(no subject)

[lavienver.livejournal.com]

could the differences between russian and polish be compared to the differences between italian and spanish (or english and german)?
or are there in this languages less differences than between the others i mentioned?

Comments

[spokojnik.livejournal.com]

i think it could, actually. as much difference as in those you mentioned.

[poluzhivago.livejournal.com]

It's very difficult to compare differencies between languages. But you can tell that - like between English and German. If russian spaeking person did not learn Polish he/she wouldn't understand the language - just some words will sound familiar.

[spokojnik.livejournal.com]

agree with that

[mogu.livejournal.com]

more like differences between italian and spanish than eng. and german.

[megazoid.livejournal.com]

Russian and Polish are from the same slavonic group, so there is some words which are similar, some words are alike, sentence construction is either similar or exactly the same and you can figure the meaning from the context without any knowledge of language. My friend got back from Bulgaria awhile ago and he said that he was able to communicate with bulgarians perfectly well using Russian while they have been speaking Bulgarian.

[welgar.livejournal.com]

I think Russian and Polish are actually quite like English and German. A Russian speaker can't usually understand Polish except some of the words.
At the same time Italian speakers can understand some Spanish (and vice versa) so it's more like Russian and Ukrainian.

[beowabbit]

Bulgarian and Russian are a lot closer in vocabulary than Polish and Russian, though. (Polish and Russian are closer in grammar and phonology.)

[nemica.livejournal.com]

I agree. Ukranian and Polish are like Spanish and Italian and Russian and Polish are not so close so they are like English and German.

[scuttle.livejournal.com]

I would say that even though they both have Slavic roots Russian and Polish would not be as close as the other examples because of the alphabet and subsequent grammar differences of Latin and Greek on the two.

[rita-ivanovna.livejournal.com]

I don't have much personal experience with Polish but from a linguistic standpoint-

Linguists spend a lot of time trying to determine which languages are "related," much like biologists trying to classify how closely related guinea pigs and rabbits are. In both cases, related languages and animals have evolved from some common ancestor, but in the case of languages it is more complicated because they evolve much faster, they can influence and borrow from each other, and one person can speak more than one language.

Russian and Polish are both part of the Slavic language family but Russian belongs to the East Slavic branch (with Belarussian and Ukrainian) and Polish belongs to the West Slavic branch (with Czech and Slovak) - there's also a South Slavic branch that includes Macedonian, Bulgarian, and my own personal favorite Serbian/Croatian, but that's another debate for another day....

Russian and Polish are more like cousins, then, and Italian and Spanish are brothers.

I'm not sure how much that tells you about how much a Russian speaker can understand Polish or vice verse, but anyway it gives us linguists something to do = )

Indo-European Languages Family tree (http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/linguistics/pie2.html)

[forever--more.livejournal.com]

Polish is difficult. More difficult than Russian in many aspects; for example, Russian has three genders while Polish identifies six (two are variants of the masculine gender). Polish is also becoming a bit more useful than Russian due to the foreign investment pouring into Eastern European countries who have joined the EU. I think Polish and Russian are more mutually incomprehensible than Italian and Spanish. The only Slavic language speakers I've met who can communicate with Russians without studying the language are Bulgarians.

[aunil.livejournal.com]

I completly agree with what you've written here :)

[ekeme-ndiba.livejournal.com]

All Slavic languages, regardless of so-called subgroups, are closer to one another than any other European languages within their groups. However, spoken Polish is hardly comprehensible for Russians thanks to Polish phonetics full of sibilants. At the same time, written Polish is much easier.
In fact, Polish has the most similar grammar because it's really "brother" to Russian (if we don't count Ukrainian), while Bulgarian has closer vocabulary since Modern Russian has overwhelming number of Church Slavonic borrowings (actually, Church Slavonic is Old Bulgarian, slightly Russified some centuries ago).

[a-konst.livejournal.com]

I don't know how difficult learn German for one, whose native is English.
But it was rather simple to learn Polish (at least, for reading) for me :)