can learning the russian language also allow me to speak other european languages?
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 at
7:10 am
if so, what other languages can i speak? i want to learn bulgarian and all but if russian can cover it, itll do! its also hard to find bulgarian classes and its also not on rosetta stone 
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Tagged with: languages
Filed under: Russian - Written and Spoken
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Russian uses the Bulgarian alphabet (yes, unbelievable but true) so it will be relatively easy for you to read in Bulgarian. Vocabularies are quite close … some 50-60% of the words are the same. However, pronunciation is different – when you listen to both languages, you would hear that Russian sounds softer than Bulgarian.
I can understand most of the Slavic languages, but I’m a native Bulgarian speaker so I’m used to hearing and noticing the differences and then comparing and finding the right word in my language so that I’d understand what they’re saying. Another thing – Bulgarian has borrowed many Turkish words throughout the centuries of Ottoman rule and you can notice that in Serbian, too, so that’s quite a big difference between the Eastern and Southern Slavic languages.
Overall I would say that Russian (and if you’re really fluent in it) will only help you with reading, and understanding 50% of Bulgarian. And I don’t think it will be of any help with non-Slavic languages.
Learning Russian can help you to study other Slavic languages, but Bulgarian, Czech, Serbian, Polish are different both in grammar and vocabulary, so it won’t be easy to speak them without studying them properly.
I’d recommend you to learn a easy Slavic language with a simple Roman Alphabet. Like Slovene or Croatian.