What is the language they speak i can t understand a word

nederlandsk said:

Everyone says they do
I’ve only heard Russian and Slovenian
They sound alike

For natives, they obviously do not!
For the uninitiated, they might. But Czech is less soft than the others, Russian vocals are less clear, Polish does not have long vowels etc. — all of these influence how the languages sound.

Jana

Jana337 said:

For natives, they obviously do not!
For the uninitiated, they might. But Czech is less soft than the others, Russian vocals are less clear, Polish does not have long vowels etc. — all of these influence how the languages sound.

Jana

They, certainly, do not all sound the same but to my ears there are some groups of them which include similar (if not the same) sounding Slavic languages, e.g. (you probably won’t agree with me, Jana ) Czech and Slovak.

I think that what happened to skye and polaco have a little to do with being slavic speakers and Slavic languages…

I think this can happen to anyone who spends some time out of their country and does not listen or speak their own language for some time. I have already seen here in this forum some Englishmen telling the same thing. I myself, after spending almost a year in Spain and not saying nor jhearing almost none of Serbian, had a difficulties when I came back to Belgrade… At the airport, people were speaking Serbian, and it sounded me so wierd both to listen and to speak my own mother tongue…

As far as the initial question is concerned…. I suppose it is very possible that all Slavic languages sound to you same, if you have no idea how each particular language sounds. The same you can say , for example, all Asian languages… I have no idea how Japanese, Chinese or Korean, or Vitnamise, or any of Hindu languages sound… So, I am sure I would say the same — they all sound the same to me, but on the other hand, I am sure that any Japanese, Korean or Chinese would be shocked if they hear me what I say….

On the other hand, even though I don’t speak all Roman languages (only Spanish), I am able to recognize each and everyone of them — Portugese, French,Italian, Catalan, Galician, etc…
Salut.
N.

skye said:

That sounds very reasonable, I agree with this. I guess this is why so many foreigners say that all Slavic languages are alike and that if you speak one you can communicate in all others as well.

This absolutely is not the truth.

We cannot understand more each other than for example an Italian or Spaniard can understand without any problem some French or Romanian.

There are words that are similar, but in no way if you speak, for example, Russian, you can understand me, or a Bulgarian…

I think that when I hear something Slavic I can distinguish it, or perhaps say, from what region they are>>> like from the south, east or middle. Ukrainian and Russian sounds very alike to me, but when I’m listening to it longer, maybe I can distinguish some differences. Also when I hear someone speaking some of the south slavic languages-like Croatian, Slovenian…they will probably sound quite similar to my ear…don’t know.

But it is always somewhat pleasant to hear a similar, slavic language, like on the airport…

Tolovaj_Mataj:
good question!

Well, as I previously said, Czech and Slovakian (even Polish sometimes!) sound very similar to me(probably because I have never been in a contact with these two languages, so that I could here and recognize the diference. (Russian, Ukrainian, or Belarusian too!)
I can clearly make a diference between Serbian and Croatian, for example, but it takes some time (it depends, if I don`t here some word which exists in the Croatian, but is not used in the Serbian, for example, it`s harder for me to distinguish them only by the intonation). OK, yes, Bulgarian is clear too, but there is something in the Slovenian, in the intonation(also, the lenght of the words), in the way of pronounciation, the words themselves, that makes the Slovenian a bit different. For me, of course, it is the case with all macedonians!
OK, you got me, now even I don`t know how do I always distinguish it that quickly. Maybe it`s because, together with the Russian, I like it most from all Slavic languages

Caramba! Aren’t Serbian and Bosnian very similar…like Croatian and Serbian are?

The above post probably referred to B/C/S speakers talking to Slovenians. In such a situation, it is indeed easier to speak in English if both sides are fluent in it, especially if neither side has had much exposure to the language of the other.

On the other hand, people from Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro talking to each other in English would be a scene of montypythonesque absurdity. I suppose totally uneducated people from different regions who speak only their village dialects might have serious problems in communication, but anyone who speaks any English is virtually guaranteed to have learned the standard language first.

I have a little bit experience hearing Slovenian, Serbian/Croatian and Russian and less of Czech, Slovakian and Polish.
They all sound rather different to my ears, but then this is typical if you know at least one Slavic language.
Slovenian is «softer» to my ears than Serbian/Croatian which sounds rather «hard» and very «precise» (staccato even) but with «melody», while Russian is even «softer» (at least if not spoken by a martial politician like Stalin who was Georgian in the first place anyway), especially if you listen to Russian songs.
Czech and, even more so, Polish come over «harder» to my ear, and both have quite a different prosody compared to Russian and the South Slavic languages.

Typical for all of them are some basics in phonetics (even if there are quite some differencies between Slavic languages, for example the ones with palatalization — like Russian — and the ones without — like Slovenian).

But for anyone not knowing any Slavic language the Slavic languages may indeed sound similar.

Hi,

This thread is interesting to me because I have always wondered about the same thing.

To me, all Slavic languages sound similar too! Whenever I hear a native Slavic language speaker, I say «this must be an Eastern European language».

Of course, the situation must be different for someone who is able to speak a Slavic language fluently. They can grasp the differences between different Slavic languages.

However, no matter how similar they are, each «Latin language» sounds different. French and Italian, two similar languages, yet they sound very different, even people who dont speak French / Italian can distinguish these two languages.

To me, «Russian» sounds so Slavic and I can somehow guess that the speaker is Russian. Other than that, the other Slavic languages sound so similar.

Still,

to me

, the less Slavic sounding Slavic languages are South Slavic languages ex. Croatian, Bosnian…the most Slavic sounding languages are Russian, Polish etc.

I guess, Belorussians and Ukranians prefer speaking Russian in their daily lives, so they sound as Slavic as Russians

Also some non-Slavic languages sound Slavic to me!
Romanian, Lithuanian, Portuguese

This absolutely is not the truth.

We cannot understand more each other than for example an Italian or Spaniard can understand without any problem some French or Romanian.

There are words that are similar, but in no way if you speak, for example, Russian, you can understand me, or a Bulgarian…

I think there is also a big difference between how the spoken language sounds, and how it sounds when it is read/written. Despite the fact that I have spoken and written/read Polish for over 35 years, I still find some Polish a little difficult to read at times, but do not feel the same way about Czech. I cannot speak Croatian, but I’ve attempted to read a few Croatian articles recently and have found the difficulty level to be similar to Czech. But could I understand most of what a Croat says, or have a 10-minute conversation with them? Clearly not.

While I would argue that there is certainly some similarity in the way all members of a certain language group sound, and there may be some common (or, at least similar) vocabulary, all that this serves to do, in my opinion, is to make it a little easier for speakers of other languages in the same group to communicate with each other. But by no means can anyone truly claim that all speakers of Slavic languages can communicate with each other, simply because they speak a related language!

One of the big myths I hear in the Polish community is that it is very easy for us to communicate with Czechs and Slovaks. On a very basic level, this is true — a Polish-only speaker probably won’t go wrong when ordering coffees in a Czech cafe, or booking themselves into a hotel, for example. But beyond that… there are so many differences in grammar, vocabulary, word endings and pronunciation that it quickly becomes clear that Czech is a totally different language. Even Silesian, which some argue is «just a dialect of Polish» (I disagree though) sounds and is written quite differently to standard Polish, despite being spoken mainly within Poland!

As an aside, my mother works as an interpreter and speaks English, Polish and Russian, and therefore manages to interpret for Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and the occasional Czech/Slovak. But because she has never studied Czech/Slovak, it is with the natives of those two countries that she has the most problems, and manages only with the aid of a dictionary and phrasebook. Whereas I can only speak English, Polish and Czech, so I can communicate with Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, but cannot understand a word of Russian and virtually no Ukrainian. Yet, strangely, I appear to be able to understand some Croatian (and once had a fairly lengthy conversation in Polish-Croatian during the early part of the third Balkan War — but that’s another thread altogether, lol )

After studying Czech for a few months with a tutor (not having studied another Slavic language), I was interested in listening to Czech songs, so went to look for songs to download from the internet. One that I downloaded («Dokud se zpívá») turned out to be a version with verses alternating in Czech and Polish (the singer, Jaromír Nohavica, is Czech but also popular with Polish audiences). At first I didn’t notice, I just thought it was all Czech with a lot of unfamiliar words, but then I noticed the distinctive Polish sound «ł» (similar to English «w») which doesn’t exist in Czech.

I tried some Czech on a Polish woman I know, and she said, «I can’t understand that language! It sounds like Polish people when they are drinking!»

lol!!!

I think Czech sounds like a funny, ungrammatical form of Polish. I’m sure native Czech speakers may think something similar about Polish, though.

It does sound funny to us indeed, there were some discussions on the forum about that, but I cannot find anything at the moment.

Mind you, I wish I could stop pronouncing Czech words like neplatným as
nepłatným… I wonder if other Polish speakers have the same problem with Czech, haha

The problem unfortunatley exists when we try to speak other Slavic languages too: Russian: Лайка/Laika.

Tom

I was just wondering how does Serbian language sound to foreigners? Which language could I most easily compare it to so that I can hear it from your point of listening, and how does it generally sound like: soft, sharp, etc. Are you usually going to like it when you first hear it or not?

Hope you can give me a short description of Serbian and quench my curiosity.

The problem with your question is that the answer depends on the native language of these foreigners and also on the other languages to which they have been exposed previously.

Hello.

I’m a native Serbian speaker from Belgrade and I’ve always been interested in one thing, which can unfortunately only be answered by non Serbian speakers.

I was just wondering how does Serbian language sound to foreigners? Which language could I most easily compare it to so that I can hear it from your point of listening, and how does it generally sound like: soft, sharp, etc. Are you usually going to like it when you first hear it or not?

Hope you can give me a short description of Serbian and quench my curiosity.

Thanks!

Of course. As native Croatian speaker, I can say that Serbian is very interesting language, I don’t understand very much of it, but it sounds a little bit like Russian.

I’m just kiding, I just wanted to say, that as Slavic language speaker, I feel the difference very much…

For natives, they obviously do not!
For the uninitiated, they might. But Czech is less soft than the others, Russian vocals are less clear, Polish does not have long vowels etc. — all of these influence how the languages sound.

Jana

I noticed that every Slavic nation thinks of their language as less soft then the others. I don’t know why that’s so, but for me Croatian is definitely less soft than the others , and Czech, Slovak, Polish are the most soft languages.
Is it just me — or Ukrainian is easier for us (Croats) to understand than Russian? Like it’s vowels are more open, or something. I don’t know, maybe i’m just imagining.I never heard Belarusian.
Slovenian for me sounds like German in some way, definetly not like Russian.
Macedonian /Bulgarian also/ sounds like Croatian but more dynamic (if that’s right expression).

I believe Slovenian definitely sounds harder than most other Slavic languages and in this respect it is probably closer to German than to Russian.

I have a rather different opinion about the sound of Slovene.

Yes, Slovene (to my ears) is definitely ‘harder’ than Russian: Russian sounds so ‘soft’ because of the palatalisation, also the melody of Russian is ‘soft’ to my ears (the whole Russian language is like a poem to me, that is if spoken ‘normal’, not Stalin-style, of course).

But Serbian/Croatian really sounds ‘hard’ to my ears, definitely much harder than Slovene, despite the fact in SC the tonal accent is much stronger pronounced than Slovene (at least, in standard SC).
To my ears Czech also is definitely harder than Slovene, Polish too. But this also may be due to the speakers of both languages that I had the chance using their mother tongue (the sample of Polish and Czech speakers I already heard in real life is very small while I had quite some hearing experience with Slovene and Croatian/Serbian).

Interestingly I once read in an article that to Germans Slovene sounds like a language almost without vowels, although I am not sure if that goes for all Germans or if it was meant to be more of a joke.

I think the person who wrote this either had Croatian or Czech in mind and didn’t know much about Slovenian at all — or was only joking about the Slovenian writing system. Because in Slovenian the shwa sound before the ‘r’ (in words like ‘vrniti’) is quite pronounced, more so than in some other Slavic languages; and the ‘v’ in ‘vtis’ too is a vowel, which many speakers who don’t know much about Slovene don’t realise.

No, Slovenian sounds quite ‘vocalic’ to speakers with German mother tongue — much more so some Slovenian dialects, of course, but standard language too.

I think the branches are pretty much devided by their sounding. Eastern ones comprised by Russian, sound very soft, they have this accent I can spot everywhere when they speak English too. Western sounds very jumpy, with too much stress and polish has too mush sss… sounds

This is my impression also.

Putin of course also has a strong Russian accent when speaking English — anyone may search for audio files, there’s plenty on the www, but I shouldn’t link to sites probably violating copyrights.
And yes, ‘jumpy’ is what I too have in mind when thinking of Western Slavic, and Polish really has a great many sibilants.

A Polish colleague of mine also told me that the Poles are used to speaking in a rather ‘hard’ manner (that is, not sounding polite at all — to Austrian ears it sounds as if they were quarreling with each other while this colleague said this is just ‘normal talking’ without any impoliteness attached to it; as this is my only source of course I can’t be sure if this is an exception in Poland, or rather the rule).

Of Bulgarian however I know little. What I know of South Slavic languages (mainly Slovenian and Serbian/Croatian) sounds — to me — softer and more melodic than Western Slavic, and less so than Eastern Slavic. But this generalisation probably isn’t shared by others, especially native speakers.

Well, Putin certainly sounds softer in speech than Stalin — very much so (but then Stalin was a Georgian by nation, Russian wasn’t his ‘mother tongue’ or at least not his only one).

As far as I know, Stalin’s stereotypical Georgian inability to palatalize soft consonants has been a running joke in Russia for many decades.

But Serbian/Croatian really sounds ‘hard’ to my ears, definitely much harder than Slovene, despite the fact in SC the tonal accent is much stronger pronounced than Slovene (at least, in standard SC).

«Despite»? I would actually say it’s in part because of the tonal accents. I would describe the «melody» played by these tonal accents as quite heavy and rough.

BCS dialects in which the tonal accents are most prominent nowadays (e.g. most of Bosnia, and especially Herzegovina and Montenegro) are perceived by people from other BCS-speaking areas as very hard and rough. In contrast, for example, Kajkavian dialects, and even standard Croatian as pronounced in traditionally Kajkavian areas, which lacks the official BCS tonal accents, sounds very soft and gentle to e.g. Bosnians.

«Despite»? I would actually say it’s in part because of the tonal accents. I would describe the «melody» played by these tonal accents as quite heavy and rough.

Well yes, the ‘short’ one displayed in writing with two accents grave above the vowel certainly is heavy and rough but I didn’t quite realise — as you wrote — that in the dialects where the neoštokavian accent is most prominent still (e. g. Bosnia) the speech sounds harder to other BCS speakers.

There’s a simple reason for this, my ears mainly were exposed mostly to northern and western Croatian speakers (i. e. not-quite-neoštokavian accents).
So I only perceived the ‘double-short-accent’ as hard (that is, this one was the only one I really could clearly differentiate from all the others — with my mother tongue lacking a similar tonal accent it is different for me to perceive it correctly, let alone produce it).

But it is very interesting for me to hear that the classical neoštokavian accent also is perceived as ‘hard’ by speakers who only produce a weaker form of this tonal accent.
A similar, if not quite the same, form of accent also exists in Slovenian, by the way, but with the accent also the vocal quality changes (péti and pêti both being long vowels, but the é being closed while the ê is open), therefore the different tone curve of both vowels (in ‘classical’ pronunciation; some dialects seem to be different) is not phonemical but only a phonetic feature (or so my teachers said).