If I learn how to speak russian will i be able to speak ukrainian?
Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at
12:41 pm
How closely are the two languages related? I want to speak ukrainian but it seems like the training to speak russian is easier and more available
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Tagged with: languages
Filed under: Russian - Written and Spoken
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I do not speak either language, but they are mutually intelligible.
Ukrainian, along with Russian and Belorussian, belongs to the East Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of Indo-European languages. Linguists believe that the Slavic languages have retained the features of the original Proto Indo-European language to a much greater extent than the Romance and the Germanic languages have. The spoken Slavic languages also show more similarity among themselves than do the Germanic or the Romance languages. However, some are written in the Cyrillic alphabet and some in the Latin alphabet. Ukrainian, Russian, and Belorussian are all written in the Cyrillic alphabet. These three major Eastern Slavic languages began to diverge around the 12th or 13th century, and all three languages are still mutually intelligible to some extent.
I speak Russian and I have Ukrainian friends if I tried to talk to them they don’t understand but they can pick up one or two words. So if you wanted to learn Ukrainian then there’s no need to learn Russian. The Ukrainian spoken language is quiet different from Russian but the writing is the same. However, in Ukraine most people speak Russian because it was part of the Soviet Union especially in Eastern Ukraine everyone speaks Russian.
I’m Russian. I have a pretty hard time with understanding Ukrainian.
it is a foreign language to me. Pronunciations differ, different words –
if I’d want to learn Ukrainian, I’d have to work hard.
im russian and i can tell what ukrainians are talking about….the languages are similar but not entirely same
i am Russian and i understand Ukrainian perfectly. And all the Ukrainians understand Russian perfectly (it’s not true that Ukrainians can pick up some words only as i have lots and lots of friends from all over Ukraine). those two languages are very very close. i’m sure that you’ll get the main meaning while reading something in Ukrainian. But you will never be able to speak Ukrainian without learning it. Even Russians can’t speak Ukrainian without accent.