Learn Russian

my mom speaks it. i can ask her.

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although now i that think about it, she could only give an english translation so it's probably not what you want.

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that will do! i ll get back to you! thanks!

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firebottle.livejournal.com

When I was in Minsk, I was able to understand 99.9% just being native Russian speaker.

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thevile.livejournal.com

It's my native language, feel free to contact me

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yeah belarusian sounds to me like russian with "ш" often replacing "с" and a "дж" sound often replacing "д."

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Well I live in Belarus and I learned Belorussian at school though it was rather long time ago. And it seems to me I have a dictionary too... Well, you see, a great number of words do coincide or sound very much alike as Russian ones but there is a number of them that are very specific and Russians can't even guess their meaning unless they have something of the kind in their regional dialect. For example I guess the majority of Russian native speakers would not understand that a word вавёрка means белка unless they live in some region close to Belarus' borders so that their dialects contain such a word.
Feel free to ask)

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towarysc.livejournal.com

дз, not дж

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but i am not...and i didn't hear much belorusian on the streets in minsk, to be honest!
For a none natve speaker, it is really hard,it's interesting, it is the same thing with norwegian, swedish and danish. To be a nitive speaker of one of the languages, makes all the difference when you try to nderstand another of them. It is much harder for somebody who just learnt one of the languages.

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veliki djakuj!

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Veliki djakuj!

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veliki djakuj!
The problem for me will be to understand the grammar, since my native language is not slavic, i don't have the "feeling". The endings are so different in Belarusian from russian, I mean the genitive, the dative and all that. So sometimes I understand the words but i cant figure out how they stick toghether. And I couldent find a grammarbook when i was in Minsk. maybe there is some site on the internet about belorusian grammar?

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i can't read belarusian so i was just going by what i have heard. :)

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http://www.knihi.com/taraskievic/hramatyka/index.htm here is a textbook. if you go to http://www.belarus-misc.org there are a lot of links relevant to learning belarusian.

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veliki, veliki djakuj!

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thevile.livejournal.com

sorry for the correction, but it will be better to say "Vialiki dziakuj" ) jfyi so you are welcome

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captainhighwind.livejournal.com

I'm a native speaker%).

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Well you see Belorussian and Russian are both state languages here in Belarus but in reality very few people speak Belorussian in their everyday life. They're either freaks who just do it because they're convinced to do so for some reason (they study it or they consider themselves to be patriots or smth like that - they live mostly in big cities) or it's just some people in the country - very poorly educated and with low social status. And they speak it just as any other such people in villages and small towns of every country speak their regional dialects - because that is all that their level of education allows them to use for speech.
Frankly speaking, you may go to any область of Russian Federation and you will find there a dialect very much worth a dictionary of it's own - not less than Belorussian "language" deserves. It's just a matter of politics imho because Belarus is an independent state and some Ленинградская область - for example - is not. The line between a language and a dialect is hard to be found.

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And I wanted to correct you too - it's not 'vEliki' - it's 'vyAliki' - because it is E in a preposition before a stressed syllable - there is a rule that E changes to YA in such position - because the stress here is on the first I - 'vyalIki'.
That is almost everything that I can remember from grammar ;)
I suppose only schoolchildren here have some grammar books at home and they do not possess them - they borrow them from school libraries for their period of studying and when summer comes they just return them back to school. Although it is possible nowadays to find some textbooks in bookshops sometimes but it's rather rare.

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kart.livejournal.com

My great-grandmother was a native speaker. She considered her native tongue to be related to standard Russian, but entirely proper for her local region. In her time, only travelers from distant lands spoke "chisti russki". Besides Bielarussian, the next most common local tongues were Yiddish and Lithuanian.

On the surface, the language does sound like nothing more than Russian with a Polish accent, but there is more. The actual grammar indicates that Bielarussian has been evolving as a unique (dialect/language) just as long as its Ukrainian and Russian siblings.

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