Question by Retread: How different are Russian and Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/whatever you call it?
How different or similar are these Slavic langauges? I’ve studied Russian for a while and I would like to get into Croatian sometime, but I just hope they aren’t so similar that I would confuse myself greatly.
Answers and Views:
Answer by Alaric
well, they are different languages, but there is a lot of similarity. i know russian very well, but i have to struggle to read a newspaper in serbo-croatian. spoken, i don’t follow at all. it would take probably a week or so to get that.
What do you think? Answer below!
Mikhail says
Russian is an East Slavic language, while Serbo-Croatian [I don't like this term, but it's easier than naming each language individually] is a South Slavic language. The difference is similar to the difference between English (a West Germanic language) and Swedish (a North Germanic language).
The ancestor of the South Slavic languages (Old Church Slavonic) and the ancestor of the East Slavic languages deviated from one another over a millennium ago, this means that the Slavic languages have had slightly more time to evolve and develop differences from one another than the Italic languages have. Both Russian and the South Slavic languages have been subjected to outside influences which have further helped to give these languages unique characters.
Zed says
Hello Mikhail. I don't quite agree with you. I believe those languages Serbian/Croatian and Russian (and slavic languages in general) are more similar to one another than Germanic or indeed Romance languages are, as Slavic languages formed much later. I know Serbian/Croatian and have very little trouble understanding Russian which I believe is a little simpler, and would not take long at all to be fluent in Russian. It seems to me however (from reading on comment threads) that Russians have more trouble understanding Serbo-croatian than vice-versa…cheers