I speak Danish fluently, so with no additional efford I could immediately read and understand Norwegian (not all the dialects of course, some of them are even tricky for the natives to understand). Swedish took a little more practice, but still nothing too crazy though, just checking more words in a dictionary. Knowing Danish definitely helped me when learning Swedish, as it was mainly the matter of grasping the differences in grammar, avoiding false friends and interference + a bit frustration on the way. After couple of months I was able to communicate with my colleagues in Swedish. From my perspective it was great to start with Danish as it has this crazy pronunciation, which makes the other two sound like a breeze, nice and clear. My fellow university students who have chosen Swedish as their major language, could maybe read some Danish with effort, but the spoken language made almost no sense to them. Of course everything depends on a person. I think the key is to be open-minded, then you tend to notice more.
I have been living in Iceland for 9 months now. My goal is to finally learn Icelandic fluently.
Danish helped a bit, but not as much as it helped with my Swedish.
Icelandic is far more complex when comes to grammar, but the pronunciation is rather easy in comparison to the Danish one. My Icelandic boyfriend, his family and friends say that I speak very good Icelandic, so I might be on the right way
So @Cindy I imagine it would be a breeze for you to grab some Norwegian or Swedish, after mastering Icelandic. So keep going!
And finally, I have a friend who is Faroese and he claims that by being Faroese he gets all the Nordic languagues for free. He gets Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish and Swedish.
Ahh⊠Faroese is my dream goal. I am going for it as soon as my Icelandic gets stable enough
If you know German then Dutch is not very difficult to learn. If you know both English and German then that helps even more when learning Dutch, possibly Afrikaans too.
My friends have said people from SkĂ„ne (southern Sweden) speak differently than the rest of Sweden. I canât tell the difference. Funny, thereâs always that âone regionâ which speaks differently from everyone else in the country.
Yeah, you are totally right, they speak differently! Swedish in SkÄne is somehow very close to Danish, as historically this region had been under the reign of Danmark for a long time.
Like what youâve mentioned, Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Indonesian are quite mutually intelligible. Thai and Lao also have a high degree of mutual intelligibility.
I am agree with your comment, as a native Spanish speaker is easy for me to understand with people in Italian or portuguese although my level of these languages is basic.
I can totally agree with this. Ever sinc3 I first learned French in school and have gotten to a certain level Iâve been able to read Spanish and Italian without much of a problem. Much later I started studying Spanish and it was quite easy for me (contrary to my fiance who had no prior knowledge of any romance language).
I can say the same for Slavic languages. With what little I still know in Russian, Iâm usually able to get around when we go to the Czech Republic (i.e. ask for the way, read the menu and order at a restaurant). I havenât had the chance to try this with other Slavic languages yet, I know slovakian is quite similar to Czech, so it should work with that as well, but Iâm less sure about i.e. Polish as it does seem to be quite different⊠On the other hand I did have Polish, Slovak and Czech classmates back in school and they understood each other perfectly while each was speaking their own mother tongue. So maybe Polish isnât so different after all?
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I can say the same for Slavic languages. With what little I still know in Russian, Iâm usually able to get around when we go to the Czech Republic (i.e. ask for the way, read the menu and order at a restaurant). I havenât had the chance to try this with other Slavic languages yet, I know slovakian is quite similar to Czech, so it should work with that as well, but Iâm less sure about i.e. Polish as it does seem to be quite different⊠On the other hand I did have Polish, Slovak and Czech classmates back in school and they understood each other perfectly while each was speaking their own mother tongue. So maybe Polish isnât so different after all?
So the deal with Slavic languages is that the languages are divided in 3 areas: the West Slavic, East Slavic, and South Slavic languages. Each language has more in common with another in its region than with the other languages from outside its region. Polish, Slovak, and Czech are West Slavic languages, so they have more vocabulary and grammar similarities with each other than say, Serbian.
Sover ek weet, is Kishwahili en isiZulu beide Bantoetale, maar nie wedersyds verstaanbaar nie. Maar miskien is daar 'n paar sprekers van beide tale om dit beter te beantwoord.
Is this topic strictly for grammar and/or vocabulary?
Or is it about way certain language groups thinking too?
I found more similarities between Chinese and Czech, than English (Czech, English and Sign Language are languages I am thinking and dreaming in) or other languages I was learning (although in this meaning I find English, German and Dutch similar)⊠Or is it just me
I speak Czech decently, but I am not able to understand Russian or Ukrainian.
But older folks who learned Russian in school (in communism it was number one language after Czech). Maybe that helped people to understand you? No offence, just wondering
Iâve tried to learn my languages somewhat strategically like this. English is my native language and I started learning Spanish as a young teen. Once I got to be highly proficient in Spanish, I learned Portuguese, which led me to Italian, which will then lead me to French! Spanish and Portuguese share 89% lexical similarity, Spanish and Portuguese together share a lot of lexical similarity with Italian, and the lexical similarity of Italian with French is quite high! The pronunciation of French is also made much easier, having experienced the nasal vowels in Portuguese. If I were to learn Romanian from here, it would be a Gateway into the Slavic languages, or perhaps even German, because of Romanianâs introduction to cases. Once you learn a grammatical concept once, you can kind of skip it when learning the next language. Another example of that is with the subjunctive and grammatical gender! It pays to be economical with the way you learn languages!
After learning some Polish, Czech became easier for me to understand (at least in reading). As was mentioned above, within West Slavic group it is easier. Similarly, Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian speakers would understand each other better.
There is an interesting YouTube channel called Ecolinguist, exploring Slavic languages similarities and differences.
