moravian, Slovak and Rusyn music and been fascinated by folk music and dances from almost all Slavic cultures and tried to understand all those connections between them, especially the west Slavic ones. This is such an interesting video, thank you for doing it! And much love from my home country Germany😊❤
What about Sorbian languages which are minority in your country?
@@HeroManNick132 sadly I don't know much about it, even though I live in the Wendland area. I don't know how I can learn more about that culture, but I would love to! You're right, I'll try to find out more about it :) thanks for making me aware of which should be so obvious to me actually..🙈🤣
@@spiritofthewinds9089 Sadly they are spoken by less than 20K people.
@@HeroManNick132 that's really very sad😕
@EvelynMedrano-if1bj Thank you :D
Your explaning of Serbian,is just great,im impressed
I am Croatian, and when hear Russians speaking, I recognize some of the words and they mean the same thing, but they are pronounced differently in Croatian
Hi, I am from Czechia, and I want soon make video about these differences between our slavic languages by my czech view, because as you said, we have completely different way of slavic language.
You also helped me to understand more about east slavs, So I hope I will just add an other view about this interesting topic And help you to more understand West slavs :).
Really nice video, Zdravím z Česka 😁 (I believe you understand this xD)
zetkniesz się z szowinizmem wschodnich Słowian... i zdziwisz się jak bliski będzie ci język ukraiński... jest tego parę przyczyn jedna to to że Ruś podbiła również zachodnich Słowian (te mapy z zasięgiem wschodnich Słowian to taki dzisiejszy szowinistyczny teatrzyk polityki historycznej) a po drugie wasz język odrodził się w podobnym czasie gdy język ukraiński powstawał czy raczej powstawały jego normy i forma literacka... a i jeszcze jedno czy wiesz że Bułgarzy nie są Słowianami??? oni przejęli język i kulturę ale Słowianami nie byli...
@@wielblad1344 Here is a linguistic forum. You are spoiling it with politics and your petty pathetic village-like nationalism in EVERY your post. You are an ill man.
@@pskovityanina8549 jestem chorym człowiekiem... no cóż choć zastanawiałeś się dlaczego akurat ty natrafiasz na moje komentarze? nie ciągnie cię do nich czasem??? choroba?
Do you know what is CHEKIA in Bulgarian? Lol 😂
Zdravím⭐⭐ czech 🇨🇿 language is gorgeous
I learn 4 Slavic languages right now (Russian, Czech, Polish, Slovak)
And I must say, learning Russian and Polish made me understand Czech and Slovak a lot better (I am currently trying to get fluent in Czech, it goes very well)
I'm belarussuan, russian and ukrainian. Learn polish language
I'm from Belarus
Good luck with your czech studies I'm czech 🇨🇿 and wish you warm welcome to learn this unique language and it is very interesting you want to learn it. Good luck and keep learning !
For us Poles Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian sound almost the same eventhough the Ukrainian and Belarusian language use most of Polish words, but the way they pronunce the Polish words resembles the pronounciation of Russian language.
I'd like to learn them all😭
@@ElifromRussia are you from Baku? (does Bakunova means from Baku?)
Hey, I'm from Bulgaria :) Thanks for the nice video! I would love to learn Russian one day! It is a very beautiful language!
P.s: I love your hair!
You're cute
You are a gem, I am glad I prescribed to your Channel ! RUSSIA has a lot to offer the world, Thanks for sharing.
Linguistics say: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin are one and the same language. You can give it whichever name you like but it is always the same language.
Politics say: they are different languages.
In the 19th century, some people considered Slovakian as a dialect of Czech language. Silesian language is also something specific, it is a scale from Czech to Polish dialects which can be considered together as a separate Silesian language (German Silesian is a different thing). Similarly Ruthenian is a fuzzy concept, covering West-Ukrainian, East-Slovak and South-East Polish dialects of Transcarpathia, Galicia and Bukovina. The official national language is always somewhat artificial, politically enforced, displacing authentic dialects and minority languages. And even if we look away from politics and from the transience and variability of power and constitutional units, also linguistically it is difficult to determine what is a separate language and what is just a dialect. What about so-called Moravian Slovaks? Historically and culturally, the belong inseparably to Moravia, yet the name refers to it as if it were a branch of Slovaks. The authentic west Slovak language arround the Trnava city has some Czech (Moravian) features, and fonetically, it resembles also Polish (ł). Linguistic terminology also changes over centuries.
@@breznik1197 I am not talking about dialects but about the same language. Differences are so minimal, almost imperceptible. Structure, grammar, syntax, phonetics, all the same.
But, if you say that they are different they I am a native speaker of all of them.
@@Enks77 So I admire you if you can really master all the variants at the level of Serbo-Croatian-... as a native speaker. Although I am a native speaker of Czech, I do not speak any of its dialects as a native speaker - only the Common Czech and the Standard (Literary) Czech.
The question of whether a similar language form is considered a dialect of the first language or a separate language is seldom unambiguous. I doubt that Serbo-Croatian is a completely homogeneous language without regional differences.
@@breznik1197 , of course, there are regional differences. But they are not so accentuated to define any of them a language. In 🇷🇸🇲🇪🇭🇷🇧🇦 we all perfectly understand each other without any difficulty. There is less “regional” difference in our language than between English spoken in England, Scotland, Ireland and US. And we always call it English.
@@Enks77 If two languages are close to each other, it is only a matter of terminology whether we think of them as two languages or as two dialects of one language.
The cyrilic alphabet is the bulgarian alphabet. It was developed in the area of Preslav, Bulgaria. Also called Veliki Preslav or Great Preslav, which was the cultural center of the First Bulgarian Empire and all slavic nations. The cyrilic script was made in Bulgaria after the bulgarian Tsar Simeon I the Great replaced the Glagolitic script made by the brothers Cyril and Methodius, with the cyrilic script. Nowadays all the countries you have mentioned use the cyrilic alphabet as the main foundation of their alphabet. Furthermore the cyrilic is the 3rd official european language, also written in bulgarian cyrilic on every euro bill. Sadly you didn't mention any of this. Bulgaria deserves more credit and you all should be more appreciative and greatful.
its made by macedonians not bulgarians
@@krix2738 Macedonians were bulgarians until the yugo propaganda. So in that case you are right.
@@danbrawnn no lol
And Russian stole your language))
@@olexandrkuzmenko1438 they adopted it not steal it
My father was born and raised in Slovakia. However, he was an American citizen by birth since his father, my grandfather, was born in the U.S. My grandfather traveled around the world in the merchant marine and ended back up in Slovakia (which was part of Czechoslovakia back then). My grandfather later moved back to America with the intent of bringing my grandmother, father and uncle and aunt over. It was April 1938 when my father, the eldest, came on the S.S. Europa to America. The manifest listed him an American citizen even though he couldn't speak a word of English. Unfortunately, a few months later Hitler took over Czechoslovakia and then started WW II the next year. This effectively split the family. During the War, my father was drafted by the American Army and was sent back to Europe. By this time, Germany had surrendered and my father was assigned to the army of occupation near the demarcation line between the Allies and the Soviets. I found this video very interesting because my father would talk about his interaction with troops from other nations. Apparently, the American mess was known for having the best food and officers from other armies could eat there. Russian officers were of course allowed to eat in the American mess of which they happily partook. Polish troops, as allies, were also allow to eat at the American mess. My father would speak in Slovak to the Polish troops. He said he could understand about 50% of what they said though it wasn't real clear. As far as the Russians, he said he could understand nothing.
Cool story from hard times!
😂
I'd be interested in a video on the influence of Old Church Slavonic on Russian. Old Church Slavonic is still the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, my understanding is that it is much closer to Bulgarian and Macedonian since it was originally based on the south Slavic dialect that eventually became these two languages. Over time the Russian Orthodox Church has made recensions (извод) to the Old Church Slavonic texts to make them easier for Russian speakers to read, but I would still that these religious texts would have a great influence on the speakers of Russian.
It’s old Bulgarian, it was the official language of the Bulgarian Tsardom when it was decided that it can be used in church instead of Latin or Greek.
@@johniewalker4356 So old Bulgarians spoke more similar to how Croats and Serbs speak today, that's interesting?
@@HladniSjeverniVjetar maybe. I don’t know how close is modern servo-Croatian to old Bulgarian. But it was the only literary Slavic language and thus influenced other languages with words and grammar.
@@johniewalker4356 Could be. There is one little flaw in that thinking. Unless you swapped Glagolitic with Cyrilic we had written stuff a century before you in Croatia. So how do you explain this?
Saying that Old church Slavonic was old Bulgarian doesn't make much sense if you didn't speak like this before as well and continue speaking like this today.
"Otče naš iže jesi na nebesih
sveti se ime Tvoje.
Pridi cesarstvo Tvoje
budi volja Tvoja
jako na nebu i na zemlji.
Hlib naš vsegdanji daj nam ga danas
i otpusti nam dlgi naše
jakože i mi otpuščaem dlge dlžnikom našim.
I ne vavedi nas v napast
na izbavi nas od neprijazni"
This is how Croatian sounded like back in the time when Glagolitic script was in common use in Croatia. Anyone with a basic knowledge of the dialectal language spoken on the coast will understand it even today with no problems. So how does Bulgarian sound today? Similar?
@@HladniSjeverniVjetar The thing is firstly that Glagolitic was also used in Bulgaria as well before Cyrillic was created. Also your argument is flawed since your assumption that a language is the same only if it stays the same for 1000+ years is wrong. Numerous counter examples exist to your “argument”, one is English. Most modern English people will have quite a hard time understanding even Middle English much less older versions of it. Yet it’s still English. Therefore you can’t base any claims on this. Moreover at the end of the second Bulgarian empire Bulgaria was split in three and after the ottomans conquered it Bulgarians split it different regional identities and the language evolved separately in different regions. For example a dying dialect in the Rhodope mountains is much closer to old Bulgarian than the official version which was created from the dialect in Veliko Tărnovo (old capital). After that the alphabet and languages was reworked two times again, and was further distanced from its roots (last time was by the communists). So the language is a living thing and the 500 years of no centralised official Version exacerbated that effect.
I'm Hungarian but I'm fluent in Russian, Slovak & Czech. I love this video.
wow
I am Bulgarian and here is what I think: For a person from the Slavic peoples, with our languages it can happen as with the Morse code. If you listen carefully to the melody, with a little intuition you can understand enough to communicate.
Освен ако слушаш полски, там повечето думи са с ш, ч, ж.... По-лесно би било с него ако го гледаш на текст и сравняваш с български! 😃
From the scientific and language fan points of view, the best way is to start with Old Church Slavonic (or even with its more tough ancestor Proto-Slavic) and then only go through historic changes in grammar, phonetics, vocabulary etc.
There have been many attempts to create a new common Slavic language as a kind of Slavic Esperanto (because with the return to Proto-Slavic you would break your tongue and nose). From those attempts you can find up Inter-Slavic on wiki. However, I cannot imagine that without political support the semi-artificial language can flourish.
From the practical point of view you can start with Serbian (I myself am Slovak). The "official" Serbian language was standardized somewhere in the middle of 19th century. Probably this is reason it has a relatively simple grammar (said relatively but posses thousand pages text-book):
- you do not need to worry about tough sounds - nasals (Polish), ř (Czech), dark L (Polish),
- you do not lack noun cases (which were lost in Bulgarian and Macedonian),
- you are still in touch with aorist (simple past) and other tenses of Proto-Slavic,
- you are not sentenced to overuse personal pronouns (Russian),
- you can use both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets and the language is very close to "official" Croatian, Montenegrin and Bosnian languages,
- you write as you hear (mostly),
- similarly to Russian, you have to cope with the floating syllable stress (sometimes even more than one) but it is not so strong as in Russian and therefore the pronunciation is very close/almost identical to the written form (no akanie, minimally swallowed unstressed vowels, which are monsters in spoken Russian),
- you can watch Kusturica's movies without subtitles. :-D
My estimate is that a Slav from one nation can be fluent in other Slavic language in 3-6 months if he/she practices it daily. It is because of the common word roots, suffixes and prefixes.
If we omit nowadays English, and old Latin and Greek, here are the biggest non-Slavic contributors:
East Slavic - borrowings from Turkic languages,
South Slavic - borrowings from Turkish, Italian,
West Slavic - borrowings from German.
as a Turk learning Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, I find this a quite useful summary, but as a non-native speaker of a Slavic language, I find my Serbian gets in the way more as an obstacle when I try to learn Russian for example and vice versa. Maybe I should only confine myself to BCS until I reach roughly B2 level
@@malleus2997 yeah, to learn similar languages is hard. I cannot imagine learning Daniish and Swedish in the same tíme.
@Richard Schiffman Yes, I started with Latin :-) You can LOL now.
@Валерий Сабуров A mozhno ty prav. ;-)
@Валерий С You are correct since one of your more "enlightened" rulers took words and customs from French and some German and implemented them in the present day Russian. It was Petar Veliki if I am not mistaken. Before that time common Russian was different.
My wife is Polish, so I've been learning Polish along with my ancestral Lithuanian. What is difficult for me about Polish are all the conjugations. What is easier is the Latin alphabet which makes it easier to recognize the appropriate phoneme when pronouncing words. Same with Lithuanian.
Learning the Cyrillic alphabet is problematic, but hey!, if Russian kids can do it, it's nothing sufficient exposure can't resolve, amirite or am I right?
Slavic languages have the advantage that their writings are very phonetic, especially compared to English. In fact, almost all European languages have a phonetic writing, except English and French. If you want to learn Cyrillic, start with the Greek script. Everyone who had physics and geometry at school should be able to do that. Friedrich Nietzsche helped me with a fluent reading of Greek, in his works the Greek words in the original are used. But I don't know if it's customary in English translations as well. Declension and conjugation in Slavic languages are also based on the same principles as in classical languages, Latin and Ancient Greek. In this sense, Slavic languages are archaic, grammatically preserved.
I can read Cyrillic writing with no problem, I learned it overnight
The Cyrillic alphabet is super easy. It might take you a couple of hours if you’re really concentrating to learn it
@@sovaoriginal5377 yes it is, if you get the right sources, you can read it proficiently in a few hours
I thought all Lithuanians know Russian because of USSR
I am an extremely passionate language enthusiasts and Slavic languages are my “specialty “ !:) As per proficiency I speak the languages following this order .....Bulgarian, Croatian/ Serbian , Macedonian, Slovenian, Polish , Russian , Czech.......looking forward to expand my linguistic knowledge in Ukrainian &Belarusian 🙂! Thanks for your informative video :):)
Meanwhile I, a Belarusian, struggle to learn my own language: *struggling noises*
Я очень рад услышать о вашей беглости, связанной с полиглотом. Я изучаю русский язык последние 306 дней и хотел бы узнать больше о славянских языках. Ich lerne auch Deutsch, wenn auch nicht so “wild” wie Russisch. L’altra lingua che sto affrontando al momento è l’Italiano. È motto più facile per me, dato che parlo già spagnolo, quindi confesso che non mi impegno tanto. No sé si hablas otros idiomas basados en el latín que los que ya mencionaste, pero tu inglés es excelente, Amigo? Do you happen to speak or have familiarity with any other linguistic branches, i.e. Asiatic, Middle-Eastern, etc? Feel free to correspond with me, Ardit. Also, have an excellent day!
Macedonian doesn't exist.
@@АлександарВелики-ч9ш neither does your mom 🇲🇰
As a Serb, I like the Russian language the most 👍
Защо ли? Защото си русофил и държавата ти е с про-руска пропаганда, нали?
Сербський націоналіст коли московит насцяв у море : 🚰🚰🚰🚰
@@CHoLsoidarUYTP Съгласен!
Ой, я как украинка, свободно говорю на украинском (так как он родной), свободно на русском (так как учила его со школы) и так же я хорошо понимаю польский и белорусский, так как много слов похожи на украинский, русский и английский.
I am Serbian and I understand every single word that you wrote . 😉
On Ecolinguist there's a 30-minute conversation with a native Polish speaker and an Interslavic speaker. They seemed to understand each other well.
I'm Brazilian, my native language is Portuguese. I've been studying English since 2015 and now I'm trying to learn Russian. But the long words in Russian made me get discouraged.
Great video. Thanks a lot!
You can do it. Just listen to native speakers a lot and pronounciation will come more easily. It can be tricky, but you’re at advatage since portuguese sometimes sounds like russian..especially the way Brazilians pronounce the endings of words like “genTE” “saudaDE” and the “nh” sound in like “maoziNHa” which is also very present in russian. Good luck😊
@@Mmm1222_ Thanks good lady.
Privet Eli. My original language is Macedonian but English is my language in use (live in the west). I heard the song Daghestan and understood about 25 %, later I found the lyrics (in Cyrillic) and reading it I understood about 75%. That inspired me to learn Russian ( casually ). I am amazed how many words we share and our alfav(b)et is 95% same as Russian. Polish I barely understand 5%.
Така и не разбрах ти къде живееш? Изглежда, че не живееш в Северна Македония и се преместил на запад и сигурно САЩ нали?
@@HeroManNick132 Roden vo Ohrid (zapadna Bulgaria ..ha.ha ) z'iveam vo Australia od mal.
@@michaelcoceski5442 Интересно
@@HeroManNick132 Razbiram mnogu Italianski .. da sum vo Russia sigurno za 3 meseci bi nauc'il mnogu. (kolku poveke jazika c'ovek znae polesno se uc'i nov jazik) pozdrav brat.
@@michaelcoceski5442 Благодаря и на теб!
West slavic language is Sorbian as well, the language spoken in Germany.
English is my native language. I've been speaking it my whole life and I still can't get it right!
Legend
Write it you native like a.
English is easy to learn hard to master language.
🤣🤣🤣
@@skelet8337 every language is hard to master, english is one of the easiest languages in the world, and probably the easiest in all of Europe, the only difficulty is that English has no rule for pronunciation, that is why you have to memorize every word pronunciation and spelling
We Slavs should be keeping it together. There is so much that binds us.
We should :)
Hi Eli, I’m from Poland and I love watching your videos from traveling through Russia. What a beautiful person you are and the way you present your country makes me want to go there right away. Listening here about similarities and some differences between Slavic languages makes me nostalgic and wondering why we Slavic people cannot form a closer union where we would support each other. We have so much in common. Best to you, Eli!😊
For me as a Romanian the nicest Slavic languages are Bulgarian, slavo-macedonian, Slovak and maybe Serbo-Croatian
Romanian is a Romance language. Not Slavic.
@@followyourideas I am romanian and I know mine language. Offcourse is not a Slavic language. I was just saying what sounds nice for me.
@@dacicus090 then it's a comment completely out of context. Like I like pizza 😂
@@followyourideas But it has quite decent amount of Slavic influences so? You could say how the EU Portuguese sounds like Slavic but it doesn't have any Slavic influences lol.
@@HeroManNick132 well Spanish sounds like Greek and vice versa but they're two completely different languages.
I'm a native English speaker learning Ukrainian, but I'm able to understand bits and pieces of Russian (I think listening to a lot of Russian music helps). Belarusian is more similar to Ukrainian but it still sounds very confusing to me because the vowels are so different.
Поважаю вас рідко є люди які вчать нашу мову👍
@@Aegon11907 что значит :
"уважаю вас, редко есть люди какие учат наш язык"
Я никогда не учил украинский, например. :>
Elina, are you by profession a Russian language teacher or a linguist? The reason I ask is that you are so conversant in the mechanics of language. Here in USA, that was taught in grades 6-12 50 years ago, but no longer, which explains why many Americans do not speak English properly. Love your videos-- you exhibit such joy at new experiences and sharing that with us---across the world. Hopefully, soon, this terrible unpleasantness across Europe will subside. I wish you all the best and take care. Will keep watching as long as you are able to post.
No, she is a russian propaganda channel (profi)
In fact the Bulgarian and the Russian use the same alphabet. The Bulgarian have all letters except three - [э] [ы] [ё]. For the sound [ё] we in Bulgaria use a combination of [ьо].
Thank you for your very informative video(s) ! I learnt a lot about slavic languages from you!
One important aspect was missed in this discussion (probably for the lack of experience). If another language belongs to your native group of languages, you INTUITIVELY can understand the meaning of words even out of the vocabulary of your language and get the working of grammar rules even if they are not existent in your own language. However, if you learn a language out of your language group, you wouldn't have that sort of natural intuition helping you to understand another language of that group. And even if in time, especially when you live with that foreign language, you would get some of that intuitive feeling, it will never be as strong and instinctive as with languages of your native group!
Very interesting. The Cyrillic alphabet is tough to learn as is the pronunciation of words. I have a Russian friend who told me that “the Russian language is even hard for them”.
Same in Czech, even older people sometimes don't know if somewhere is MĚ or MNĚ. :-D
Very nice presentation, thank you! I’ve always been curious about the Slavic languages compared to the Russian language.
Why Russian has to be the center of the Slavic languages I don't get it?
@@HeroManNick132 Because of Russian influence and because of tsar Peter the second Russian is native to 160 million people. The next is Polish with 40 millions (only one forth) and then Ukrainian, I think. In internet most resources are available in Russian, also for learning Russian. Earlier Russian was important for scientists too. The influence is fading because former Soviet countries do not want to use Russian anymore and English is nowadays the language of science with the most resources in the internet and so on. And it is one of the United Nations languages too.
@@qlango If in alternative universe Russia and Bulgaria swap their places it will be another story.
@@HeroManNick132 Of course. I only tried to explain it.
When I was in the US Army and studied Russian in 1980, I was under the mistaken belief that all Slavic speakers could converse with one another - at least at a basic level. I know better now. Thank you for the tutorial.
Just because it is the most spoken one, doesn't make it the only one for God damn's sake.
It depends. With my knowledge of Serbian and Slovenian it was easy for me to learn Russian and now after speaking fluently Russian and a very good understanding of Ukrainian (because of reading a lot of books) I understand all other in video mentioned Slavic languages very good.
As I am a native speaker of a Slavic language it is a bit difficult for me to learn other Slavic languages. There are a lot of words, that sounds the same but have totally different meanings. Úžasný in Czech is amazing but very similar word in Croatian is terrible. In Czech život is a life in Russian it is a belly and there are many and many others...
I can remember a situation from the school years ago... I told my Russian friend "ty máš krásný život" which ment you have a nice life. But she understood that she had a red belly. Same words different meanings 😀
actually in Russia from the literature we know that Krasny is also can be Beautiful (for example the Red Square - Krasnaya Ploschad means not red but beautiful square), same for zivot, we have a saying "polozhit zivot za druga svoya" - means "to sacrifice life for friends" or, which is quite common, "ne zhaleya zivota svoego" - "not sparing your life"
I'm south Slav, and this girl made my heart in Love
I want to learn Russian.I want to read Pushkin,Nabakov,Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.I love the sound of Russian compared to other Slavic languages and when a woman speaks Russian It is very good.I use to do Cossack dancing when I was young and my favourite story as a young boy was Peter and the Wolf which I saw at a concert.I never put all my likes together as being Russian. Now I would like to learn the Russian language. I would be able to listen to Russian radio here in Australia. I am also thinking of joining the Russian Orthodox Church.
So plenty of reasons to learn this beautiful sounding language.
Do svidaniya.
Russian is archaic old Bulgarian with weird palatalization and unphonetic writing.
@@HeroManNick132 You are everywhere trolling like a crying baby... which is quite pathetic
@HeroManNick132 Бугарски језик јесте словенски,али звучи као да га говоре странци без много талента за језике.Уз то,никада нису научили граматику(падеже)😂!
По свему,тако и јесте!
Крутое и весьма познавательное видео! Но, как жительница Беларуси, хотела бы заметить, что Belarusian читается через "с" (беларусиан). Нас в школе за произношение через "ш" морально бьют, потому слух уже автоматом ловит такое)
Если образовывать форму от Белоруссии (как любят наш восточные соседи) - то тогда Беларашан ) но это фу )
@@marynavesialukha2891 Я ваш "восточный сосед" и впервые "беларашн" услышал из уст англоязычных.
Чтобы никого не разгневать, я просто никак не называю ту страну где столица Киев и никак не называю ту страну, где столица - Минск. Я стараюсь вообще не упоминать эти места всуе. Я точно также называю их "наши западные и юго-западные соседи". Очень нейтрально, политкорректно и безопасно для жизни и здоровья. За "НА Украине" вместо "в Украине" и за "Белоруссия" вместо "Беларусь" сегодня могут убить бутылкой от пива или тупым напильником средь бела дня.
Спорный вопрос. Как знаете сочитание звуков /s+j/ в английском дает /ш/. Music - musician, Belarus - Belarusian. Miss - miss you (mishya), so in best terms it could be optional but very hypercorrect. It would like saying "mission" as мисйон, not мышн. English has its own rules despite political correctness.
@@samuan001 белораша
По-турецки Беларусь вообще называют "Белая Россия")
Eli, your videos are simply wonderful. I enjoy the craft of language and my greatest challenges are: a) perfectionism that makes me shy to speak and b) the ideas I wish to express are far beyond my capacity in all languages, sometime even with a considerable vocabulary in English! Languages I work on periodically include Russian, French, Guangdonghua, Spanish, German, Italian and Dutch (in order of familiarity and effort ;-) I mostly claim Russian and French as second "rusty" languages. Sending best wishes for much success, John James from Canada
i found out that i can understand so much written bulgarian by just knowing russian, feels like i can understand more bulgarian than any other slavic language (except ukrainian and belarusian of course)
I disagree with you
On my 4th trip to Croatia on summer vacation I noticed that I can understand speech on radio pretty well (not that I didn't do it before, it's that I never made a notion), the same goes to writings, most of which I cound understand from the beginning. After Croatia I went to Czechia where I literally couldn't understand almost a single word, it's incredible.
I am a Croat and I have never studied Slavic languages in school. But I understand and speak all Slavic languages, not perfectly, but I get along with everyone. All Slavic languages are similar, when people speak slowly you will understand at least 80%. I work with tourists, so I have experiences with Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovenian, Slovak ... you can talk to everyone. The only difference is in the alphabet, we Slavs from the west write in Latin, and those from the east write in Cyrillic. I studied Cyrillic at school in ex YU, so I manage in Russia, I can read everything, even though I can't write in Cyrillic.
I as a Pole understand Russian in 75 % because I studied it in the past in the primary school.
I'm most interested in learning Croatian cause I think it has the prettiest phonology.
I'm also interested in the cultural and linguistic influences the Mediterranean has had on it
So you want to learn Serbo-Croatian in general?
@@HeroManNick132 Maybe. But I'm most interested in the Croatian variety.
there are also loads of endangered local languages in Croatia I find fascinating
@@Sandalwoodrk Not really loads. Just two, Chakavian and Kajkavian. Shtokavian, the third language/dialect isn't endangered as it is the basis for the standard of both Serbian and Croatian. All these are named for their word for 'what' (I'm using English orthography). Chakavian is spoken in Istria and Dalmatia, mostly the islands, whereas Kajkavian is spoken in the mountainous areas north of Zagreb. An interesting fact is that in Dalmatia the old Glagolytic alphabet was used well into the 20th century for religious writings/services of the Croatian version of the Catholic church.
@@mitchyoung93 I was thinking of the local romance languages spoken in Istria. Like Istriot and Istro-Romanian. there's even an Istrian dialect of Venetian spoken there
@@meduzsazsa8490 oh those aren't varieties of Croatian. those are romance languages.
Currently I am learning both Ukrainian and Russian. I am learning Ukrainian because it is my maternal family's ancestral language, and Russian because it is so widely spoken. They are difficult to use mutually. Sometimes, they are very much the same, and sometimes, they are wildly different.
Thank you for learning ukrainian✊🏻👍🏻
However, over the centuries, the two languages have diverged due to different external influences. For instance, Ukrainian has been influenced by Polish, while Russian was influenced by Church Slavonic and, to a lesser extent, by Tatar and other Turkic languages.
The article at the end of the word is how Swedish works, too- experiencing that helped the article on the end for Bulgarian makes more sense. Thanks for such a detailed video!
Macedonian is the same
I'm originally from Romania and have considered learning Interslavic (or equivalent0) which is an invented language made to allow slavic people from all over to understand each other. The reason is because Romania is sorounded by slavic countries.
Romania is also a Slavic country.
Serbia is a Slavic country.
Serbs have Slavic origins, but also nomadic, Illyrian, Asian-Caucasian, then indigenous-Balkan origins.
Romania was deliberately expelled from the circle of Slavic peoples by Vienna!
Vienna allowed the Vatican to influence Romanian Christians to eliminate the Cyrillic alphabet from any use. Today only Latin is used.
Romanians are a mixture of natives, Slavs, Avars, Huns, Illyrians ... In order to stand in the way of successful unification of all Slavs, who would be under the rule of Moscow in Russia.
Britain and Austria never wanted to allow Russia to occupy half of Asia, and more than half of Europe.
The Russians were subjected to revolutions, so-called communists, misery ...
@@mildanialekvasil2872 Romanians are technically vlachs rather than slavs. However Vlachs and Slavs have a long shared history. Minus the language the culture is very similar to Serbians or Bulgarians. Balkan people. Western Europe has never really liked us historically.
I am a native speaker of Czech and it helps when learning other Slavic languages. There's always some vague similarity. All other Slavic languages sounds like somebody is making fun of Czech in different ways. You know, they make up bizarre words and switch the meaning of some words at random. And twist the sounds in bizarre ways along the way. But there are some basic rules that you can apply and some words that actually are the same. Take Croatian, for instance. When a Croat says "piča", it means "cunt" in Czech. But it isn't incomprehensible that they use the word to say "drink", because the Czech word for drink is "pití" which isn't that far away. And that's about how it works with all Slavic languages.
The "piča" is very similar the Bulgarian word "пичка" (same pronounced except we add 1 extra k and it means the same thing as in Serbo-Croatian). The only difference in some context it may mean very cool woman because the word "пич" means dude in Bulgarian and adding ka makes it the female counterpart of "dude".
But if you add 1 O to "piča" - "опича" it means to bake/to burn something in Bulgarian. Also drink is again as you said similar and in Bulgarian is "пия" (we replace the ti sound with ya at the end but it is the same meaning).
Yea we say "piti" for "to drink" in Croatian, what i find interesting is for example you say "rikati" and we say "reći", for us "rikati" means to "roar" or to "yell". For the drink itself we say "piće", for example "Ja pijem piće" > "i am drinking a drink" .
@@HladniSjeverniVjetar "Ja pijem piće" sounds like it should mean "I drink cunts." :D
Is it funny that I want to learn all Slavic languages one day. I am Serbian and I learned a little bit of Russian by myself, I realized that I don't even need subtitles for Russian videos anymore most of the time (I do need them when people are talking very fast tho 🤣 ). I think all Slavic languages are beautiful ♥️ love you all 💞
I'm Macedonian and the town I live in has a dialect that when I was in the army, I had to speak official Macedonian so we can communicate with other Macedonians from other towns, they didn't understand everything I say. I am from Gevgelija which is located to the south on the border with Greece, and if I speak fast even Macedonians don't understand me.
Как така не те разбират? Ти да не си грък?
@@HeroManNick132gevgeliyskiya dialekt na makedonskiya ezik e trudno razbiraem otnosno vokabularya i morfologiyata, syshto kakto kumanovskiya edni s drugi izkluchitelno trudno se razbirat, osven ako govoryat na literaturen makedonski (bitola-prilep-veles dialekta) samo v takyv sluchay se razbirat napylno.
Primerno kakto v bylgarskiya ezik dialektite ot Vidin i Rodopite obache vsepak razlikata e pomalka otkolkoto pri kumanovakiya s gevgeliyskiya v makedonskiya ezik.
I am from scandinavia. And I know advanced german. it got some similar words with russian. Do wanna learn some Russian though since I got a friend from Saint Petersburg. She knows english but I wanna talk to her friends. Russian is beuitful :) really nice video by the way. Keep it up :)
German here , do you mean German loans into Russian ( quite a few ) or Russian loans into German , because for the latter I can’t think of any right now , except Samowar and Babuschka
@@Mike8827 yeah I meant German loan words into Russian. Think rucksack/which is backpack in English and Kartoffel which is potato is the same in Russian. Not sure though
@@Noldorwarrior92 I always thought kartoffel was dialectal rather then standardised Russian
Bravo, first time seeing someone taking this topic more seriously and with some educational support and background 👍🏻
As a Bulgarian I can say that we learn Russian relatively easy while it is quite difficult for Russians to learn Bulgarian. I am not sure why but it is a known fact in our country. Also while listening to Russian I can understand a lot of the words. My father has made numerous business trips to Russia and some ex USSR republics knowing only Russian that he learned in school many years ago without knowing English and without having a translator etc.
I think it might be that a lot of Russian words are either old Bulgarian words or synonyms. So it’s easier for us (Bulgarians) to make associations and it kinda “clicks”
Where Russians can’t connect some of the words we use today with anything, so their only option is pretty much to memorize the word😅
Like the word “trap” in Bulgarian “капан” is “ловушка” in Russian.
Obviously it’s not the same😂 but we can make the association with “лов” (hunt) and we good for the next time😅, where for Russians it’s a complete different word since they don’t have “капан” in their dictionary (as far as I know)
@@vg1408 Actually there is a synonym of trap in Russian that is closer to the word "капан" - "капкан". Also there are some synonyms in Bulgarian for trap like "трап, клопка, примамка" and etc. But the closest word to the word "капан" is "капкан". There are other words which can reffer for trap that are exactly the same in both languages like: "яма, подкоп" and you get the idea I won't write the whole dictionary of similar/exactly the same words in Bulgarian and Russian.
But 1 thing that mostly confuse the Russians is the grammar (like the articles in Bulgarian) and some false friends like: "направо" in Russian means right but in Bulgarian straight which can be a lot confusing for some who don't know the meaning of this word in both languages.
А то може би и причина, что болгары изучали руский язык в школе, а руские болгарский нем.
@Khan Krum Да бе, не можеш пък съвсем нищо да не разбираш на руски.
@Khan Krum Все пак, ако си учил руски това ще е бонус. Е, аз не разбирам руски перфектно, но поне четейки мога да разбера 70% без да съм учил кой знае колко, но говорейки там 40-50%.
Dear Eli! I have a question about Russian conditional sentences. I never quite figured them out because it doesn't seem to be a difference between English second (present) and third (past) conditional sentences.
An example: If you were here, I would kiss you. / If you had been here, I would have kissed you.
How are these two sentences said in Russian?
Если бы ты был сейчас здесь, я бы тебя поцеловал. The third conditional does not work in the same way in Russian. I guess the closest version would be: Если бы ты тогда был здесь, я бы тебя поцеловал.
Just a sidenote: in Czech, like in Serbian R and L can be tautosyllabic, so there are many words without consonants where R or L have its function like in:
vlk - wolf
krk - neck
smrt - death
smrk - spruce tree
hrb - hunch (like in hunchback)
drn - turf
drž - (iperative of hold - držet)
blb - fool
krb - fireplace
hlt - swig or gulp
prd - fart
and many more :D
In Bulgarian these words ALWAYS have consonants here is an example Ъ which is your schwa sound that you love to swallow:
vlk - вълк (vălk)
smrt - смърт (smărt)
prd - пръдня (prădnya)
hlt - глътка (glătka)
blb - тъпак (tăpak)
drž - дръж (drăž)
smrk - смърч (smărč)
krk - врат (vrat)
hrb - гърбав (gărbav)
drn - торф (torf)
Вероватно су Срби дошли на Балкан из Лужица,сасвим близу Чеха!
Вероватно су Срби дошли на Балкан из Лужица,сасвим близу Чеха!
Большое спасибо, было очень интересно :)
57 old French guy here, who learns Russian, because it is music to my ears, and because some Russian friends, a very long time ago made me fall in love with their country and its culture (I am not in contact with them, but I keep them in my heart).
I speak German (and I am old enough to have learnt Latin and Greek at school), so the case system is not a real problem, what I find difficult is memorizing the vocabulary (the roots who enjoy "mutating" and often becomes barely recognizable, at least when you start learning). The real problem for met though, is the spelling of words, not because of the Cyrillic alphabets which is not that hard to learn, but due to the fact that when a letter is unstressed, I never remember if it is a "а" or a "о", a "и", a "е", or even a "я", sometimes it drives me crazy :) (Not a critic of the Russian language btw, French spelling is a mess :) )
On a side- note, I was really surprised to learn that the common vocabulary between Ukrainian and Russian is "only" 60% and it made me understand how different both languages (French and Italian share 85% of their vocabulary for example).
You'll be surprised how Bulgarian and Russian are very close in words. Not to mention these 2 languages are using almost the same alphabet.
Sure they may not be the closest languages but I feel like Russian as Bulgarian is closer to the South Slavic languages (in terms of words compared) to the East Slavic ones (Belarusian, Ukrainian) that are actually closer to Polish than Russian. And Russian is somehow understandable to me (of course I don't understand every word but sometimes Russian is even more understandable than the Serbo-Croatian languages). And also I haven't even studied that much Russian.
But most Russians find Bulgarian challenging to understand because of the "odd" grammar of all Slavic languages (with Macedonian) when it is spoken but in written form it is more understandable to them.
As you know Bulgarian and Macedonian are the only Slavic languages that use "foreign" grammar just like the Romance, Germanic languages with the definite articles at the end of the word. Bulgarian and Macedonian still have some case remnants but they are barely even used so we use caseless system.
I know it maybe like that because Romanian, Albanian and Greek don't have cases either so that might be the reason why these 2 languages have "odd" grammar compared to the other Slavic languages.
But again as being French most things will make sense there in the grammar but the hardest part of learning Bulgarian is that we have 3 times more verb tenses than Russian (total of 9) so good luck with that.
And to compare "большое спасибо, было очень интересно" will be "много ти благодаря, беше много интересно." It will look pretty different but actually most of the words are in Russian too but less commonly used like for thanks instead of "спасибо" you may find "благодаря" too in Russian. The word "много" for "очень" is kinda archaic there even if for the word little "немного" that is still pretty commonly used you can think of what "много" means. "Большое спасибо" translates are big thanks so we rarely say "big thanks" and if you want to say in Bulgarian it will be "С големи благодарности". Again 80% of the words in Russian you'll find pretty much the same in Bulgarian but again some words in other languages may be considered "archaic" even if in the dictionaries or in the literature are used.
For example "eyes" in Russian is "глаз" while in Bulgarian is "очи". "Очи" is in Russian too but it is archaic word despite if you read some literature in Bulgarian and Russian you'll spot these words. So vise-versa for Bulgarian the word for door is "врата" while in Russian is "дверь" and in Bulgarian there is almost the same word "двер". "Двер" in Bulgarian is archaic word and used mostly in the literature but you can see how both languages are very similar but the grammar is way too different. So that's what makes Ukrainian and Belarusian similar - the grammar but the words not really.
And since the alphabet is almost the same (except Bulgarian doesn't have Ы, Э and Ё) despite Ы and Э are still on the Bulgarian keyboards but we don't use these letters since the 1930s while Ё is not there at all.
And there are some minor differences in the pronunciation of the letters like:
Е in Bulgarian is read like the Russian Э (or the Ukrainian Е not the Ukrainian Є)
Щ in Bulgarian is read like ШТ (which is pretty different from the Russian and Ukrainian ШЧ sound of this letter).
Ъ (Here it comes the biggest difference that distinguishes Bulgarian from Russian). This letter in Russian doesn't have any sound in Russian but in Bulgarian is like something between Ы + A. Imagine like pronouncing Ы as hard И sound but instead it is a hard A sound like in the word "rubber". This sound is not in Russian despite the closest sound to it is Ы despite they are different sounds. Usually when Russians speak Bulgarian they tend to pronounce this sound as Ы. I mean it is not wrong to pronounce it like that if it is hard just it will be bit "weird".
Ь in both languages this letter itself don't have a sound but the use is different. You know in Russian is used as soft letter but here is used as most the Russian Ё sound - ЬО. But you'll rarely see words with these 2 letters.
Hopefully I was helpful here :)
Still in love with russia and his culture? Specially the part of #Bucha village? (!) Vous êtes sur une chaine de propagande russe (!)
@@charlesdegaulle4463 This is not a propaganda channel and yes I still love the Russian culture since it has absolutly nothing to do with what is currently happening. BTW, don't you think your nickname is a couple of sizes to big for you?
I'd like to learn Croatian or Poland. As a Peruvian, I find these languages not only to sound beautiful to my ears, but also they are pretty exotic and brand new to my mindset. So the initial challenge would turn out to be a pleassnt rewarding task if I were to take up Croatian or Polish. I really hope I can learn one of these languages someday.
Learning Croatian is like saying "I'm learning American English instead of British English or I learn the Latin Spanish instead of the Castilian one."
Basically if you learn Croatian you'll automatically learn Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin too. And with that knowledge you can kinda also learn/understand Slovene, Macedonian and Bulgarian which are still similar but actually the Slovene language is the most exotic from all South Slavic languages even though it shares the same accent accent as the Croats and kinda the similarities with Serbo-Croatian but it is more distinctive than the rest of South Slavic languages.
Bulgarian and Macedonian are like Czech and Slovak or like Hindi and Urdu. 99% the same language, different influence.
If you know Polish you might also understand Ukrainian, Belarusian as well Czech and Slovak better than Russian but I don't like how many clusters of consonants and weird pronunciation Polish has. And as Bulgarian it is impossible to understand it in normal conversation unless if it is spoken REALLY slowly I can understand something but not all of it. Vise-versa also for them.
I mean the weirdest part of knowing how some words can unite us and understanding how similar all of them are just like the Romance languages but at the same time very different. And Polish to most people feels like "the French" language of the Slavic languages. Weirdly how Slovak is much clearer than Czech and almost all of the Slavic speakers can understand Slovak better than Czech.
There also excist the so called "Esperanto of the Slavic languages" - Interslavic which basically takes the most common words that connect us and make it into 1 language but unfortunately it is not used or taught anywhere.
@@HeroManNick132 Pa što je krivo rekao ako je rekao da želi naučiti hrvatski?
@@topfektcheking9526 Не знам защо отговаряш на този коментар отпреди 2 години. Аз дори не помня кога съм го писал. xD
As someone who speaks no Slavic languages but is interested in languages in general, I really appreciate this breakdown. Super helpful and fascinating!
Thank you for this video! I come from Ukraine and I live and work in Germany. On many occasions I have to explain people that Slavic languages are not all the same. This is very annoying. Moreover, many times at my work I was asked to translate from Slovenian or other Slavic languages. My boss and colleagues could not understand that I do not speak those languages. Many times I was in a very unpleasant situation, when my boss asked what something in Polish or Slovak meant during the client meeting and I was forced to say that I do not know. I really hope that the awareness about the Slavic languages will grow, since this is very frustrating.
Omg this is so true
In Austria, some people mistakenly think that Hungarian(!!!) is a Slavic language. Blahhhhh...
For the Slavic languages which aren’t standardized as any national language , one could also mention Rusyn, which is spoken in the Carpathian Mountains and kind of functions as a transitional language between Slovak and Ukrainian ; and Sorbian , which is the only Slavic language remaining on today‘s Germany territory , from a past when the Germanic - Slavic „border“ was around the Elbe river, to name just 2 of them.
Rusyn is the same ukrainian with a dialect dude , ukrainian used to be called ruthenian , and ukrainians used to be called ruthenians/rusaks from those exact places of todays ukraine , can google it up
Your English is perfect! How many languages do you speak Eli and may I ask how did you start your interest in languages?
Great video! Bulgarian is an analytical language and there are no cases (phew) :) Bulgarian is quite a modern language in this sense and easier to learn. Greetings from Bulgaria :) I also love Slovak and Czech as my second languages.
Забравяш, че и македонския няма.
Bulgarian is a phonetic language, which makes pronunciation very easy to understand. Each letter of the alphabet has only one sound with just a few exceptions and it always sounds the same no matter where it appears in a word.
@@tst678pgp Ама сърбохърватските езици и македонският са малко по-фонетични от българския език.
I am interested in Czech because my boyfriend's family is from Brno. It's actually quite fun, but the declensions are so difficult. My native language doesn't have any declensions. I now understand the system of cases a bit, like when to use which case. But memorising the endings... it's hell.
Eli, I am trying to learn Russian, but I have occasionally seen it written with accent marks like you would see in Spanish or Italian. Is this an official part of the Russian language, or something that is done to help people with the correct vowel stress? I also read and speak Hebrew, which is an alphabet with no characters for vowels. Instead, Hebrew uses a set of dots and dashes around the letters (called “niqqud”) that indicate what vowel should follow the letter-although once you become fluent in Hebrew you do not need the vowels written out to read.
Which slavic language to learn at first place?
Practicality : Russian or Polish( my mother tongue :))
To learn with most ease: Bulgarian
Bulgarian is not the easiest, you don't even speak it to tell it even if it is easy or not. Technically it's ''Macedonian'' but again no Slavic language is easy.
I'm Russian and I have a totally different experience and feeling about it. Ukrainian feels to me almost the same, the official Ukrainian news - I understand practically everything. In Poland I understand what are they talking about and if I stay there more then 3 days it gets really easy. Czech is a bit more far but I've been there a lot and I can understand more or less what is the subject they are talking about. In Bulgarian - the same, even easier. So I really feel different about all this topic.
Ukrainian feels for you the same? You must to know that russian is dialect of ukrainian as of bulgarian. We have not that awful pronunciation as you have in russian. And so why the Russians don't understand ukrainian? If you learn it's other thing
@@andrewshepitko6354 1) I don't get your statement, what do you actually wanna say here? 2)Modern Russian is initially developed from a mix of Church Slavonic (close to Bulgarian) and Novgorod dialect with the roots of east Slavic language which was spoken in Kiev Russ as well. Then - inreached by mongolian and Turk influence, then a lot of latine (from Italian and French), and Geman, which as a result made it to be one of the reachest world languages, a basis for a brilliant literature, which actually developed and develipong the language as well. 3) i won't go to the dialect topic cause it's mostly political and not lingual, everywhere. Especially since the War is going on now (and I'm as a Russian totally against it as well) and saying stuff like "aweful pronunciation" is 100% emotional...
@@TenorDmitry я не пишу це для того, щоб когось образити. Від цього нічого не зміниться. Але оскільки я знаю всі 3 східнослов'янські мови, можу сказати, що більшість подібних слів просто взяті з української та білоруської мов. Більшість тих слів не мають коріння в російській мові. Тобто ви самі не розумієте від чого походить певне слово. Як ви сказали, російська основана на церковній мові, тобто староболгарській. Це свідчить про те, що не розмовляли в Московії до того часу слов'янською мовою.
@@andrewshepitko6354 Начнем с того, что я понял 90% того что вы написали, что и доказывает то о чем я говорил выше. Далее , подчеркивая в очередной раз факт того что я, как русский человек, категорически против этой войны, развязанной нами против суверенной Украины, постараюсь ответить объективно, не вдаваясь в политику и национализм. История это наука и в ней есть факты. Говоря о прошлом - Украина большую часть своей истории существовала в составе Российского царства а потом и империи, и видилась она многим украинцем и миру в целом как часть России а Русский был языком империи. Для сравнения - Франция и парижский французский, или Италия, где возобладал Тосканский диалект, хотя в Сицилии есть свой (сицилийцы называют его языком, все остальный - диалектом, к слову) как и в каждом регионе. Горячие споры о том, что такое "настоящий итальянский" бушуют и там, но факт, что каждый сицилиец говорит на общем итальянском, в то время как другие не говорят на сицилийском опять же доказывает - кто оказался исторически сильнее, хитрее, мощнее, иногда и умнее - тот и правит,и на его языке и говорят. Если говорить про культуру - фактически все знаменитые ( и являющиеся частью мировой, а не локальной культуры) произведения этих мест написаны именно на русском языке, не важно где родился автор. Это и литература, и научные работы и опера, и кино, и это факт. Я уважаю суверенитет украины с 1991г., Но я против мифологизации и демагогизации истории, пытаясь подогнать ее под современные реалии и взгляды, и выглядят такие попытки инфантильно и убого (как а России с вычеркиванием киевской руси из учебников, так и на Украине с попытками придумать историю великой независимой украины, якобы существующий в прошлом).
P.S - Допустим что будет доказано то, что сицилийский древнее тосканского (главного диалекта всей италии). И что? Что это меняет? Факт остается фактом - Беллини (сицилиец) писал свои оперы на общем (тосканском) итальянском, на котором писал и Данте, и все те, благодоря кому мы знаем эти имена, и это единственное что реально, по факту важно. Мир всем!
@@TenorDmitry Ви хвора нація своєю ординською імперією. Вам щось казати марно. Видатні українські твори писалися і російською, бо московити забороняли українську мову. Тому Гоголь писав на діалекті. Ви угро-фінські племена, які з часом почали говорити слов'янською мовою зі своїм східним акцентом ніяк не відноситеся до русичів. Русичі і московити то зовсім інші народи. Київська Русь існувала кілька століть до появи Московії. Після об'єднання Московії з золотою ордою, була підкорена Русь. 1721 року Петро перший перейменовує Московію на росію. Тобто просто переклали слово Русь грецькою мовою. Навіть такий нібито сходи діалект на східнослов'янські мови, він всеодно дуже відрізняється від двох справжніх східнослов'янських мов.
thank you I'm from China an a Russian learner, I always wounder the difference between Slavic language, Thank you!
You thought Russian was the only Slavic language?
I love your pronouncing of Makedonian, instead of Macedonian
We from Balkans can understand each others without any problems 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
You'll understand even better, when they will come with tanks and kalasnikovs
@@charlesdegaulle4463 hahaaa washbrain
I didn't know the Slavic languages where SO different! Thank you for this super interesting video!
Thank you for this video. I speak Russian and I am starting to learn Bulgarian. Much of the vocabulary is similar but I am lost with the grammar. Romanian attaches articles to the end of words also. I studied for awhile. I am finding that Latin based languages come quicker and easier. Slavic languages are for those who want a real challenge 😎
Well, Bulgarian has vocative case too (like Macedonian) which doesn't exist in Russian, except some sort of neo-vocative in Russian.
Bulgarian has few leftovers from instrumental, accusative and dative cases like:
един - едного - едному
свое - своего - своему
друг(и) - другиго - другиму
всякой - всякого - всякому
всеки - всекиго - всекиму
кой - кого - кому
който - когото - комуто
някой - някого - някому
никой - никого - кому
мое - моего - моему
наш - нашего - нашему
стар - старому
твое - твоему
ново - новому
настояще - настоящем
ход - ходом
род - родом
тежко - тежком
горко - горком
път - пътьом
вкуп - вкупом
дар - даром
кръг - кръгом
ден - денем
нощ - нощем
утро - утром
ходещ - ходещем
на него - нему
на нея - ней/неи
на нас - нам
на вас - вам
на тях - тям
на них - ним
And good luck with the 9 vern tenses, 4 moods and 3 voices. :D
I am Ukrainian and I understand slow spoken Polish and Belarusian well as for person that have never learned them especially Belorussian. Also I understand all other Slavic languages on minimal level A1 at least, even thought I am bad in linguistic.
So if you want to understand all Slavic languages you have to learn Ukrainian!
100%
Нахрена иностранцу учить украинскую мову, на которой говорят только в Украине, когда есть русский - один из официальных языков ООН?
@@vladimirnikolskiy nice, apart from "Нахрена иностранцу" I could understand what have you written - why learning Ukrainian speech, which you can only speak in Ukraine, when there is Russian - which is an official language (or tongue, język), greetings from Poland
@@mateuszt661 Zdravstvuyte! Witam! Dobrze rozumiem również polski tekst. Jeśli chodzi o „Nakhrena inostrantsu”, to jest to żargon, przyimek „na” i słowo „khren” (po polsku chrzan). Cóż, słowo inostranets to obcokrajowiec.
Hello to you. Hello Poland!
@@vladimirnikolskiy wow, może to znaczy coś w stylu obcokrajowcy chrzanią naukę ukraińskiego, w sensie chrzanić jest tu równoznaczne z olewaniem, pomijaniem. Очень мило, pozdrawiam :)
Thank you that you show difference. As you Ukrainian I’m happy to see normal Russians who don’t hate others and don’t trying to be a “big brother”