Slavic Languages
I have just started toying with Slavic Languages. Due to my family tree this has always been a bit of a toy interest of mine, butI never pursued it seriously as there seemed little need. The war in Ukraine has changed that focus and from that point on I’ve had at least one Slavic language going in the background of my language learning.
Goals
- I would like to be able to follow the events in Ukraine, Poland and Russia more directly and without translation.
- Be able to have a brief conversation with anyone in those three languages someday. Mastery is unlikely while living in a country where I need to survive in a different non native language to my target language (so my normal strategy of full immersion is out).
- If need be, help out with refugees here in France, this seems somewhat unnecessary now as of yet there are enough native speakers around to satisfy needs as the expected massive influx of Ukrainians never fully materialized in France for a variety of reasons. However, the future is hard to see, may as well get started.
Initial thoughts
I am not even the slightest of an expert in any of this and I’ve only studied some linguistics aimed at the general public. I do have a pretty considerable exposure to Latin languages now and I’m not a newbie to language learning, so I think I may have something valuable to add.
- The brevity is awesome. While the words can be crazy long and the conjugation another level of complexity beyond modern romance languages, you have nice sentences like ‘the street is over there’ in Ukrainian become ‘vulytsa tam’ (pretending it used a Roman alphabet here). Lack of articles (a, the) being the bigger feature I noticed. I’m sure as I learn more I will find the conjugations add back in the missing parts.
- The consonant sounds are easier than expected. Granted having lived my whole like with my last name having several consonants together this bothers me less than most.
- This is the first language I have learned where I have less words in common with anything I have exposure too, so vocabulary acquisition has been slower than usual.
- Learning one seems to help A LOT with the other, Czech and Ukrainian seem very close after a brief forray into both and several times I’ve picked up Polish words from people in the street not realizing the folks were speaking Polish until later.
- the sounds are way more subtle than I expected and I fear it will be like french someday where I am going to be constantly thrown by slightly unusual accents.
Nothing more to add, I am in the very early days but hopefully in a few years I will have one of them mastered by accident, and that I can get by in several if need be.