is Polish similar to the Russian language?
Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at
12:17 pm
I have taken 2 years of high school Russian and am wondering if taking/learning polish will be easier or about the same as learning, say Swedish.
I have noticed that Russian and Polish share some of the same words (exp. Kto? is "who" in both) So would it be easier to learn Polish now that I have the Russian base?
This would be my third language (English base, French and Russian), and I have a polish heritage.
Help would be appreciated!
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Tagged with: kto • language english • polish heritage • third language
Filed under: Russian Language
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The grammar will be very similar, since you’ll already be accustomed to verb aspect, noun endings, gender, etc. Spoken words will be remarkably similar in some cases (and quite different in others), but spelling will be a completely new experience!
Polish adds a seventh noun case, but that’s not too difficult — the hardest part was learning the first six! Also, Polish plurals distinguish between "men" and "everything else". That, too, isn’t much of a stretch since you’ve already learned Russian gender.
Pronunciation will add a bit of difficulty to what you’ve already learned in Russian, especially with the introduction of nasals… though your French experience will help with those.
Nonetheless… going from Russian to Polish is not a difficult step compared to how hard it must have been starting in Russian with no previous slavic experience.
A few examples to illustrate the similarities and differences:
ground: (rus) земля, (pol) ziemia
milk: (rus) молоко, (pol) mleko
hair: (rus) волосы, (pol) włosy
good evening: (rus) добрый вечер, (pol) dobry wieczór
pretty similar so far, but…:
why: (rus) почему, (pol) dlaczego? (which does sound like для чего)
I speak English: (rus) говорю по-английский, (pol) mówię po angielsku
do you understand: (rus) понимаешь?, (pol) rozumiesz?
So there are, no doubt, differences.
On the plus side, though, if you learn Russian and Polish, you can add Ukrainian with almost no extra effort.
Yes, they are similar! Though not EXTREMELY identical, you’d still have an easier time learning Polish with a Russian base.
No, for one thing Russian uses the cyrillic alphabet and Polish uses the same as ours. They may sound similar to untrained ears but then so would other Slavic languages like Croatian, Czeck, Bulgarian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language
They both belong to the Slavic language group, but to different subgroups. Polish is in the Western subgroup, and Russian is in Eastern one.
Learning Polish having Russian base would be similar to learn German having English base (or vice versa).