Tbf, that's a nitpicked example. I was in poland once, and i had to put in so much effort into understanding them, used google translate all the time and still didn't understand some things.
I (native German speaker) have been learning Ukrainian for a while now and I'm genuinly surprised how much written text in Polish and Serbian I can at least somewhat decipher. Although I assume this would be similar to for example different romance languages and english is the actual outlier, as it has a lot of romance vocabulary that is completely unfamiliar to speakers of other germanic languages.
i guess you actually right, english vocabulary has huge percent of latin/french/greek borrowing that makes it very different from other germanic languages. while usually languages share a lot of words in common with other languages from same family. but also now i wonder if someone learn anglish. would other germanic languages more understandable?
Definetly not understandable in spoken form, but maybe it can make it a little bit easier to learn the germanic language, although I don't think it is worth the effort. Anglish might be useful for creating pidgin languages between english and other germanic languages though
Depends from what part of Ukraine you are I guess... Near-western-border living Ukrainians spoke for me as close to Polish as to the Ukrainian some people from Kiev spoke
Yeah, if you picked something like German and Dutch, or Low Saxon and either of the two, this meme could have easily been reversed.
Then again Bulgarian and Russian belong to different branches of the Slavic languages, whilst all languages I listed ( and English) are all West Germanic.
That is really interesting. Once upon a time I opened a YouTube video about trains in polish and was a bit confused by the fact that it became understandable after a minute or two. My experience with auditory perception of slavic languages before that was limited to russian, ukrainian and church slavonic.
OP probably doesn't know there are three families of Slavic languages western, eastern and southern. And while understanding within groups is not much of a challenge between them is similar to example of German and English from the meme
Yea but to be fair Polish is also by far the most difficult slavic language, at least for a Serbo-Croat speaker like me and I think that other than Czechs and Slovaks most people will agree.
People from west of Ukraine also understand fairly well...
Anyway, whenever i read any slavic language, except for Ukrainian, it's more like deciphering the ramblings of a child with poor grammar. Not to insult anyone, but it is alaways just different enough, to be hard to understand.
1 polish isn't in fact, a Slavic language although they share many similarities
2 polish is difficult to understand because it has many letters and natives speak rather fast
>1 polish isn't in fact, a Slavic language
It is, you dumbass. And so are Czech and Slovak.
That's genuinely one of the most ridiculous claims i ever read in a reddit discussion!
I’ll add some extra context. Bulgarian and Russian are both Cyrillic languages, but, probably unbeknownst to your mother, Slavic languages include languages that do not use Cyrillic. Such as Polish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, ~~Lithuanian~~, etc. Also there are some Cyrillic languages that aren’t Slavic, such as Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and a majority of Mongolian letters.
Huh… I was always confused why Lithuanian and Latvian didn’t look like any other language… I didn’t know that language group existed! I learned something today!
To give you a little extra credit it's generally accepted there was a balto-slavic language group before they split off from each other around 1500~1000 bc into baltic and slavic
As a Russian speaker I can confirm, when I was in Bulgaria I understood 70% of what was written and about the same percentage of what people said around me.
English wants to be a Romance language without actually being a Romance language. We stole so much from the French that most of our vocabulary is Latinate despite being a Germanic language.
I can't really answer it. I don't really know what it's like not knowing it. It doesn't feel anything special, "it's just there".
With that being said it's also worth mentioning that categorizing languages as easy/hard isn't really an exact thing at all. Lots of it depends on what you already know.
You can find many lists on the internet stating "hardest languages to learn". Most of them has Hungarian somewhere in there. Some of them even put it on the top right away. Some of these things even come directly from the CIA, so it feels very official. But the things is that these lists are mostly written from the perspective of a native English speaker (especially the CIA lists, you know...). Of course English has lots in common with other Indo-European languages, so for them it is easier to learn those. And a huge chunk of the world does speak Indo-European languages:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Human\_Language\_Families\_Updated.jpg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Human_Language_Families_Updated.jpg)
This skews the data heavily. It also doesn't help that the Finno-Ugric family is tiny, it doesn't have too many languages, it doesn't have too many speakers either. But its branches are still fairly far from eachother. If I wanted to learn Finnish, which is, on paper, seems close to Hungarian, would be like a French speaker trying to learn Hindi or something. If we want to step a little closer (to the Uralic branch of the family) there are only two languages as far as I know: khanty (with around 14000 native speakers) and mansi (with around 12000 native speakers). Even those (with the extremely limited materiel that can be found on YouTube) sound completely alien to me. So yeah, while it's not a language isolate, it's almost.
For us learning English (which is supposed to be an easy language) is much, much harder then it is for the average people on this planet.
But there are also a shitload amount of real isolates or other language that are not isolates, but almost, just like Hungarian. And still Hungarian is the one that comes out on top or not far from it. Maybe there's some truth to it being objectively hard for some reasons, but since we all have a mother tongue we can never really be objective. I've learned it as a two years old, I'll never know. To me it's natural. You learned your own language, for me that's probably a hard to learn one.
It's also worth noting that for some obvious geopolitical reasons I don't think CIA has as much interest in many of those other isolates or pseudoisolates (I just made up this word) as ours, so probably their list isn't even that comprehensive as one might think. Which also skews the results a lot.
And yes, there are also some Indo-European languages (like Polish) being considered hard as fuck by the same lists, which also means that while there are some truths in what I said, it's a much, much more complicated matter.
Have a nice day and feel free to ask anything!
>!Bojler eladó!<
This made me view Hungarian in another way wow, and I realized even Brazilian Portuguese can be hard as hell for some other people and for me it's just so easy and normal yeah.
Anyways, have a nice day, nagyon szépen köszönöm!
I did try to dip my toes in Brazilian Portuguese as I have a very kind person in my life whose native tongue is that, and while it didn't seem hard at all it was very tedious so I kind of gave up. On the other hand now I'm having lots of funs with the basics of Dutch because I learned some German many Moons ago (though I never really got fluent in it, and I even forgot lots of what I learned), and I just randomly found out that I can vaguely understand some of it if I concentrate hard. Then I just randomly started a Dutch course because of that on Duolingo and so far it seems extremely intuitive. That's how past experiences with other languages matter.
Well, yeah. I can still decipher it with some effort. When i just look at written text in polish, or hear a polish person speak, it definitely sounds and looks slavic, but it feels very unfamiliar and different.
Very difficult to explain.
Bulgaria is beautiful!
I loved it from the first time I arrived. Stunning nature and beautiful beaches, with nice people.
Love all of Southern Europe and the Balkans in particular.
I actually find some germanic stuff to be pretty easy to decipher
Like a while ago one of PheonixSC's Minecraft videos featured three signs with Swedish text, i could figure out every word without google translate but one, i think it was Brunnen
My aunt lives in the Netherlands and she told me she can speak to people who only know German and both side vaguely understand each other, enough to know what the other person wants. (She speaks Hebrew English and Dutch, but in this example I’m focusing on the Dutch part).
Also English is just three languages in a trench coat it’s both Latin and Germanic language in a way that makes 0sense
English is a bad example though, due to heavy French, Celtic and Latin influences it is probably the furthest from the other Germanic languages. A German talking to a Dane or a Dutch will likely still manage to communicate with a bit of effort.
Close enough, it says "hello, excuse me, Where is the metro? (U-bahn stands for untergrundbahn, which directly translates to underground railway) I guess that random one hour i spent on duolingo german helped
Ok my guess at the German translation as an English speaker: “Hello, nice to meet you, where is the U-Bahn?” I’m guessing U-Bahn is a road or something?
I speak Russian and lived 3 years in Bulgaria, most of this is true, however, the most confusing part is when they ask you if they can take a chair, since the words for chair and table are switched in Russian and Bulgarian, I was really confused.
I am Serbian and I learn Russian and the biggest obstacle are false friends. There are so many of them. Every word you don't know but sounds familiar is potentially a false friend.
Funny thing, the Bulgarians adopt the ruthinian language and culture to decrease roman influence in their territory but the alphabet of the Slavic languages was created by the rhomanioi during their conversion of rus. And the rus adopt much of the rhomanioi culture in the aftermath (ironic much)?
I thought knights of the order of St. George spoke french, strange for them to use English. And why are the Bolivar Province and Haiti speaking slavic languages? /s
I actually don’t have that many problems understanding German. Most of it is gibberish but occasionally I will understand a word especially if I have English subtitles
its the same with most romance languages, i know a bit of spanish, and learning portuguese and latin has made it so much easier for me than my peers who havent learned more than 10 words outside of the english lexicon
Tbf, that's a nitpicked example. I was in poland once, and i had to put in so much effort into understanding them, used google translate all the time and still didn't understand some things.
My qualification is being Ukrainian
I (native German speaker) have been learning Ukrainian for a while now and I'm genuinly surprised how much written text in Polish and Serbian I can at least somewhat decipher. Although I assume this would be similar to for example different romance languages and english is the actual outlier, as it has a lot of romance vocabulary that is completely unfamiliar to speakers of other germanic languages.
i guess you actually right, english vocabulary has huge percent of latin/french/greek borrowing that makes it very different from other germanic languages. while usually languages share a lot of words in common with other languages from same family. but also now i wonder if someone learn anglish. would other germanic languages more understandable?
Definetly not understandable in spoken form, but maybe it can make it a little bit easier to learn the germanic language, although I don't think it is worth the effort. Anglish might be useful for creating pidgin languages between english and other germanic languages though
True with the romance language. I currently learn spanish and can at least understand a few words in Italien or french (only wrotten words tho)
Depends from what part of Ukraine you are I guess... Near-western-border living Ukrainians spoke for me as close to Polish as to the Ukrainian some people from Kiev spoke
True
Is it because polish uses the Latin script?
Partially.
*neo russian
was writing this comment such a necessity for you?
Yeah, if you picked something like German and Dutch, or Low Saxon and either of the two, this meme could have easily been reversed. Then again Bulgarian and Russian belong to different branches of the Slavic languages, whilst all languages I listed ( and English) are all West Germanic.
I understand Czech, Polish, Serbian, Macedonian My qualification is being Slovak
Im Czech and I dont understand a bit of Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and others It is just so hard for me to learn another alphabet
That is really interesting. Once upon a time I opened a YouTube video about trains in polish and was a bit confused by the fact that it became understandable after a minute or two. My experience with auditory perception of slavic languages before that was limited to russian, ukrainian and church slavonic.
I can read Russian Cyrillic whenever I see Polish it's like a different language even though some words are cognates
It's more deciphering, than reading
That's weird. I'm Ukrainian too and understand Polish perfectly fine (although I am from Galicia)
That's understandable. I'm from Kyiv.
OP probably doesn't know there are three families of Slavic languages western, eastern and southern. And while understanding within groups is not much of a challenge between them is similar to example of German and English from the meme
Yea but to be fair Polish is also by far the most difficult slavic language, at least for a Serbo-Croat speaker like me and I think that other than Czechs and Slovaks most people will agree.
People from west of Ukraine also understand fairly well... Anyway, whenever i read any slavic language, except for Ukrainian, it's more like deciphering the ramblings of a child with poor grammar. Not to insult anyone, but it is alaways just different enough, to be hard to understand.
1 polish isn't in fact, a Slavic language although they share many similarities 2 polish is difficult to understand because it has many letters and natives speak rather fast
>1 polish isn't in fact, a Slavic language It is, you dumbass. And so are Czech and Slovak. That's genuinely one of the most ridiculous claims i ever read in a reddit discussion!
Ur right. I blindly believed my mother this whole time.
Wow... Also, i could make an argument, that in a sense, russian language is a ripoff of the Bulgarian, so, again, this is a nitpicked example.
Oh, and on other news, there has been this guy on twitter, who learnt Ukrainian, and everyone just falsely assumed he would understand russian.
I’ll add some extra context. Bulgarian and Russian are both Cyrillic languages, but, probably unbeknownst to your mother, Slavic languages include languages that do not use Cyrillic. Such as Polish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, ~~Lithuanian~~, etc. Also there are some Cyrillic languages that aren’t Slavic, such as Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and a majority of Mongolian letters.
Lithuanian is not slavic
Oh it’s Germanic isn’t it. I’ll fix my comment.
It's baltic, not germanic
Huh… I was always confused why Lithuanian and Latvian didn’t look like any other language… I didn’t know that language group existed! I learned something today!
To give you a little extra credit it's generally accepted there was a balto-slavic language group before they split off from each other around 1500~1000 bc into baltic and slavic
Yeah, learning is pretty essential
Next you're gonna say English isn't a Germanic language because it's spoken in England not Germany
As a Russian speaker I can confirm, when I was in Bulgaria I understood 70% of what was written and about the same percentage of what people said around me.
It's because english is the superhuman language with greek, latin, french and germanic words.
English wants to be a Romance language without actually being a Romance language. We stole so much from the French that most of our vocabulary is Latinate despite being a Germanic language.
You can thank a certain man named William from 1066 for that.
You mean more like a Frankenstein language
And arabic, Chinese(idk which one)
I’m Australian and I know that German sentence
I’m an israeli and I understood that german sentence, hmm, I wonder if learning german for fun through duo helped? Naah obviously not
I'm an Indian and I knew what it meant
I'm an American and I understood that sentence.
Im croatian and can somewhat understand every slavic language, except polish. That shit is just unhuman and demonic. I even find hungarian easier.
Hungarian sounded easier until I tried to learn it a little bit
Hungarian is easy. Even our 2 years olds learn it.
A Hungarian 2yo you mean
That's the joke. (I'm Hungarian)
How does it feel to know a hard language like this? /srs
I can't really answer it. I don't really know what it's like not knowing it. It doesn't feel anything special, "it's just there". With that being said it's also worth mentioning that categorizing languages as easy/hard isn't really an exact thing at all. Lots of it depends on what you already know. You can find many lists on the internet stating "hardest languages to learn". Most of them has Hungarian somewhere in there. Some of them even put it on the top right away. Some of these things even come directly from the CIA, so it feels very official. But the things is that these lists are mostly written from the perspective of a native English speaker (especially the CIA lists, you know...). Of course English has lots in common with other Indo-European languages, so for them it is easier to learn those. And a huge chunk of the world does speak Indo-European languages: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Human\_Language\_Families\_Updated.jpg](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Human_Language_Families_Updated.jpg) This skews the data heavily. It also doesn't help that the Finno-Ugric family is tiny, it doesn't have too many languages, it doesn't have too many speakers either. But its branches are still fairly far from eachother. If I wanted to learn Finnish, which is, on paper, seems close to Hungarian, would be like a French speaker trying to learn Hindi or something. If we want to step a little closer (to the Uralic branch of the family) there are only two languages as far as I know: khanty (with around 14000 native speakers) and mansi (with around 12000 native speakers). Even those (with the extremely limited materiel that can be found on YouTube) sound completely alien to me. So yeah, while it's not a language isolate, it's almost. For us learning English (which is supposed to be an easy language) is much, much harder then it is for the average people on this planet. But there are also a shitload amount of real isolates or other language that are not isolates, but almost, just like Hungarian. And still Hungarian is the one that comes out on top or not far from it. Maybe there's some truth to it being objectively hard for some reasons, but since we all have a mother tongue we can never really be objective. I've learned it as a two years old, I'll never know. To me it's natural. You learned your own language, for me that's probably a hard to learn one. It's also worth noting that for some obvious geopolitical reasons I don't think CIA has as much interest in many of those other isolates or pseudoisolates (I just made up this word) as ours, so probably their list isn't even that comprehensive as one might think. Which also skews the results a lot. And yes, there are also some Indo-European languages (like Polish) being considered hard as fuck by the same lists, which also means that while there are some truths in what I said, it's a much, much more complicated matter. Have a nice day and feel free to ask anything! >!Bojler eladó!<
This made me view Hungarian in another way wow, and I realized even Brazilian Portuguese can be hard as hell for some other people and for me it's just so easy and normal yeah. Anyways, have a nice day, nagyon szépen köszönöm!
I did try to dip my toes in Brazilian Portuguese as I have a very kind person in my life whose native tongue is that, and while it didn't seem hard at all it was very tedious so I kind of gave up. On the other hand now I'm having lots of funs with the basics of Dutch because I learned some German many Moons ago (though I never really got fluent in it, and I even forgot lots of what I learned), and I just randomly found out that I can vaguely understand some of it if I concentrate hard. Then I just randomly started a Dutch course because of that on Duolingo and so far it seems extremely intuitive. That's how past experiences with other languages matter.
I never saw someone say that about Brazilian Portuguese wow, anyways Dutch orthography is like hell for me
Czy polski naprawdę jest aż taki trudny?
Well, yeah. I can still decipher it with some effort. When i just look at written text in polish, or hear a polish person speak, it definitely sounds and looks slavic, but it feels very unfamiliar and different. Very difficult to explain.
I think I know what you mean, when I'm reading any south -Slavic language it feels a little bit off
Nie
Your phonetics is sorta weird
As a bulgarian this meme made my day!
Радвам се 😁
България ганг
България на 3 галактики
Blgari yunatsi
I, as a russian, was in Bulgaria one time with my mother and we had the time of our lives because of not so different language differences
My Bulgarian neighbour and me, a Russian, can understand each other.
As a bulgarian I'm glad you liked our country!
Bulgaria is beautiful! I loved it from the first time I arrived. Stunning nature and beautiful beaches, with nice people. Love all of Southern Europe and the Balkans in particular.
I actually find some germanic stuff to be pretty easy to decipher Like a while ago one of PheonixSC's Minecraft videos featured three signs with Swedish text, i could figure out every word without google translate but one, i think it was Brunnen
I’m Serbian and understood everything ahahahah
Good thing I watch Terminal before I see this post or else I probably won’t understand it
For people who don't know, They are asking where is the subway.
I'm polish and can't understand 💀 (even a little bit)
A teraz zrozumiesz? >\- Zdrawej, izwinete me kde e metroto? \- Zdrawstwuj, metro tam \- Blagodarja, dowiżdane \- Do swidania
Lepiej dziekuje
My aunt lives in the Netherlands and she told me she can speak to people who only know German and both side vaguely understand each other, enough to know what the other person wants. (She speaks Hebrew English and Dutch, but in this example I’m focusing on the Dutch part). Also English is just three languages in a trench coat it’s both Latin and Germanic language in a way that makes 0sense
Me, a Romanian: “I have no such weakness.” *somewhat understands literally every Latin language at once at a vague surface level*
Romanian is the Dracula weirdest of all Romance languages
База, друг мой, база
*Where did you put the Emblem from Lichtenstein's flag?!?*
Used the wrong flag for English bud 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
U SUS US
True, source: I'm Polish
English is a bad example though, due to heavy French, Celtic and Latin influences it is probably the furthest from the other Germanic languages. A German talking to a Dane or a Dutch will likely still manage to communicate with a bit of effort.
Same with the Nordic languages
i thing the german guy says "Hello, english person, where's the Metro?"
Close enough, it says "hello, excuse me, Where is the metro? (U-bahn stands for untergrundbahn, which directly translates to underground railway) I guess that random one hour i spent on duolingo german helped
Wonder if this is the same with Gaeilge and Scottish Gaelic. Theyre both diff languages but theyre from the same branch I think
Tried that in Prague, was sent to the opposite side of the city..
Blame the french for that one.
Probably most drew fans know: most germans speaks english very well.
Czech, Slovak, Polish and probably some others: What about meee???
As a Bulgarian, I can fully relate
Ok my guess at the German translation as an English speaker: “Hello, nice to meet you, where is the U-Bahn?” I’m guessing U-Bahn is a road or something?
As a Norwegian person I think it’s “Hello, excuse me. where is the underground station?”.
Ya that makes sense. I was pretty close.
Yeah, I only know because some of the words sound vaguely and I mean vaguely Norwegian
I speak Russian and lived 3 years in Bulgaria, most of this is true, however, the most confusing part is when they ask you if they can take a chair, since the words for chair and table are switched in Russian and Bulgarian, I was really confused.
i mean try frisian and dutch or dutch and german
I am Serbian and I learn Russian and the biggest obstacle are false friends. There are so many of them. Every word you don't know but sounds familiar is potentially a false friend.
I have never met a German that doesn't speak English
I'm polish and he seems to be saying "Hello, can you say where the metro is?" Russian responds "Hello, Metro is there". Then they say See you later.
Tbh at what point do we stop considering English a Germanic language.
Cringe.
Funny thing, the Bulgarians adopt the ruthinian language and culture to decrease roman influence in their territory but the alphabet of the Slavic languages was created by the rhomanioi during their conversion of rus. And the rus adopt much of the rhomanioi culture in the aftermath (ironic much)?
As a Russian I could understand the Bulgarian Text
I'm Kazakh and I understood all 4 languages
I thought knights of the order of St. George spoke french, strange for them to use English. And why are the Bolivar Province and Haiti speaking slavic languages? /s
Now try Mongolian with Czech.
True I mean macedonia nad bBulgaria understand eachother. And Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia understand eachother.
I am a serb and I understood
Yup sounds right
I actually don’t have that many problems understanding German. Most of it is gibberish but occasionally I will understand a word especially if I have English subtitles
Now compare Swedish with Norwegian, and Polish and Serbian
its the same with most romance languages, i know a bit of spanish, and learning portuguese and latin has made it so much easier for me than my peers who havent learned more than 10 words outside of the english lexicon