What is your native language again? Russian or something else?

German cases really aren't that complicated. Just take some time to memorize. But I've noticed people find the Dativ in particular to be quite daunting. I guess Romance speakers(except Romanians) and English speakers just aren't used to cases and declensions, so it might seem alien to them. English speakers find it frustrating often to learn gender forms and verb endings when it comes to Romance languages. I was happy when I was a kid and had my first English classes and saw that regular verb conjugations in English were pretty simple. And it seems that in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish they're even more simple. The easiest part for me in German was also learning regular verbs and tenses. Germanic languages, at least the major ones, just seem to have less verbal tenses than Romance languages. Jesus I remember French from 7th to 9th grade and they had several verb tenses, including a couple(Futur Antérieur or wtv that shit was) that didn't exist in Portuguese.

Thanks for the recommendations.

You're welcome.

My native language is Croatian, but AFAIK most Slavic languages have more or less similar grammar.

Yeah, I agree with you that German cases aren't that difficult. I'm just warning you, though, that there are six cases in most Slavic languages, so another two extra may or may not be more difficult (although the vokativ case is piss-easy, to be fair). The tenses are also quite similar to German in my language as well, so I guess I could say the same for Russian.

Are Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian all the same language but considered different ones due to politics? Or am I wrong? Nevertheless there's prolly words and expressions that are used in some parts and not in others.

Then you have Slovenian, which for the record, according to this Slovene I talk to sometimes, he says Croatians ans Serbians have trouble understanding it.

Oh I don't doubt Russian is gonna be a challenging language. In my part of Europe we're not very exposed to Slavic languages, let alone study them. I wasa bit surprised when I learned that brother in Russian and Polish is "brat", which sounds kinda Germanic.

No, you're right. Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Serbian are all more or less dialects, so to say, of the same big branch of Serbo-Croatian. You have a few differences, of course, for instance, "spoon"; in Croatian the word for it is "žlica" and in Serbian it's "kašika". Really, though, quite a lot of these differences can be traced back to German and Hungarian, like in continental Croatia and Vojvodina, or Italian, like in most of the Croatian coast, or Turkish, like in the ex-Yugoslavian region in general, but more so, I think, in most of Bosnia and Serbia.

Compared to Serbo-Croatian, yeah, it is a bit more difficult. I think there's more German influence, but I'm not sure.

^ Glad to hear one of y'all admit that When I'm by myself, listening to Osmi Putnik (Croatia), Divlje Jagode (Bosnia) or Gordi (Serbia), in my mind I consider that all to be "Yugoslav" for linguistic purposes. I avoid using that term around anyone from that area though...

Is Cyrillic used a lot in Serbia and Croatia? Or not really? Also, what are the Slavic languages you find the hardest to understand?

From what I've seen and read, it seems Polish is the Slavic language that diverts the mostly from others. Not really having one that is mutually intelligible with. Slovak and Czech I'm guessing are the most closely related to it but still fairly different. A Russian and Ukrainian speaker also told me once that Polish was the Slavic language he had the most trouble understanding. Whilst a Pole I talk to often told me that for your average Pole studying and learning Russian isn't really that complicated and that he can understand about 30-40% of what a Russian speaker says even though he doesn't speak Russian himself.

I've read several times on the internet before that Polish is possibly the hardest Slavic language to learn. Although I guess that depends on the individual.

I guess Romance languages are technically "easy" compared to other language families and branches, but I dunno. So many people seem to find French hard(me included) and so many foreigners who try to learn Portuguese struggle at it. I wonder what they'd think of languages like Mandarin, Arabic, etc. Then again most people don't speak as many languages as Tolkien did.


I've seen Norwegians and Swedes saying before that their languages might as well be just one.

To be fair, what truly matters at the end of the day is phonetics. Portuguese and Spanish have quite some phonetic differences, that's why you never see a native speaker of either language claim both to be the same language. Back to the North Germanic languages, Danish also sounds quite different than Norwegian and Swedish despite looking borderline identical to Norwegian Bokmal. And then, ofc there's Icelandic which isn't mutually intelligible with the 3 continental languages at all.

Another thing I find interesting is how different European and Brazilian Portuguese can be. I mean if it's standard language in a newspaper or something then it's fine for me. It might take me some sentences to realize I'm reading PT-BR, but reading what Brazilians write online with all those weird expressions and the way they phrase things? Holy shit. And people think US English and UK English are already bad enough. No wonder some websites still have Portuguese and BR-PT listed separately as if they're different languages.

I find interesting how Dutch became Afrikaans in South Africa. And it's not even a creole language. The differences between NL Dutch and Belgian Dutch seem interesting as well. In the Dutch verses of Belgium's anthem there's words like "immer" and "arbeid" per example.

That's because Bokmal is just Imperial Danish renamed so mildly nationalistic Norwegians can feel better about themselves

In most of Serbia and the Serbian parts of Bosnia, Cyrillic is used there yes. Croatia has never used any form of Cyrillic outside the church since the early Middle Ages; however, the script from which Cyrillic was later developed, the Glagolitic script, was used extensively back then in some regions. Nowadays it's somewhat taboo to have it written here, unless it's explicitly in context of Russian, Ukrainian, etc. basically any language except Serbian, because here all Serbs are evil non-Catholic Četniks spreading communism and coming to eat your babies! And in Serbia all Croats are evil non-Orthodox Ustašes spreading fascism and coming to eat your babies!

Ahem.

Anyway, I studied Polish quite briefly once and I'd definitely reckon it's the weirdest one out of the Slavic language group. The pronounciation alone is utterly confusing and needlessly complicated IMO. In a modern world where English is a dominant global language, the presence of the letter 'W' replacing 'V' is something quite difficult, as are the weird derpy vowels like ą, ę, ł or w/e. Then you have sounds like "cz" and "rz" which are highly misleading to read (at least there's a special letter for them in Czech, Slovak, and, "cz" only for Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian, geez). Outside of pronounciation, there's also the bizarre declensions I encountered, which are actually the same as in my language but used differently. Like, when introducing oneself, in most Slavic languages the subject is nominativ, for instance, in Croatian: "ja sam dječak" ("I am a boy"), where "dječak" is the subject and is nominative. In Polish it's different: "jestem chłopcem", where "chłopcem" is the subject and is AKUZATIV. In English it'd more or less translate to "I am of a boy" or something like that. And that's how it is in a lot of similar sentences in Polish. It sounds super distorted to my ears but, to be fair, I'd find it less confusing if I were Czech or Ukrainian. I think there are some similarities but I don't know enough Polish to tell you for sure.

This, probably. I took Latin and Spanish before German so learning German cases didn't seem that difficult to me.

But regardless of the language, I still think the most important thing is actually giving a damn about learning it and being dedicated to that goal; a lot of people take classes and expect classes to make them totally fluent in a year or two, but a few hours a week in class won't if you're not also using it outside of class (listening to music and actually trying to understand lyrics, watching movies, traveling to countries where that language is spoken, using online forums in that language, etc.).

As for books, I've had better luck just buying a shit ton of language learning books in a language, then when one of them frustrates you, you can switch to another that might explain the same thing in a different way.

(I work as a translator, btw, German>English mostly but sometimes French>English.)

Hmm that is indeed weird how Polish uses the accusative case to say "I am a boy".

circleofdestruction: I took Latin briefly in 10th grade just because I though it'd be fun(I was a huge Astérix fan when I was a kid) but it really wasn't, so I dropped that class pretty quickly. Plus, I saw no use for it.

And yes, you're right that classes really don't teach you much asides basics. I find those courses to learn a language during the Summer or wtv to be an overpriced scam. Nowadays with all the websites, youtube channels and apps teaching you stuff for free it's probably easier than ever to learn a new language.

This was back in the days when we had "gifted classes" here and they put everyone in those into Latin, also. I took 2 years. Our book and our teacher were actually kind of fun, I guess a lot of Latin classes just make you do a lot of boring translations and we didn't. I think I took it in 7th and 8th grades, then we had a choice of Spanish, German, or French in high school.

I just knew a whole lot of people in college who put forth no effort and then also spent a summer in Germany and were shocked that they had trouble just having normal conversations or ordering food in German while in Germany. (Never mind the fact that most Germans speak English; that defeats the whole purpose of an immersion course.)

And I'm sure my conversational skills have gotten worse, but I sure do know a lot of legal and medical terms now from translating divorce decrees and medical reports.

The thing about Latin is... it's pretty much a dead language. So it's not like you'll have many chances to practice it. Maybe if you live in the Vatican.

Back in my day we were forced French from 7th to 12th grade. I was lucky to join a HS and a course that offered German as an alternative from 10th on, which is what i did. Nowadays it seems kids can pick between German and French at any school. I've talked to some university students who are 19-20 years old and most of them pretty much forgot all the German they learned in HS.

The thing about French is, until the 70s-80s it was taken more seriously and compulsory for more years than English was here. That's why you'll find several people aged 50-60 who speak passable French but struggle with English here. And they haven't been able to catch up with the times and how fast the English language spread onto technology. Nowadays it's very rare to find a young person here who speaks French fluently, I'd say. Not to mention when I was a kid we were already "against" learning French in school because we found it useless compared to English and not to mention harder.

I know that the university where I majored in German and minored in French no longer offers majors/minors in either anymore due to staff cuts. Not sure about high school, I think they offer fewer now, too. And art students, esp. art history students, were required to minor in a language before, so no idea how that's working out for them now.

But yeah, I took Spanish in high school (9th-12th) for 4 years and can't use it worth a shit now, because I never used it outside of class. And that probably started the year I left high school, forgetting Spanish.

Latin is probably useful for all languages that borrow from it, just not in a direct way of actually having to speak it.

I'm currently learning Danish, or attempting to-- reading and writing has been alright thus far, but speaking (especially where words with the 'rø' combination are concerned) is proving difficult and understanding spoken Danish conversationally is even tougher.

I really need to dust off my German. I've been learning it for 5 years in high school and haven't really used it since (and that was 8 years ago). I can remember most of the grammar, but the vocabulary just largely disappeared from my mind. I need to get back on track and practice.
(... any tips on great German movies? I really like their cinema.)

Try "Funny Games" and "Der Untergang".

I bought 2 Werner Herzog DVD box sets on Ebay recently.

German movies? Das Boot. Seriously. That movie is incredible. And don't shy away from watching the extended edition which is like 4 hours long. Trust me, that time will fly while you watch it.

I've met people who refuse to watch german language movies no matter how good they might be because "I don't want to listen to the German language for 2-3 hours!"

Festivus (and anyone else wondering), the Cyrillic alphabet is pretty easy to get used to. I picked it up from watching a Russian Super League hockey game, with the players' bames in Cyrillic on their shirts.

The pain in the ass about it is, the Russian keyboard and the English keyboard do not position letters in their corresponding place. For example, the middle row on an English keyboard has ASDFGHJKL. But the Russian keyboard does not read АСДФГХЖКЛ. So typing even the shortest thing in Russian takes me a long-ass time while I search for wherever the damn й is hiding.

If it helps you can always use the Serbian or Macedonian keyboard, severzhavnost. Much more similar to the QWERTY format, though without the Q and W, and the Y is replaced with Z, as with a lot of continental European keyboards. Granted, there's no "й", "э", "ы", "ю", "ё", "ь", "ъ", and "я" on there (spent five minutes typing that!) but it's better I guess.

Thanks for the tip! Although, what the hell is њ, ђ, ѓ and ќ? Looking around, the Bulgarian keyboard is so
far the closest to western configuration.

I dunno about the latter two (that's probably Macedonian), but њ is the "ny" sound, as in "canyon", while ђ is the "j" sound, as in "jump", but with the middle of the tongue on the palate rather than the tip. You also have љ, which is pronounced like the "ll" in "million".



Really? I'm not sure why, but it seems that the Bulgarian keyboard seems to be arranged differently from my end here, then. This is what happens when I type QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKL: ,УЕИШЩКСДЗЬЯАОЖГТНВ. Doesn't look remotely close.

Some strange Bulgarians in your area, man! My Bulgarian keyboard reads:
Явертъуиопю
Асдфгхйклшщ
Зьцжбнмч
That's 19 of 26 counterparts of English letters in the same place. 20 if you count ц as c.

You're in Canada, mate, you're the one with the strange Bulgarians!

Anyway, apparently Wikipedia explains there are two keyboards in widespread use:


So yeah, I guess you're right that your version fits best for your needs.

In case you struggle at telling the difference between Russian, Belarussian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian here's a great simple guide I found online:

"You only need to learn three characters:

ї
ў
ъ

Only Ukrainian has ї. The Ukrainians employ в for the allophone of /v/ rendered with ў in Belarusian. (If you learn a little East Slavic, you'll soon see that Belarusian orthography is phonetic to a fault.) And if you ever see syllabic or final ъ, you know you're either dealing with pre-Revolutionary Russian, Old Church Slavonic, or Bulgarian.

With that in mind, try this quiz:

(A) Запрашаем да галасавання выбару найлепшых артыкулаў 2016 года.
(B) Сделать Америку великой снова!
(C) Тръмп е най-възрастният избиран за първи път президент на САЩ.
(D) Правонаступницею Російської імперії стала Російська республіка."

Easy with these examples to tell which is which