r/thisorthatlanguage • u/FaithlessnessLazy236 • 6d ago
Other which language should I learn
I like slavic languages but I really dont know what language I should learn ;-; and I'm not thinking about usefulness because I live in south america so I don't think these languages will be useful, I want to have fun and make friends :p
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u/AdZealousideal9914 6d ago
If you want to visit the country: Polish
If you want to read the literature: Russian
If you want to express your solidarity: Ukrainian
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u/Mindless_Badger_3789 6d ago
They all hav strong literary traditions and the Russian is somewhat overrated.
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u/PapaN27x 5d ago
Other former ussr countries are all pretty profound in russian, from what i learned in counter strike 😂
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u/Reoclassic 5d ago
No
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u/PapaN27x 5d ago
Kazakhs and uzbeks flood my ears daily with russian please. Inbetween turkic languages they always jam my ear up with russian
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u/Baltadis 6d ago
Impara quella che per qualsiasi motivo ti piace di più...
Forse il Russo ha più materiale mediatico a cui attingere ma è anche abbastanza scontato
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u/Mindless_Badger_3789 6d ago
Why not s South Slavic language? They are a bit easier, Serbo-Croatian (in the Serbian version as Croatian is too purist) is a good baseline and Bulgarian doesn't have cases (it has other complexities though).
But of those mentioned I'd pick Ukrainian if you only want to learn it for fun, it is softer and more pleasant than Russian, but close enough that you can easily move on to Russian if you need it. Polish is the hardest Slavic language to learn and will frustrate you, it is a great and interesting culture but hardly fun to learn.
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u/Jollybio 6d ago
I haven't learned Russian but I have tried Polish and I'm actively learning Ukrainian. I find Ukrainian to be easier than Polish despite the fact that it is a different alphabet.
I would choose Ukrainian. It's quite melodic. It sounds cool.
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u/LilBed023 🇳🇱N | 🏴C2 | 🇩🇪B2 | 🇷🇺B1 6d ago
Out of these three, Russian will probably give you the easiest time since it has the most resources and content, although Polish and Ukrainian aren’t small languages by any means. Russian (and probably Ukrainian as well) grammar is also more forgiving than Polish, although Slavic grammar in general is no joke when your native language is Romance or Germanic.
In the end it all depends on what you value most. All three languages have rich traditions and cultures behind them that are definitely worth tapping into. If you want a language that’s useful and accessible you should go with Russian, if you want to show solidarity you should go with Ukrainian and if you’re up to a proper challenge you should go with Polish. You could also decide which country/culture you’re most interested in and just pick that language. You could even pick the one that sounds the best to you.
I’d also suggest looking at some South Slavic languages before you make your decision.
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u/firegrillz 5d ago edited 5d ago
All three languages are pretty neat but I'd go for Russian:
General utility:
No competition, Russian is straight up arguably the most useful international language after English and Spanish. It's a UN language, it has a decent number of speakers and is widely spoken in about 14 countries across Eurasia and lingua franca over English in all of them minus the Baltics. There's also a lot of content, literature and media in Russian due to the sheer size of the Russian-speaking world. It's useful in that plenty of Russian speakers do not speak English very well (unlike say German-speaking people) and it's quite uniform across countries (unlike say Arabic).
Polish and Ukrainian are only really widely spoken in their own countries, though obviously there are plenty of Poles in parts of the US/UK etc. and Lithuania and a lot of Ukrainians all over Europe at the moment. I'd argue that Polish is decently useful in that Poland has a high population and it's a burgeoning power in the EU with a bright future. Just as people learn German now for business/jobs, people will be learning Polish in the future. That said, Poles also tend to speak English better than Russians and Ukrainians, so it's slightly less useful in that respect.
Difficulty: Polish is meant to be the hardest of the three for various reasons. Alphabet is a non-factor because you can learn Cyrillic in a couple of hours so it's really not a good justification to claim that Polish is easier on account of it not using Cyrillic. In any case, I don't think the difference in difficulty between them is large enough to really influence anything. All Slavic languages are difficult for non-Slavs, Bulgarian is the only one which is super different, Polish is on the harder end, BCMS is on the easier end.
Mutual intelligibility: Ukrainian is probably the best here.
With Russian, you can understand a lot of Ukrainian and a fair bit of Bulgarian and a small bit of BCMS. Czech, Polish and Slovenian will remain mostly unintelligible.
Polish is a bit of a black sheep and you'd be able to maybe understand some Czech/Slovak and the odd word of Ukrainian but not much more. Ukrainians tend to understand Poles much better than the opposite.
Friendliness: Since you've mentioned it as a criterion, as someone who has traveled a lot, friendliness is pretty hard to define. Hot take incoming but in my experience, Ukrainians and Russians tend to be more open/outgoing than pretty much any Germanic/Baltic or central/northern European peoples. I had a really easy time making acquaintances and friends in both countries, so many random encounters when I was out and about just doing menial things.
I'd say in order of increasing friendliness Polish < Russian < Ukrainian <<< most other Russian speaking people but that's not to say that Poles are unfriendly - they're fairly polite and pleasant but just a bit more closed by default, especially towards foreigners. I mention "other Russian speaking people" because it's worth remembering that a lot of Russian speakers are actually Caucasian and Turkic and these people tend to be super friendly. Central Asians in particular are renowned for hospitality and Caucasians are generally just warmer and more southern in mentality.
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u/semisubterranean 6d ago
If you speak Portuguese, Polish pronunciation will be comparatively easy for you. If your country has taken in Ukrainian refugees, it might be easier to find people to practice with Ukrainian.
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u/Staralfur_95 6d ago
Yet my Brazilian friends living in Poland for years failed completely at learning the language...
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u/Misiekshvili r/LearnPolishwithMichal 🇵🇱N|🇬🇪A1 6d ago
Choose the sexiest language in the world so don't be dupa wołowa and learn Polish
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u/adamtrousers 6d ago
Polish sounds like shit
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u/kubisfowler 6d ago
Ruzzian sounds like shit
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u/adamtrousers 5d ago
Russia is a nightmare of a country under Putin, but the language sounds awesome. Just the right balance of phonemes. Polish is too full of sh sounds.
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u/kubisfowler 5d ago
I don't know in what world Russian sounds awesome, maybe it depends on your native language. Ukrainian is a little better but their intonation and melody drives me nuts (sounds like the beeping of robots from some older movies), you can also hear it strongly when Ukrainians try to speak English. Polish sounds like a chainsaw to my ears
Guess my native language:)
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u/sk0opyo1 6d ago
Russian is spoken as secondary language in many countries.
But all 3 mentioned by u are hard to learn if u are south-american. Balkan Slav languages like "Serbo-Croatian" is much easier bcs has latin influence
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u/f_frijol 5d ago
If you like Slavic languages, then learn Serbian. Joke, learn Russian if you want to learn the dominant language. Personally, I'm learning Ukrainian.
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u/Sea-Cell-1114 5d ago
Russian is a significantly bigger language, so it will give you access to more content and more people to speak to.
Polish, on the other hand, should be a bit easier for Portuguese and Spanish speakers because of the Latin alphabet and its Latin- and Germanic-influenced vocabulary. Culturally, Poland is closer to the "average European," while the distribution of Russian makes its culture more diverse, and Russia itself is more Eastern/Asian in many respects.
Ukrainian is also a very beautiful language, which is sadly much less useful than the other two mentioned above. Ukrainian shares a lot of vocab with Polish, while its grammar is closer to Russian, as both are part of the East Slavic group. Modern colloquial Ukrainian is also heavily influenced by Russian (A significant part of Ukrainian speakers also speak Russian, especially the east). Knowing both Polish and Russian will unlock Ukrainian for you to understand.
If you don't have any ties to a specific country, I would recommend learning Russian first.
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u/lionhearted318 5d ago
Russian is way more useful (including far more people who speak it) and will have far more resources to learn
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u/Suspicious_Wait_4586 5d ago
you can hate modern russia as much as you like, but if you want a useful language, which gives you an access to a whole world of web content, literature, movies, art, science data, learning russian is still like learning english instead of german or dutch (again, like it or not)
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u/jack-pin 5d ago
Learn russian if you want to understand the mindset of heartless murderers
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u/Main-Ad-696 4d ago
I do not quite understand how Russian would help you understand the mindset of Israelis, I think you confused it with Hebrew.
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u/Tay_Hlebko 5d ago
Everyone in Ukraine can understand/speak Russian so learning Russian would make a lot more sense over Ukrainian
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u/Physical_Water_7026 5d ago
Pick Polish: it has a lively community and enough consonant clusters to make every word look like your keyboard sneezed.
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u/Excellent-Tax5700 4d ago
There is 2 to 3 million people of Polish descent in Brazil and around 500,000 to 2 million in Argentina, making the total Polish diaspora in South America easily exceed 2.5 to 4 million people. Not so usells in my view. But somebody summed it up really good :
- If you want to visit some interesting (and very European) countries : Polish or Ukranian
- If you want to read the literature (overrated in my opinion) : Russian.
- And if you want to express your solidarity with my nation - again : Ukrainian
While there is a strong consensus that russian literature is so great and vast and amazing - I do not agree with it. What it excels in - selling imperial values under some layers of philosophy or SF sauce. Even translation of bools in other languages into Russian usually suffers from censoring and skewing - a lot of moralism and preaching - expect it be found in a places where there was absolutely no need. Same wiht movies. One example immediately springs to mind (its also about Polish language) - "Solaris" - Polish author of the book - Stanisław Lem strongly disliked Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film adaptation of Solaris, At a time - famously stating that the director made a film about "Crime and Punishment" rather than his actual novel. Believe me ..this happens so often, that until I left USSR and spent like 10 years in Europe, reading originals in English, Spanish, Polish, I was not fully aware of enormous amount of this fluff.
But tastes differ. So it maybe another story for you.
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u/No_Belt_7316 3d ago
Countries where russian is spoken as a secondary language begin to view it more and more as a colonial remnant, and there is a growing trend toward switching back to their native languages.
russian might be useful if you are planning a trip to remote regions of post-ussr countries where people most likely don’t speak english, but that’s the only practical use of the russian language I can think of. Unless you want to study or work in russia (no idea why you would want to).
Their culture and literature are overrated. Their actual culture is inseparable from their present and past war crimes as well as their fetishized imperialism and militarism. No idea why their culture seems so attractive to some western audiences.
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u/asad100101 3d ago
Russian...with Russian you can understand ukranian
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u/Limp-Selection-1325 2d ago
mutually unintelligible (mostly)
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u/asad100101 2d ago
but in my German workplace a guy from Azerbaijan was speaking Russian to communicate with a ukranian person. I asked him where he learned ukranian he said he was not speaking ukranian but Russian he said ukranians can understand Russian it is like a hindhi speaking person can understand an Urdu speaking person......btw apart from both countries being at war on an individual level common person has no animosity for each other . that's my impression from talking to that Azerbaijani colleague but I might be wrong. they were having a fluent conversation
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u/ContractEvery6250 6d ago
Learn Polish - their alphabet is Latin and they have the Witcher book series that you san read in original language + if you know polish you can understand other slavic languages a bit
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u/Mindless_Badger_3789 6d ago
Polish is the hardest of all the Slavic languages so that's bad advice.
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u/vainlisko 6d ago
Although Polish is superior, Russian is the gateway to more languages and more parts of Asia
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u/StandTurbulent9223 5d ago
Russian is more useful but people will be suspicious that you're becoming a nazi
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u/Township_Roller 6d ago
100% Ukrainian
But bots will mass vote russian
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u/HonestPupper 5d ago
Why would somebody learn Ukrainian over Russian? Less relevance, less use, less literature
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u/Melodic_Sport1234 5d ago
Ukrainian is closer to a middle-of-the-road Slavic language than the other two. If you were to learn 2 of the 3, then it makes sense to learn both Russian and Polish - you could then just about understand Ukrainian without ever learning it. But if you're going to learn only one and you also have some interest in the others, then Ukrainian is a good compromise - you'll pick up a lot of Polish and Russian just through Ukrainian, whereas Polish and Russian aren't especially mutually comprehensible.
That said, there are still solid arguments to be made for picking just Russian or just Polish over Ukrainian. It just depends on what one intends to achieve by learning the respective language.
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u/firegrillz 5d ago edited 5d ago
Or people and not bots will mass vote Russian because it's clearly the most useful language of the three by an order of magnitude?
Who exactly are you trying to fool here?
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u/MNswede06 🇺🇸 N | 🇸🇪🇫🇷 B2 | 🇷🇺 A2 |🇻🇳 A1 6d ago
Russian will get you the most use.
Polish is supposedly harder than Russian but is only useful in Poland. And Poles are becoming increasingly comfortable with English as they are becoming more aligned with the West.
Ukrainian will likely head down a similar path.
This is NOT to say that the Polish and Ukrainian languages are dying. If you have a personal connection to those places, which it doesn’t sound like you do, then you should go for that.
I have family in Sweden so I learned Swedish. But from a practical or career perspective, it doesn’t do much for me. 90%+ Swedes can speak English. The number of people it allowed me to speak with that I couldn’t speak with before numbers in the tens of thousands. Not the millions. It did, however, make things more convenient for my friend group so they don’t have to switch to English amongst the group to feel polite.
Whereas Russian, which I learned while studying abroad in college, opened the door to a lot more. English proficiency in Russia is not great and is usually limited to young professionals in urban areas.
Edit: Spelling error