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Russian or Polish more difficult?
I wann a learn polish or russian and I am curious to know if russian or polish is more difficult to learn and to speak.
what do you guys think?
btw. I am german. So if theres any german who has experience with one of these languages let me know :)
13 Comments
I am Russian but I still find Polish difficult :D However I think that the pronunciation in Polish might be easier for a German speaker: the palatalization of the consonants is different there and there is no vowel reduction depending on the syllable stress.
My personal experience indicates that Russian is easier than Polish. Polish pronunciation is difficult and there are so many exceptions to grammar rules.
Russian felt more regular in terms of both grammar and pronunciation to me. Once I learnt how to read Cyrillic script, everything else came relatively easily (even the grammatical cases).
In contrast, had a very difficult time with Polish grammar; and even though I learnt to read it quite accurately and comparatively quickly, some words have just have a tongue-knotting combination of sounds. I found that practising Polish tongue-twisters daily quickly helped make my pronunciation more accurate.
Although, I love both languages (perhaps Polish a little more than Russian, becasue of how it made me a better polyglot)!
IMO despite being written in a different alphabet, Russian is easier. Polish was one of the hardest languages on here to try, second only to Turkish and possibly Hungarian or Hebrew
The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) ranks them both at category IV or 1100 hours. I would say whichever you are more interested in learning.
in my view, Russian is quite difficult: it has mobile stress so vowels change their sound when stressed and when not stressed and you never know which will be stressed. Polish, on the other hand, has a fixed stress and vowels don't change according to stress. Having said that, I find Polish harder than Russian because I learnt Russian at school. The phonetics in Polish are tricky and can confuse, but they are constant and fixed, at the very least. Polish also uses the vocative case which Russian does not, so one more case to learn. Also Polish retains some archaic slavic forms that are tricky that Russian has done away with. Past tense in Russian very simple, quite tricky in Polish. Hope this helps
In my opinion, neither Polish phonetics nor its past tense are tricky. The past tense conjugates consistently and requires almost 0 effort to master once present-tense conjugations are mastered (which are trickier and less consistent). And the phonetics are very similar to Russian - with the core differences that Polish is more palatalised and nasalised (as well as the length of stressed syllables and the like, but these aren't important differences as they can simply be neglected when learning the languages).
Much more difficult are formations of adjectives, present-form conjugations, word endings, word forms, etc, which are so inconsistent that (apparently) even natives struggle with them. But they are also extremely difficult - if not more difficult - in Russian (I can confirm I have trouble with word formations as a native), so I'd say it's a toss-up. But I agree with the rest of your comment. Overall, though, I'd say it's difficult to conclude definitively which language is harder because both are very hard but in sightly different ways.
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I think Czech is harder than both Polish and Russian though :)
(because of the stylistic levels and the pronouns)
I disagree: Czech phonetics are much simpler and many of the tricky older Slavonic forms have been lost in Czech, whilst retained in Polish
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Polish would be more useful as it is a close neighbour to your Germany
http://jackelliot.over-blog.com
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