Similarities And Differences Between Slavic Languages

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• published: 18 Feb 2016
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My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve Visit https://www.LingQ.com Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. I decided to move outside for this video. I can’t see very well here squinting with the sun in my eyes. Hopefully, this works out; I’ll have a look later on. Slavic Languages -- My experience in learning to various degrees of fluency four different Slavic languages. I’m going to talk a little bit longer than my recent three-four minutes videos, so those who aren’t interested or don’t like the longer videos can turn off the video right now. One thing I should say, too, to me these videos are a form of sitting around a coffee table and talking, so I often don’t know what I’m going to say when I start out. I really wish that some of the people who are part of my YouTube community lived nearby so that we could get together regularly and chat about different things, but of course we can’t. One of the great things about learning languages is that it’s a way of discovering the world. Of course, we create our own language worlds and we do that by finding things of interest, at least I do, whether it be in libraries on the internet or wherever it might be. Through that we create our own language world and we discover things about the world. When I wrote my book on language learning, I had this reference to Zhuangzi and Taoist philosophy and I think it was Laozi that said we can discover the whole world by looking outside our window or something. I mean we have this tremendous ability to learn about so many things today without going very far. Slavic Languages -- If we look at a map of the world we see this area north of the Black Sea, this vast area of steppe land where apparently the Proto-Slavic people originated from. Today, we have a variety of of Slavic languages and they differ from each other because of the different sort of historical influences that effected the development of these languages. Another thing that I firmly believe is that culture or language is not in any way associated with our genes or DNA so that language doesn’t equal some kind of ethnic division necessarily. Often it matches, but it doesn’t have to match. So we have what they normally talk about as the eastern Slavic languages, which is Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian, the western Slavic languages, which is Polish, Czech, Slovakian, and then the southern Slavic languages, which is the languages of the former Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croat, Slovenian, Bulgarian and so forth. My experience has been that I studied Russian first and I would recommend that because Slavic language speakers, that’s a large group of people. Geographically, it covers obviously most of Russia and it’s not just the sort of ethnic Russians who are Russian speakers. Russian is sort of a lingua franca in Central Asia and other countries of the former tsarist empire the Soviet Union. So it covers all of that right into Eastern Europe. So I started learning Russian because that was the biggest one and where I had exposure to Russian literature as a teenager and wanted to read those books in the original language. Then with the development of the whole Ukrainian crisis, I started watching Ukrainian television and couldn’t understand what the Ukrainians were saying only what the Russians were saying. Yet, it sounded so similar I felt as if I should understand it and there were words there that were similar, but I just didn’t quite get the gist of what they were saying. This gets back, too, to this idea that you can’t just have a few words. Some people say if you have a thousand words, 70% of any context, but in fact that is never true because very often the key words are just those words that you don’t understand, so I started learning Ukrainian. I should step back. I did Czech before Ukrainian and the reason for that was my parents were born in what became Czechoslovakia. They were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so I always wanted to learn that language. I never understood any of it and I figured now with Russian it would be easier. Well, it’s easier, but the grammar of those Slavic languages that I have studied is remarkably similar. Read the full transcript here: https://www.lingq.com/learn/en/workdesk/item/11811923/reader/