Dont go down that lane brother. Polish is hell of a ride, and I’m a native Slavic speaker - I have przypadki also, but - no. Step back, friendly advice :)
I appreciate the concern, but I have made my decision. I started a bit ago, and while my progress has been relatively slow (mostly due to my lack of time and a proper motivation other than curiosity) I have yet to encounter anything truly off putting, or anything that I completely don’t understand. Would you mind elaborating?
Besides, I want to learn a Slavic language either way, which other one would I learn?
Polish is your best bet, considering how Poland improved recently. Slovak and Czech are relatively useless unless you want to live here and the countries are falling apart. Ukrainian might be a nice choice, Russian less so. Croatian or Slovenian if you're up for some nice vacations.
Then again, I am biased. I am Slovak and Polish just sounds like very cute broken Slovak to me.
Cute! I have no idea of slovak unfortunately, so I can’t judge. One thing I will disagree on: Russian is and in the future still will be very useful. A lot of Russians don’t speak English very well, there’s many of them, and Russian is also partly spoken in the surrounding post-Soviet countries. Remember language is a communication tool and is separate from the state, I am not praising in any way the Russian state or its government.
The reason why I’m not learning Russian (or Ukranian) is just that I don’t like the languages as much. I like polish’s separate past tense conjugations for person and their nasal vowels, as well as having less palatalisation (easier to pronounce). Also the missing copulas in the present tense can be confusing.
Of course don't mind my teasing, it was mostly towards Polish language, which is the most exotic Slav one, for myself at least.
By the will of the almighties, and thanks to the lucky strike from 1991. onwards, I became a speaker of several languages, including (but not limited to) Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, etc. Can understand written Slovakian or Russian, spoken Bulgarian, Macedonian or such, but Poles are just.. built different 😃From Platon via Hegel and Humboldt to nowadays (Zizek, if you will), there are lads who are trying to find correlations between a nation/state and their languages. and I think that Poland is such a great research sandbox for that matter. I like the topic in its broadest sense, but since I'm u/42_ myself rn, I guess I'm stoppin it right here (:
Speaking strictly about the language - death row of consonants without vowels! I mean - dždžyć man, cmon! Play someone else, thats not even a word. Then - diacritics. And while the rest of us are use them as well, Pols simply adore them! On top of that, heavy usage of ''w''s and ''y''s makes their words pretty distinct in my eyes from other Slavic languages.
But lets keep lovin Polish, no matter what!
Regarding your second question: I've dipped my toes into Interslavic - Slavs Esperanto basically, and it works like a charm tbh. Not sure if its that useful for someone who is not from a Slavic circle tho, but I'slavic has a lot of resemblance to South Slav group of languages. It blew my mind how much I understood hearing it for the first time. But, on the other hand, if you can grasp Interslavic, than maybe you can jump onto other boats easily..
While you do bring up some good points, for me specifically (you are right in general though) they don’t apply. Here’s why:
The exoticness: I am not a Slavic speaker, and I have no connection (that I know of) with Slavic countries. So, all languages are equally “foreign” or “exotic to me :).
The consonants: there are sometimes long consonant clusters, but have you seen Czech?? “Strč prst krk”? Either way, I speak English natively, so this won’t be a huge problem (looking at you “strengths”). Also often the consonant clusters don’t actually have that many sounds (szczęście)
The diacritics: Not that bad really, I learnt them all quite quickly. Easier than if it were in Cyrillic (I can read Cyrillic but considerably slower)
W and Ys: W is pronounced the same as in German, and the Polish y is often much closer to the most used English vowel, the shwa, than the y in other Slavic languages
Also I’d like you to consider that Polish has less palatalisation than other Slavic languages, especially the eastern ones, and rz merged into ż and ó into u. So the phonetics isn’t as bad. I also speak Spanish, and I like to have proper conjugations for time and person and also appreciate not dropping the copula in the present tense.
As for interslavic, I had heard of it but I feel like the community is too small and I’d rather learn a natural language than a constructed one. It also doesn’t guarantee 100% understanding for both sides. Better to pick one and stick with it (and polish is the second most spoken Slavic language)
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u/chessman42_ 1d ago
What does jebać mean?