How to read in Czech and Polish?
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- Опубліковано 29 тра 2023
- #polish #czech #spelling #linguistics
The highest mountain in Australia is… Kościuszko! Wait, how do you actually read this?
Welcome to the world of Slavic languages!
Today, we'll delve into two Latin-based alphabets: Czech and Polish. They are fundamentally different and the other Slavic alphabets are based on them. So, if you are a bit familiar with both, then you have a key to any other Slavic language that uses the Latin script.
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00:00 Introduction
00:43 What is wrong with the Latin alphabet?
01:54 Czech alphabet
06:32 Polish alphabet
09:19 Résumé
09:54 Questions
For me as a Czech speaker, understanding of another Slavic language (to some extent) is not that hard but only after some time of exposure when I'm used to their specific sounds. The biggest and funniest issue is always the huge amount of false friends. My favourite is "otrok" - in Czech it is "a slave" but in Slovenian it is "a child". So i absolutely loved their bumper stickers saying "Otrok v autě". The classic one is šukat/szukać. :)
Me: "Szukam dziecka w sklepie"
Czechs: 🤨
@Bruh Moment34
Czech: "Šukám děcka v sklepě"
Police: Arresting a pedophile next day.
@Dan Ender
Dear God, only other Polish guys know the feeling of being on minefield when You need to find something in potraviny shop 😂
It takes Jedi concentration level to say "hleadam" istead of "szukam" just because other words are so similar to your own language xd
Yeah, do you know the joke about a Polish and Slovakian guy missing a train?
As a Polish I want to say you've done great work! Both pronunciation and explanation are very precise and clear :D
Thank you!
As a native Czech speaker, i agree!
@Kaktus Man Much appreciated!
@Kaktus Man taky taky
prawda
As a Czech guy, I just want to say that this is an actually good material for foreigners! You have nice pronounciations and you explain the stuff very well.
Thank you!
jak si dokázal získat 47 lajků za jeden den kamo to nedám ani já za půl roku
@Otis356B gaming stačí dát komentář který prostě má nějakou hodnotu, originalitu něco takového já mám vždy lajky na mých komentech a nejlépe je komentovat když to video zrovna vyšlo.
@LambdaSpecialist to dává smysl když většina mých komentářů vlastně maj pár slov xd
@Otis356B gaming Navíc on je specialista :'D
The name of the country Czech Republic is spelled with CZ, not because it comes from the Polish language, but because the name came to English before the orthographic reform in the Czech.
I'm glad someone mentioned this. Hus' Czech looks a lot more like Polish than modern Czech does. And indeed, Czech is an archaic Czech spelling of Czech.
This ... actually makes way more sense.
I've seen two versions in different dictionaries.
Oxford English Dictionary and Collins English Dictionary mention that the English "Czech" comes from Polish or was influenced by Polish spelling.
The American English Dictionary believes that the English word comes from Old Czech "Czech".
web.archive.org/web/20180412000947/en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/czech
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/czech
ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=Czech
I see one problem with the version of Czech origin of the word Czech in English. The words "Czechian" and "Czech" have appeared in English-language texts since the 17th century. Jan Hus established the new orthography much earlier, in 1406. Spelling before Hus was inconsistent: č was written as chz or as cz is different orthographies. Why English has chosen Czech over Chzech if both variants look unusual and deprecated for 400 years? I would expect some influence of Polish (or Latin) here.
@Authentic Linguistics The spelling was still inconsistent long after Hus. Both old and new spellings and their combination were used until the 19th century, like in words Cžech or Cžechy (Cž was for some reason more popular than capital Č). "Czechia" was indeed a popular Latin version of Cžechy used since the 16th century and it is believed that it was these Latin sources (often written by Czechs) that were the direct influence on the English spelling of the words Czech or Czechian. There is no reason to believe there was any Polish influence whatsoever. Czech historian and diplomat Jiří Šitler wrote an excellent article "Czechia si to bude muset protrpět" on this. It is available online (in Czech).
As a native Ukrainian speaker, it's not hard at all to read Czech or Polish. Yes, you need to learn a little, how to read all that stuff, but the sounds are familiar and therefore it all just feels logical
It is easy to understand a language in a written form, when similar words exist in my language. However, there are not so many, maybe about 60% or so
I feel like it's easier to learn Cyrillic script and read the worlds. I think this script is better suited for Slavic languages
@Deutscher Michel I don't think so, that script is somehow heavy and bit archaic and has perhaps greater variations than latin based alphabets. For example while in latin based alphabets you just add various funny marks above letters or place them together in some funny way, in cyrilic based scripts you have completely different letters that are missing in other.
On the side note, Czech language is one of few, if not only, with fully phonetic written form. That means that words are pronounced just as they are written.
@Deutscher MichelI speak Russian, and when I moved to Poland I understood a few cognates. Unfortunately the spelling made it really hard to identify them, so what I did was to change the Latin into Cyrillic alphabet and all made sense.
Like “Możesz”- можеш and then bingo! Ты можешь - “you can”!
@MrToradragonI disagree, Roman alphabets become so adulterated that is quite hard to learn rules from language to langue. Cyrillic on the other hand fits perfectly with Polish for example. (I posted an earlier comment dealing with that)
@Revert Revertz As a native speaker of Polish, I can't agree. Just seeing sentences written in Cyrillic I presume that they must be in Russian - and a Polish word which does not appear in Russian but written in Cyrillic is completely incomprehensible/illegible to me.
On the other hand, I understand your point of view. You associate the Latin alphabet so much with English pronunciation that you make assumptions about the pronunciation of individual letters. Meanwhile, in the Polish language these assumptions should be completely different - the signs/letters are the same but the sounds are different. Hence the misunderstandings. Cyrillic, on the other hand, you don't associate with the English pronunciation at all - but you associate it with the Russian pronunciation. And here is the crux of the problem and at the same time the solution - the Russian pronunciation and the Polish pronunciation of "sounds" are very similar (and both are different from English), so when you write a Polish word in Cyrillic and try to read it "in Russian" (because you read Cyrillic pre-assuming that it is in Russian), you will achieve a pronunciation very close to the correct Polish one.
This is the first time I have watched a video that covers Polish pronunciation. I'm Ukrainian. I used to read Wiki in many Slavic languages. Since my first language is Ukrainian, I never had a problem reading Czech articles, because reading Czech diacritics is almost natural for me. I simply guess how it sounds, cause we have the same sounds. Thanks to digraphs, it takes me twice as much time to read and understand anything in Polish. I guess I just have to memorize them if I wanna read in Polish. Thanks for an interesting and helpful video!
Just memorise the Polish-Czech equivalents;
Ш -> Š -> SZ
Ч -> Č -> CZ
Рь -> Ř -> RZ (Tho the Ř-sound disappeared and merged with Ž. This is for etymology's sake)
Ж -> Ž -> Ż
Exactly!
The worst is when there are multiple digraphs in a row and I have to split it and decode it.
@Tomáš Roll
As a Pole it's not that bad.
@Mod Maker 🇵🇱 ř is still a distinct sound in most of czechia and even in some small regions of poland! kashubians also preserved it
As a polish person, I understand the czech and slovakian languages very well and they're really funny. Its kinda harder with ukrainian and russian but they're comprehensible, I had 4 ukrainian refugees in my class last year and with a little bit of effort we communicated well
Haha, it's the other way around too. Most Polish sound very comprehensible, apart from that the word choices sound unusual and very childish as they're typically same as our diminutive forms.
Czech & Slovak speaker here, who learned some Polish from Kapitan Bomba.
as a Belarusian who's been living in Czechia since 2017, I can understand Polish pretty well too, and to my ear it's also the funniest language I've ever heard. Slovak mostly seems like Czech but with a Ukrainian accent
@8o86 its exactly the same with Czech for Polish people its also sounds like diminutive forma
as czech child 30 years ago i look at cartoon on polsat - with this im able to understand polish language little better.
I'm from Poland. Been many times to Czech Republic and Slovakia and I've never had to use english to comunicate. I haven't used neither Chech or Slovak language. I don't speak those languages but we can understand each other very well. There are some words that sound exactly the same in Polish but they mean something completely different but after some time you get used to it so it's not a problem. What is funny there was never a situation that Czech or Slovak couldn't understand me :D And this applies to written form as well.
Szacunek za to! Cieszy mnie chęcia każdego Polaka, który się nie boji do Czechów mówić po polsku.
Skoro człowiek mówi powoli, to każdy Słowianin potrafi porozumieć, ale niektórzy usłyszą jedno słówko, które nie znają, to natychmiast się poddają i zaczną po angielsku gadać, tak niepotrzebnie budują przed sobą mur komunikacyjny.
It does get some getting used to. I'm originally from the south of Bohemia so quite far from Poland, but if I listen to Polish for a while it makes more and more sense. One has to get used to the ways the common words evolved in the different language.
Just don't go looking for any children in a shop.
@hoseja On the other hand announcing right upon entry that you are looking for the director may significantly improve the treatment you receive.
Z ciekawości spytam czy szukałeś kiedyś dziecka w sklepie? :>
One thing worth mentioning is that Polish "y" basically corresponds to English "i"--in words like it, sit, pill, whereas Polish "i" corresponds to English "ea" or "ee" or other combinations--see, read, etc... The problem is that the graphemic systems are different and these result in pronunciation problems because of the visual interference, not due to inability to make the sound. This also happens when English speakers try to pronounce "rz" in Polish--it's because of the visual input/interference, not the sound itself, which exists in English.
Also, what we lazily refer to as short "i" in English is really a completely different vowel from "long i". We just call it short, but it can be long or short. Notice wick vs wig. I is short before unvoiced consonants, and long before voiced consonants despite being called short i. It's a problem with nomenclature. Sorry, I went a little off topic into English.
Glad to read your comment! Phonetics and phonology are my passion.
I agree that the Polish "y" [ɘ] is quite similar to the KIT vowel, especially in the New Zealand accent and to the unstressed allophone in many accents. However, the Polish vowel is more centralized and lowered in compare to a typical stressed KIT vowel in General British or General American. The Polish sound resembles both the KIT and the COMMA vowels.
Praat seems to agree: my measurements give
(F1, F2) as (382 Hz; 1958 Hz) for the General British [ɪ] and (470 Hz; 1800 Hz) for the Polish [ɘ].
Yep, you are absolutely right. A vowel become shorter before a fortis (voiceless) consonant. This way /ɪ/ in bid is longer than /i/ in beet.
I prefer the terms tense-lax for the English vowels and fortis-lenis for the consonants. They are more accurate than short-long and voiceless-voiced.
Tense vowels are still longer than shorter vowels in the same environment (/ɪ/ in rid is longer than /i/ in read). And "short" and "long" seem to be more popular terms than tense-lax. If Alan Cruttenden uses them, why can't we?
When I was learning English in the high school, the teacher presented us a word "sheet" and then a warning: if you don't want to say a bad word, the "i" has to be long ... - "iiiiiii" ... (of course we wanted to know what is this bad word with a short "i" instead.. .this was before Internet) .
@eric hamilton My previous answer was deleted, so I will repeat - you are wrong!
You replaced the word "kit" in your post with "it", "sit", "pill", which are closer to the Polish "y", but do not sound like the vowel "y" in Polish. As I wrote, a better example is "myth" or "sorry" or "Sheryl".
I will also repeat that "Google Translate" correctly reads Polish texts, in my ears it sounds as if the text was slowly read by a Pole. It is a pretty good reference platform for correct Polish pronunciation. I am not able to assess how Google's technology copes with other languages, but with Polish it does it very well.
To avoid unnecessary discussions about how this or that vowel/consonant sounds in Polish, it is best to use Google Translate to read it in Polish.
@amjan Here's a question to my Polish friends: Is the pronunciation of "bić" the same as of "bicz"?
I'm Czech and I'm not sure.
For non-Polish speakers: bić is "to beat (someone)" and bicz is a whip.
While the Czech equivalents are: 1) "bít" [with more or less the same pron as in English to beat, just the accent is a bit different, obviously], and 2) "bič" [pron as in Eng "bitch"].
Btw, as someone might ask in future, e.g. learners of Czech, if there is a difference in the pronunciation of the Czech words "bít" (to beat someone) and "být" (to be), so I just repeat (as it was stated in the video), they're exactly the same. They were different in old Czech, but have merged in the same sound.
The same with the past tenses of the same words:
"bil" as in sentence: "bil ho tak dlouho, až mu tekla krev" (he beat him as long as he started bleeding),
"byl" as in: "kde jsi včera byl?" (Where were you yesterday?)
the pronunciation of the two is same, albeit "short i" in this case.
Velmi dobrá práce. Málo lidí dělá videa o jazyku jako je čeština. Jsem rád že jsem tě našel
mozna si je jenom nehledal ? ;) ua-cam.com/users/results?search_query=americaka+v+cesku
As a Polish person I would like to say that "i" after a soft consonant doesn't come only because of vowel after. For example word "cichy" (silent) would still use soft ć sound. And word "zimny" (cold) would do the same. It is because "ć" "ś" "ń" "ź" "dź" sound are considered as "short" sounds, while "ci" "si" "ni" "zi" "dzi" are considered "long" sounds.
For example - word "dźwięk" (sound) would use "dźw" as one sound cause "dź" is short. If you spelt it "dziwęk", you would need to say it with sound "i" after "dz" like in "dziwny" (weird) as it would be "long" "dzi".
I learned a lot of new english vocabulary. In Slovene we call the č, š and ž letters "šumniki", which would translate as "humming consonants", while in english they are refered as "hushing", which is quite interesting. The charon/haček symbol is called "strešica", which actually means "little roof", as it looks like an inverted little roof. All the soft consonants are consistently represented as diagraphs and are percieved as separate sounds (n + j, instead of nj as one sound). The Slovene gajica is actually really phonetic, for the exceptions of some words where letters "v" and "l" can be prounounced as "u". The sound that the czech language represents with "h" is actually not present in literal slovene, but just in some local dialects, for example near Gorica (which the czech would write as Horica). It's really interesting to compare our languages and writing systems.
The funny thing is that in the Polish and Czech languages are some words, that are almost the same in pronunciation but means basiclly a diffret thing. For example (famous among the speakers who know the second language though a bit) "sklep", which means "the shop in Poland and "a basement in Czech.
Genialna robota! Jestem pod głębokim wrażeniem tak dobrego opracowania. No po prostu wooooow! :D dziękuję!
Gdyby ktoś chciał się od autora filmu uczyć języka polskiego, niech zapłaci mu ile będzie on tylko chciał, to świetny nauczyciel!
Dziękuję bardzo!
For me as a Pole, Slovak is much easier to understand than Czech. But I can get the overall sense of the sentence quite easily in both cases. I have started learing Russian, and we have simillar cases and so on, but many words are alien to me. And thats where Ukrainian comes in, if there is a completely different word for something in Russian, from my experience, there is a high chance that the Ukrainians use a word that is practicly the same as ours. I know that it may sound obvious, buy Ukrainian is the middle ground between Russian and Polish, so a Ukrainian has the easiest time learning either Polish or Russian
Z tego co mi wiadomo Słowacki jest najbliższy polskiego ze wszystkich słowiańskich języków. Staroczeski był tak bliski polskiego że rozumieliśmy się w 100% jednak wiele czynników sprawiło że teraz czeski jest dużo dalej od polskiego między innymi przez długotrwałą agresywną germanizację
true
also we have almost the same sounds Czech has
h sound is the same for example, not like Polish or Russian g
@Mariusz Trynkiewicz a nie białoruski? Nwm
Poles understand Slovak better than Kashubian? 🤔
@Sven Zimmermann i think slovak
Dude, I'm impressed how you're able to pronounce 'ř' 👏Sometimes it's difficult even for Poles who have a very similar consonant "rz". Salutations from Czechia!
The pronounciation of that czech R is how Rz used to sound in old polish, and for me as a pole it's very easy to say, but it may be hard for people who have a problem with saying the rolling R.
Your Czech consonant is completely different from the Polish one. Check the IPA.
Very interesting! I'd like to compare Polish and Ukrainian languages! Thank you so much!😉
I will definitely compare them!
I really like the cute soft consonants from Polish!
They are so cute: soft and hushing at the same time!
@Authentic Linguistics Cieszę się, że je lubisz. / I'm happy that you like it.
That's why Polish uses these sounds for diminutive forms or affectionate forms for certain words :) kotek is "little kitty" (a common pet name between couples) but kotuś for a more affection version of the same word. It's very cool how you can play with diminutives and augumentatives in Slavic languages!
@dumbalek or even kiciuś :) (very little and very sweet kitty)
As a bosnian speaker I've always had a sense of both familiarity but also "differentness" with polish and czech. We share some letters with czech like š and č but the phonology itself is so different. How they pronounce their h and those r's seem really hard to pronounce. Watching this made me think these languages are more similar to russian than I thought
There is only one thing you did not mention about Polish pronunciation. Ą and Ę are often simplified in pronunciation to a and e. They occur in three variants in pronunciation: As full nasal, half nasal and non-nasal. "Ę" in a reflexive "się" is e.g. non-nasal - it sound like regular "e", or maybe it's just a bit longer sound. Passion, "męka" is half nasal, so it's a bit like "me(nj)ka", and goose, "gęś" is full nasal, which is considered the "classic" sound of "ę", the one that you've pronounced. If you pronounce "ę" in a full nasal way when you're not supposed to, it's perfectly understandable, but it sounds like you're pretending to be very distinguished and sophisticated, but it sounds very artificial.
ą is nasal o not a
@Psiakowski Oh absolutely, that's right. Thanks for the comment!
@Psiakowski And I made it a habit to write it as ǫ when handwriting
""Ę" in a reflexive "się" is e.g. non-nasal - it sound like regular "e", or maybe it's just a bit longer sound."
Oh, my, this is not "Polish", but either regional, with pretence to national, or some mannerism, which I'm not going to search the reason for.
Pronouncing "ę" in a full nasal it's not only perfectly understandable, ommiting it sounds like you're mot very distinguished and sophisticated... Sie ma.
Nice video and very good pronunciation! Interesting fact: the old Czech language before Jan Hus looked very similar to the current Polish language. sz, cz, rz -> š, č, ř. If we didn't go through this language reform, current Czech could possibly still have the same phonetic script as my Polish. And vice versa. If Polish had this language reform as well, it should basically look like Czech today. But still, we still understand each other even without knowing the other language.
Damn, your pronouciation is on point :D As a fun fact i can tell that Polish "rz" and "ż" sound exacly the same in modern language, so many people have problem which one to use in writting, but there are some methods to find out, for example if the word in different form (in inflection or cognate) has "r" instead of "zh" sound you know it's "rz" and not "ż", what is interesting it extend to other Slavic languages, so if the Polish word with "zh" sound has "r" instead of "zh" sound in other Slavic language it's also "rz" and not "ż", for example Polish word "rzeka" and Croatian "rijeka", this shows how closely related Slavic languages are and how easy it is to point exact sound changes that occured in those languages and how they evolved in relation to each other.
As a Czech speaker I wouldn’t say that both letters are pronounced as “ż” nowadays. At least I can hear the difference between “rzeka” and “żeka”.
It was such a nice breakdown, for me a native Ukrainian speaker it makes roughly 70% intelligibility of both Czech or Polish in the written form, in spoken firm it's usually less like 40%, but context always comes in handy :)
7:33 in some regions of Poland, especially in Cieszyn region, people make different pronunciation between: ż nad rz, h and ch, ó and u. ;-) It's strange for other people in Poland and is hard to hear the slight difference in these cases: outside the Cieszyn region nobody can pronounce in different way ż/rz, ch/h and ó/u 😀 but this cieszynian way is the oldest way of pronounce these consonants and vowel.
Great video and as a Polish I have to admit that You have perfect polish prononcuation!
Thanks 😅
@Authentic Linguistics Well almost. When saying "Strzelecki" you missed a distinct "t" after first "S". Other than that splendid.
@ABC no he didn’t? Do you mean he forgot to say Trz as a non-affricate T + rz as opposed to Cz?
(so like the difference between Trzy and Czy)
I am Lithuanian and I know neither Polish, nor Czech, but modern Lithuanian uses č, š, ž letters which are borowed from Czech, and not many Lithuanians know it. Thus once I took Czech text and was surprised by many diacritics - I thought it would be the same as Lithuanian... Thank you for exclamation, initially I thought consonants with carons are some different sounds, not soft consonants.
As a native Polish speaker I'd say:
1) Great job mate! It's pretty uncommon to hear a non-native Polish speaker to pronounce our words correctly ;)
2) Now, when I look at the comparison you've made between the two spellings... well, the Czech one definitely looks simpler (more straightforward, less complicated).
3) Having said that tho... yeah, as you've mentioned, we are nothing compared to the English spelling (and pronunciation as well) :P
I remember what a pain it was to learning that one. And the fact, that there's no one consisent way of spelling and instead British, American, etc. (So having learnt both the British one at school and then the American one on the internet I've ended up having that weird mixed of both).
Many ppl don't acknowledge how hard the English spelling actually is, so it's nice you mention that too ;)
As a person who is learning Polish and Ukrainian on its own, I am really happy to have found this video! I look forward to your next videos! Thanks for this, it´s been really helpful!
I think both spellings have merits. You can actually see them combined in the Belarusian Łacinka, which uses v rather than w; letters with carons for š, č, ž, but it uses the Polish ł letter for its hard "l", and a regular "l" for the soft l; it also uses acutes for the soft consonants like Polish when they are not followed by a vowel: ń, ś, ć, ź etc; but also like Polish it uses an "i" to soften them before other vowels, so you get stuff like nie, sio, cie, zia all the time. Indeed, a nice combo of the two spellings, pretty easy to read for a Pole too (but guess that's just because Belarusian is closer to Polish than many give it credit for)
I am Polish and I work with CEE Region, so i have people from Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia. i can understand some words, some are similar or even the same. Some sounds like a cuter version of Polush, especially in Czech :D Good job on this movie! I keep telling my foreign friends that Polish is really hard in pronounciation and in speach! We have so many sounds which are not present in other languages, or even some people can't hear the difference (like ć zna cz or z and ż) :)
I find Polish spelling much easier as I'm from Poland😂 Still can read Czech as I used to watch Czech TV as a child. Now I live near the border. Greetings to our neighbours.
Greetings from a Polish-speaking Australian! Thanks for sharing your experience.
Your polish pronunciation is very good.
Replying your question: as a polish speaker I can read other Slavic languages easily - I understand 90% Czech, Slovak, Croatian etc. Understanding spoken language is more difficult due to difference in pronunciation and accent. Languages written in Cyrillic are more difficult to read - most of people don't know the Cyrillic script, but when you learn it becomes easy. For example, Ukrainian is quite easy to understand spoken, but difficult in reading if you don't know the Cyrillic.
Great video! Hope to see videos about other slavic languages spelling, especially Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian. As a Ukrainian I can say that every slav after a short amount of learning can read other slavic languages, also I wish that someday ther would be a latin Ukrainian alphabet too.
I'm Czech, so I can't really judge which alphabeth is easier, I might be a bit biased in this respect 😉 All I can say is that while it is kind of easy for me to understand spoken Polish, at least in direct communication (I'm not saying you would understand political debates on the radio without putting some effort into learning Polish), I still struggle with the written Polish. Always confuses me! 😅
And I'm saying this being aware of the fact that I'm usually better at the written forms of languages than spoken. I.e. I have better understanding of written Spanish, French or even English (languages that I speak on different levels) in comparison with understanding of the spoken word, either in direct contact or on the radio, for instance.
I think it might say a thing or two about the written Polish 😉
Because you don't know rules of reading in Polish, they're rather simple, it takes you some minutes to learn them.
x and ch are both pronounced "sh" in portuguese, though some dialects still pronounce ch as tch. X is the primary way of spelling words that have always had "sh"
I'm Czech and the pronounciation was great! Big up for that.
What a nice explanation! Looking forward for your next videos with language comparisons 👍
As a Ukrainian it took me 20 minutes to learn how to read in Polish. However it took me another two months to master the nasal vowels. Somehow the Czech language is harder for me and I still mispronounce a lot of words, especially that r+zh sound, I can’t pronounce the rolled r, my r sounds like the French one
It's mostly because Czech is very coarse sounding compared to most of other Slavic languages. Take for example Slovak, which is 90% similar to Czech, but at first glance sounds entirely different. Many even find it way easier to learn because it does not have such "contraptions" like Ř and if you learn it, you can easily use it in Czechia with basically zero possibility of misunderstanding, much unlike Polish which has what some people call "false friend words" that sound similar, but have entirely different meaning, therefore if one speaks to Czechs in Polish, it may cause Czechs just to stare in disbelief about what the Polish speaking guy just said and vice versa.
Doesn't Ukrainian have rolled r too?
Because I get that Ř is a complete bullshittery, that even some native Czech people don't know how to pronounce for their whole life, but rolled R isn't that much of a hardcore consonant.
Usually, when kids have trouble with that one, they don't have much trouble saying it in the word "prdel" (means ass) (because pronouncing p pushes your tongue more to the front).
@Ema Pelikánová Ukrainian does have rolled r, moreover it has a softened rolled r. I can pronounce neither of those sounds so I pronounce "r"s like the French. This feature is very apparent in my speech and I was often picked on in school because of this.
@сЕРЫЙ but that's not a problem with Czech language 😅
Cyrillic is the best for southern and eatern slavic languages. Latin Polish-style is the best for Polish but Czech-style is the best for Czech and Slovak. I speak Polish, Czech, and Russian on a daily basis but also know Belarussian and understand Ukrainian. Croatian and Serbian are another interesting couple to explore since they separated rather recently and use Latin and Cyrillic. Actually, it is a very good example that shows that scrypting system is only instrumental. You can use even the Arabic scrypt for Slavic languages.
I'm a Belarusian who's lived in Czechia since 2017. Naturally Russian is my native language and with a few weeks of practice I could probably start speaking Belarusian (currently it's on the level of "understand everything but don't have the vocab to speak" thanks to Russian cultural imperialism), and I speak Czech fluently. Slovak is very easy to understand because it's incredibly close to Czech, but sounds more Ukrainian. Speaking of Ukrainian, learning Czech actually made me able to understand Ukrainian way better, because there's a surprising amount of overlap. Same with Polish, fast colloquial speech is kinda hard but I can understand most things fine if it's spoken slightly slower, reading takes a bit but I can do it. Polish also sounds hilarious to me, it's a really funny language. I can make out the general meaning here and there in written Bosno-Serbo-Croat, but it's pretty hard. I can read Bulgarian very easily and understand basically everything, but can't make out a single word of spoken Bulgarian. Slovenian is incomprehensible. The word for "kid" in Slovenian means "slave" in Czech.
side note, I still find Czech pronunciation quite difficult, and not even because of the cursed ř sound - that one I can actually do very well. It's the language rhythm that's messing me up. In English, a vowel being long means you're going to put word stress on it, but not in Czech. Czech stress is pretty much always on the first syllable, and so you're tasked with both stressing some vowels without dragging them out while also dragging other vowels later on in the word without putting stress on them. It's really hard I still sound foreign when speaking Czech because of it.
the funny thing is belarusian is very similar to polish
I love the ogonek but I find the way Czech consonants are written to be more consistent.
I am a native Czech and when I watched this video I wondered how I ever learned my mother tongue :D. It's well done!
But to your question - understanding other Slavic languages depends a lot on the exact place you come from. I'm from the centre of the Czech Republic, i.e. Prague, and thus I don't come into contact with Polish much, so getting along with a Polish person is difficult for me (not much help from "fake friends", although I already know some of them - shop-cellar, search-fuck, road-drug, accommodation-delay, dogs-walkers), but not completely impossible in basic things. I have a similar problem with the languages of the former Yugoslavia. In Slovak, on the other hand, I can read a book or watch a movie without any burden. But that's because I grew up in the Czechoslovakia era. Today's children already consider Slovak a foreign language and don't understand many words. Some of the "fake friends": turkey salad - guinea pig salad, snack-10 o clock, cellar-beerhouse
I understand Russian and Ukrainian even less, but since I learned Russian as a child of 2.5 years, I can read Cyrillic and understand some simple texts (signs on shops, instructions on road signs).
But my friend who grew up in a town near the Polish border speaks Polish fluently.
As a Czech speaker, reading a Polish text out loud with correct pronunciation is a pretty tall order (gets easier when exposed to Polish for a short while). But that does not mean I cannot partially understand the meaning of the written text. I would even say, that it is easier to understand the meaning from written Polish than spoken Polish, despite not being able to pronounce it.
if you know g -> h, sz -> š etc. it's getting easier
I absolutely love everything about this video!
Thank you for the appreciation!
The best thing about Polish is that if you know how to read the alphabet and digraphs, you actually know how to read in Polish. In english reading is very confusing if your first language is as phonetic as Polish or Czech.
As someone who comes from Czech this makes me happy! :D
Wow, your pronounciation of Polish words is perfect. As a Polish native speaker myself I wouldn't say it better. 👍🏻
As for your question: I can understand Czech quite well, but Slovak is a way more similar to Polish. When Slovak person is speaking, sometimes I feel like they were speaking Polish, but a bit "weirder" (no offense, I don't mean it in negative way, I personally love how Slovak language sounds❤). Ukrainian is not very understandable for me, Russian is a bit more easier. But I learned Russian in school, so maybe this is the reason.
A very easy to follow explanation of how to read Latin-based Slavic languages. As a native Russian speaker, none of this was new to me, but it's nice to understand what the system actually is. Btw, a side note: hushing sounds are properly called fricatives in linguistics, similarly "soft" consonants are actually called palatalized, as they're pronounced with the tip of the tongue pressing up against the upper palate in one's mouth.
Great video!
I always use Czech and Polish (even though I didn’t properly understand its orthographical rules until I watched this video) to check, pun intended, fonts. I think it’s the most typographically different language I’ll need to use any given font for, so it’s a great way to see if a font works well with diacritics and has the necessary polish, pun again intended.
Wow actually a great tutorial for teaching Polish (Polish aprooved)
Many products in this part of Europe have description in Polish, Czech and Slovak. As a Polish if at first I read description in Czech and Slovak, I don't need to read it in my own language. Everything is already clear. But speaking is very different.
You are great in pronouncing 🙂
I would love to see in one video how you deal with tongue twisters like Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz ☺️
2:36 That sound of reproach and despair at the end of the counting got me rolling on the floor 😂😂
😀
Good work with polish pronunciation, it is almost entirely perfect.
As a polish speaker I fint it super fun and easy to read other slavic languages using latin script because I can then understand a lot more than only by hearing the language.
Love this and it's funny, some sounds already got them without a knowledge about the both languages lol Maybe I'm Slavic in another life :v Thank you for this amazing video.
Poles who have learned Czech, say they finally understand the difference between Ż and RZ 😁
in old-Polish it was used the same like in Czech
Polish also has other pairs that sound identically (and we could easily get rid of): h/ch and ó/u. We could simply choose one of them and simplify things. With ż/rz pair there are a few exclusions, for example, English word "frozen" we write: "zamarznięty" spelling zamar-znięty separately. Also Tarzan. Those 2 words (one of them is not even Polish) make so much mess :), but hey Polish is not the weirdest language there, although the slang word for "penis" we can write chuj, huj, hój, huj, chui, hui, hói, chói and it reads virtually the same. Hooj, hooy, chooj, chooy... etc is also acceptable but if you are millennial or younger.
@Grabcu Grabcu the Polish word zamarznąć is equivalent to the Czech zmrznout. There is also no ř.
The Polish ó is the equivalent of the Czech ů, a remnant of the Slavic uo.
sůl, bez soli. sól, bez soli.
@Tomáš Roll I see how knowing other Slavic helps writing in one's own language. Now with that said, Why do we communicate in English? Weird times... :P
@Grabcu Grabcu nie wiem, ja tylko kontynuowałem.
Your pronunciations of both languages were great, hats off!
There is only one thing I would like to add: Polish language does use the letter "V", but of course in some exceptions only, but it is not true that they do not use it at all.
One of the main Polish TV stations is called Telewizja Polska, but for some reason, it is abbreviated like TVP. You read it like "te-fau-pe".
It's used in loan words only.
As for understanding other slavic languages, it depends on the language. I learned how to read Polish some time ago because even though I could understand about 70% of the spoken language, the written language was much harder. Now I read Polish out loud to myself to make sense of it. For example the sound of ą is quite similar to Czech "ou" but the letter a can be confusing to Czechs.
As a Czech I usually understand 100% of Slovak because I was exposed to it and so I learned the necessary vocabulary. If course there are sometimes one or two words that I don't know if the topic is unfamiliar.
Slovene is more difficult to understand mainly because I haven't learned the necessary vocabulary. But sounds are easily identifiable.
Ponieważ uczysz się polskiego, pozwól że zwrócę sie do Ciebie po polsku. Intryguje mnie fakt że dźwięk "cz" w oficjalnej nazwie waszego kraju " Czech Rep." bądź "Czechia" nie zapisujecie zgodnie z waszym zapisem czyli używając "č", a analogicznie do zapisu w języku polskim, czyli "cz". Czy wiesz może jaka jest geneza takiego zapisu?
If I'm not mistaken it's 'ą' because historically it was actually a nasal 'a' rather than 'o'. Strangely enough a very similar thing happened to French with 'an'.
O ile ja się orientuję, wynika to z reformy języka czeskiego. Ale nie jestem pewien. Pozdrawiam
@Fekalista Grzybowory Dzięki za informacje! Pozdrawiam
In fact in spanish Ñ, the "thing on top" is called "virgulilla", not "tilde". Tilde is for accent like in á é í ó ú.
By the way, great video, I loved learning something new about languages that I really didnt know at all! 😊
According to the RAE, "tilde" in Spanish may refer to both ´ and ~, and "virgulilla" may refer to any accent that looks like a comma, such as ~ and even the cedilla (I just checked it, didn't even know that before). You can also use "acento agudo" or just "acento" for ´, "acento grave" for ` and "acento circunflejo" for ^. I agree that the general usage in Spanish is that tilde refers to ´ and virgulilla refers to ~. However, in English and other languages, tilde means ~.
8:11 this part absolutely killed me
most funny thing is that our two languages were almost same back in Medieval times... But we had Hus and Komenský. They rly changed czech writing.
Thanks to take good pronunciation of my polish and my neighboord alphabet. BTW my surname (in the name of account) could have Czech ancestors as my grandpa was born in South Silesia close to Małopolska Region (and JPII's home-town)
Belarussian latin alphabet is a mix of Polish and Czech ortography and is, at least from Polish perspective, super easy to read and understand.
Nice video. Currently learn Polish and was surprised by their what seems arbitrary use of digraphs and diacritics. I hope there are rules for that because memorising words is just hard.
Polish spelling is consistent: you can always understand how to read a word if you follow the rules. One more good news is that the stress falls on the penultimate syllable.
But guessing the spelling from the pronunciation can be hard. "Ząb" and "zomb" sound the same, as well as kurz, kuż and kusz.
Yes, when you learn how to pronounce every sound, reading is easy. But I think there is few words with the same root that could potentially throw off a learner because I had a bit of problems as a child myself: it's the words "marznąć" "zamarzać" (which mean "getting cold" and "freezing" respectively). Despite r and z being written together you won't read them as "zh" but as separate sounds. I tried to find if there exist some rule to it but it looks like that's not the case. Doesn't help that apparently "zamarzać" has also a different meaning (something along "dying from hunger" but I'm not sure, it's a rarely used word nowadays) and THEN you read the 'rz' as 'zh'.
In conclusion, the only clue to it is that any word connected to freezing and being cold in Polish should be pronounced with separate r and z. Otherwise it's likely the digraph sound. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong of course.
Honestly. After you memorise few hundred words you don't need rules any more. But I am polish.
@Anna Firnen To understand why zamarzać is pronounced with rz as rz, not ʐ, you need to see that the rz in that word is a simple consonant clustering resulting from vowel clipping, not a digraph. The root word here is mróz (frost) and you can see there that r and z are separate sounds. The vowel ó becomes 'liquid' when flexed, so it kinda-sorta shifts position and instead of 'mroznąć' you get 'mar-znąć'. West Slavic, in contrast to East Slavic languages are prone to vowel-clipping and quite often you'll see consonant clusters. When it comes to rz, Polish phonology took the matter further and the West Slavic sound for palatalized r which initially was pronounced as r and z at the same time (synchronically, the way that Czechs pronounce their ř), with time merged with ʐ... the sound for retroflexed z. This actually simplified Polish phonology, which has two sets of 'pallatalized' sibilants: retroflexed (sz, cz, ż/rz, dż) and alveolo-palatal (ś/si, ć/ci, ź/zi and dź/dzi). With only a few exceptions, the spelling rules are simple: retroflexion is graphically represented by digraphs using z as the second consonant - the expection being ż, where retroflexion is denoted by a dot above; the reason being that Polish has a lot of words with geminated z or z and retroflexed ż clustered (zza, zziajany, zżynać, zżyty), so there would be just too much confusion. Alveolo-palatal sibilants are represented by acute accent marks above or iotated. Yes, in theory we could adapt the Czech pravopis (again) and use haček instead of z. Will that make it more phonetic? Not really. Compared to English or French spelling, Polish orthography has an extremely high degree of phonological consistency.
@Szalony Kucharz It does prove that digraphs are in general a bad idea.
I am a czech, and I must say, this is pretty good video actually! Not only it does educate about the Czech and Polish language, but also shows the differences between them! So like from me, well done! :D.
And for the question at the end, probably the best other slavic language we as czechs can understand is Slovakian for sure :D. I mean, we are all like brothers and sisters, and yes, there are few differencesm few harder symbols, but most of the time, we can understand each other no problem :) . Then I found kinda interesting that, at least from my experience, I was able to understand Slovenian better than Polish! XD. I dunno why, but it is true :P. I do not say I cant hear simmilarities across, and that I cant say or know some polish words (Jagoda=blueberry, fritky=fries.... ), but its not that easy. Then I know that czech people also understand kinda well the Croatian, but i dunno, have never been there. And lastly, except few words and sounds, we generally cant understand any cyrilic alphabet and language without learning :D. Those symbols are wild :P. Hope I gave you some interesting info ! ;)
A slavic speaker here, I had to learn how to read other slavic languages as an adult, but not because there would ever be anything difficult to pronounce, I just had to learn how to read cirilics and ą/ę/ł. The Slovak diacritics were kinda automatic, I guess we learned them almost simultaneously with learning to read in Czech 😁
Polish and Czech have a bunch of different sounds. Polish doesn't have long vowels, and it has two types of sh, ch, ect. Both languages solved the problem of missing characters in the Latin alphabet a little bit different, but you could easily adapt one spelling for the other language. Like you could spell hard sh with caron, and soft sh with acute in Polish. Although it would become a little bit problematic to write on a Polish keyboard when you have three types of s, c, and so on.
when starting to learn Polish, I suggest starting with:
- the beetle sounds in the reeds
- chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie 😄
Awesome work, well-researched and produced and just the right amount of info to not completely drive people insane. I imagine even 5 minutes of exposure to the Slavic language can be maddening haha.
Very interesting, thank you!
Thanks for watching!
In Belarus we used both alphabets in different times in our history and I have studied both in school. Generally I prefer czech variant because its more compact.
Elegancko, wszystko prawidłowo wymawiane!
Moc pěkné video :)
I am Czech, but besides Slovak language, which is almost the same as Czech, i usually struggle to understand other Slavic languages. I can catch a few words, but not able to really understand what are they talking about.
Great explanation! As a czech i found this very interestion to see the difference between the two languages. Good job!
Thanks! 😃 Glad you liked it!
Very interesting, I think I like Czech better - very logical!
I also like Czech spelling because it is more coherent in conveying soft consonants and I find diacritics much easier to read than digraphs.
Slavic soft consonants are phonemic, i.e. they are independent sounds in a language, so they deserve a universal spelling that doesn't depend on their position in the word.
Polish better cause i am from Poland and Czech sounds like useing only diminutives in polish xD
@Authentic Linguistics Digraphs also cause problems once you start adding prefixes or making compounds. One word ending with what could be the first letter of a digraph, the second starting with that could be the second letter of a digraph and you are ... in problems.
@amjan Looking at the examples of Polish writing right here proves that you've got plenty of diacritics too, so I definitely would not call it minimized.
@Jan Krynicky This is a problem that looks real on paper, but can't be observed in the real world (amongst native speakers at least. Though I have never heard foreigners make this kind of mistake).
Hi, a Pole here. your pronunciation is really good for a foreigner, really educational video, I learned a lot about Czech language. Keep in mind that in "Strzelecki" the "rz" after "t" makes the same sound as "sz", it's one of those things that evolved over time, it's just easier to say
in word "Strzelecki" "Strz" is more like "Szcz"
I studied history and Russian language on Czech university. We used to transcribe old texts as a form of practice for historian's work. The pre Hus reform Czech was very similar to Polish with its use of digraphs. One difference I recall was the use of long s, which is written like so: ſ. Modern Czech does not have anything of that sort. Learning to read digraphs helped me later on, when I started learning Polish. Pozdrawiam Polaków!
As a Pole I understand most words from other slavic in their written form, including the cyrylic, although sometimes there are words that I just can't make any sense of 😂
Native Macedonian speaker here, i can pretty much understand both polish and czech in written form however spoken is way harder since you have less time to react when you hold a conversation. I feel in the written form you can more clearly see the similarities between the language you are reading and your mother tongue. Slavic languages are divided in groups so usually if you speak a language within that group all the remaining languages of that group are very easy to understand, for me it's easy to understand all of the south slavic languages while west slavic is a bit easier to understand than east slavic it still poses a bit of a challenge if you haven't tried to learn any of the languages of that group. Learning new slavic languages as someone who speaks one is fairly easy and very logical, but i can see why non slavic-speakers struggle with pronounciation. This video was great and very informational keep it up!
As opposed to English, Polish is really easy to read (or at least when it comes to knowing how to read it in theory ;D). However it's more tricky to figure out how to spell things.
As for other Slavic languages, Russian is a bit tricky to figure out the pronunciation of even when you know Cyrillic, because you need to know where the accent falls, and it's less consistent than Polish (in Polish the accent nearly always falls on the last but one syllable).
As much as I've seen of Ukrainian, as for understandability it's like of Russian and Polish were two sides of a spectrum and Ukrainian was smack in the middle. The accent sounds more like Russian to us for sure, softer than Polish, and they use a version of Cyrillic but there's a lot more similarities than between Polish and Russian.
Czech is even trickier in a way because even though the languages are connected we have a crazy amount of false friends that can result in the most ridiculous misunderstandings. It lulls you into a false sense of security. Like czerstwy, which means stale in Polish and the Czech homonym Čerstvý means fresh. So a Czech buying some fresh bread in Poland may raise an eyebrow. And don't even get me started on the whole szukać/šukat thing...
As for Slovakian, when I was driving through Slovakia, every other billboard was completely understandable to me. It's like someone was trying to speak Polish in a funny way - no offence to Slovaks, since Polish must seem like a warped Slovakian to them ;D
And just for your amusement, there is a Latin script for Belarusian languages that combines features of both Czech and Polish Latin script.
It uses the Polish system for softening like "bia", "bio", "mio", "Ł ł" for hard "l" (shift of Polish pronunciation from hard "l" to [w] is young (linguistically) phenomenon started in XIX century) and "L l" for soft "l" as well as "ć ś ź ń", however "č š ž" like Czech. As well it uses "v" for "v", the "h" represents [ɣ] a less glottal sound that Czech and Ukrainian have. And it has a unique "ŭ" for [w] sound.
Here is an example (UDHR 1) of Belarusian Latin script: Usie ludzi naradžajucca svabodnymi i roŭnymi ŭ svajoj hodnaści i pravach. Jany nadzieleny rozumam i sumleńniem i pavinny stavicca adzin da adnaho ŭ duchu bractva.
And correspond Cyrillic script version: Усе людзi нараджаюцца свабоднымi i роўнымi ў сваёй годнасцi i правах. Яны надзелены розумам i сумленнем i павiнны ставiцца адзiн да аднаго ў духу брацтва.
I have a video on my channel about Belarusian Latin script, unfortunately, it is in the Belarusian language only (but I might think about adding English subtitles given the demand).
To provide more context:
1. Belarusian despite its official status in the Republic of Belarus as an endangered language, Wikipedia list places it as vulnerable, however, the Belarusian language situation kind of orthogonal to the typical situation of endangered languages and situation referential for severely endangered level ("language is spoken by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to children or among themselves") is very quite spread. We don't have any numbers, as for different reasons this is not investigated by both sides of the battle, however, my educated guess would be that around 80 percent of the population in Belarus goes into the severely endangered category (especially in a high-density urban area like Miensk or Homel), another 15 percent goes to the definitely endangered category, and the rest 5% which are in a diffuse state between vulnerable and safe. The situation with the later 5% is the most uncanonical to the original UNESCO scale. As an example you can take me: I was born in the time of the Soviet Union, my parents were intelligentsia (natural science type, because the other (humanitarian) has their specialty in Belarus), hence they speak well-educated Russian and no Belarusian. so I was grown up in Russian language and my first full exposure to Belarusian was in the first year of school (need to say that most of the schools (except very short period after acclaiming independency) are Russian speaking (i.e. only limited subjects like Belarusian language, literature, and history (in my time now is not) taught in Belarusian rest of the subjects Russian)). And at that period I don't like Belarusian (as something external placed on me). However, in my later period since teenagehood, I was lucky to be exposed to the conscious Belarusian full-speaker community. After this, I fully awaken to my Belarusian identity and sufficiently increase my level of proficiency and usage of Belarusian. So now within the community of people connected with Belarus, I use solely Belarusian in writing, however, I personally cannot stay long within Belarusian in oral conversation if another communication partner speaks Russian (but I know a lot enough people, who can stay within Belarusian in such situation). At home, unfortunately, I speak mostly Russian, despite my wife's situation is similar to mine and she also would like to use Belarusian more. We exposed our children to the Belarusian language (progress compared to my childhood), however, they use predominantly Russian in communication with us, and given that we are living abroad, their future within the Belarusian language is unpredictable.
2. The reason behind this is the 2 century-long policy of sometimes active sometimes passive russification of the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and pro-Soviet pro-Russian Lukašenka's regime. In the most recent events since the Belarusian Revolution of 2020, the huge ratio of the population previously passive and indifferent now starts to identify themselves actively as Belarusians, and many of them (but not all) start to use Belarusian more and consciously. But now the regime violently suppresses the Belarusian language as a backlash to the revolution (we have two documented cases of arrest of people caused by public use of Belarusian, and many other not so documented cases of discrimination because of language; all book publishers oriented to the Belarusian language are closed, book shops for Belarusian closed other shops raided), need to say that the regime was never sympathetic to Belarusian and only a calm neutral in the period between 2014 (Crimea) and 2020 (Revolution). (Side note: so please never use the regime's flag (red, green with white ornament) to visualize the Belarusian language it is effectively an insult) However, now these people who actively embraced Belarusian identity and language try found other ways to increase the usage of Belarusian. We have good growth in Belarusian content on youtube, TikTok, and Twitter, especially produced by people who were forced to live abroad after 2020. So Belarusian language state is 2 centuries long political oppression with the active attempt of revitalization from the community.
3. Belarusian Latin script is a phenomenon with its own history of more than 5 centuries and is one of 3 historical ways of writing the Belarusian language (the other two are Cyrillic and ... surprise Arabic). It was always present all the time, and only in short periods was a dominant script, however, it played a humongous role in the resurrection of Belarusian in its modern incarnation in the XIX century. It goes through its evolution being based on Polish script (but distinct from the beginning like the usage of "h" and "a") and step by step embraced new features like unique "ŭ" (which is the origin of its Cyrillic "ў" counterpart, what is also unique in Cyrillic between Slavic languages) or reform "cz" to "č" following Czech. And now becomes a unique combination on its own. It reaches the classical state in the 20ies and 30ies of the XX century. It even has some official use inside Belarus, e.g. it becomes the official ISO standard for the romanization of geographical names and is sometimes written under Cyrillic on public signs (however in the current backlash period there were attacks on them, so existence under the regime is questionable). This ISO Latin script is almost a classical Belarusian Latin script only with modification for the "L" letter. There are other ideas in the Belarusian community to reform the script in the paradigm of Jan Hus, like ideas of substitute digraph "dz" -> "ʒ" and "dž" -> "ǯ". So it is a very vivid phenomenon inside the community.
Чесно кажучи завжди заздрив вашому стандарту латинки, він ідеальний, і чудово б підійшов до української теж, але на жаль поки що замість нього ми використовуємо стандарт заснований на англійській, я мрію щоб в майбутньому українська мова широко використовувала адекватну латинку і ввела її паралельно до кирилиці або навіть замінило б її якщо б суспільство доросло до такого кроку. Надіюсь що й білоруська мова теж з часом почне оживати.
@Omnigreen Дзякуй за пажаданні. Адносна таго ці падышла б беларуская лацінская да украінскай мовы -- пытанне вельмі адкрытае, у нашых моў хоць і блізкая фаналогія але ж адрозная. Напрыклад не зусім ясна як перадаваць украінскае "и", бо яно не зусім беларускае "ы", яшчэ болей пытанняў да "щ". Правапіс іншым алфавітам гэта вельмі цікавая, але і непростая тэма.
bardzo dobrze mówisz po polsku
:D
I consider it importand to note that sounds such as "ż" and "rz" or "u" and "ó" althou sound the same, they are written differently because they stood for different sounds in old Polish (wich still can be noticed in teir grammar ; 'rz' morphs into 'r', while 'ż' into 'h and 'ó' morphs into 'o', 'e', 'a', while 'u' is fully separate as a sound - at least according to my knowlegde).
I know that it has been menshioned in the film, but I believe they deserve more recognition than "they were used in Old Polish"
Isn't the same case with ch and h in polish? H used to sound like czech H but now it sounds like CH, right?
@Omnigreen Yes, it is exactly the same case
@Omnigreen to be more precise:
ch and were separate sounds but today they're read and spoken the same
Ch and H differing depends on region.
Very nice video :D Keep the good work!
Thanks!
A Czech here; I find it quite a bit easier to understand other Slavic languages (other than Slovak and Polish *) in written form rather than in spoken form. 1/ I have more time to think about what's written---and with a bit of that extra time, you can figure out less-than-obvious connections between words which aren't similar (and there are many such connections, either through old words no longer used much or through idioms). 2/ Fast spoken, unfamiliar language is always difficult (even a different dialect of your own one) and 3/ when it comes to Latin alphabet vs Cyrillic, I'm old enough to having had 1 year of mandatory Russian at school... So I can bite through it; slowly, but safely... ;-)
* When it comes to Slovak and Polish, well, Slovak and Czech are mutually understandable and since I come from Northern Moravia, I understand Polish good enough as well.
The surprising finding was that it's not at all difficult (for me) to understand Ukrainian. I think my understanding of Slovak and Polish help a lot there; many Ukrainian words sound much more like a sort of combination of Slovak and Polish to me, rather than Russian. I can give you obvious examples: like "thank you", which in Ukrainian is Дякую (ďakuju, in Slovak: ďakujem, Czech děkuji, Polish dziękuję), while the Russian Спасибо (spasiba) is clearly a very different word... Some words may seem very different at first sight; but you can see how they relate very soon; e.g. Ukrainian "please": Будь ласка (bud' laska) sounds very different from Czech/Slovak "prosím" (or Polish "proszę"), but only until you realise that we have a very close _idiomatic_ expressions which sound very similar: "buď od té lásky" or "buď tak laskav", which can indeed be used instead of "please"... Again, the Russian Пожалуйста (pazhal'ysta---hope I transcribe it close enough) is quite different from all of these. In fact, despite having 1 year of Russian at school (albeit long ago), I find it substantially easier to understand Ukrainian (with no learning at all).
as a Pole I understand other Slavic languages very well, especially since I also have Russian as a compulsory language at school (because I live near the border with Russia)
I didn't understand Polish that well but since we visit Poland regularly now for shopping and for travelling, I do understand quite reasonably. I cannot speak properly but apart from former strategy of resorting to English, I now mostly speak Czech and they speak Polish and we understand each other without fail.
Btw you omitted to mention one vowel pair on Czech and Polish language that cause a lot of confusion. In Czech, the "ů" is just long "u" and "ó" is a long "o". But in Polish "ó" is the Czech "ů". Which most Czechs fail to acknowledge. So the "Kraków" is "Krakov" in Czech (even officially) instead of "Krakův". But it doesn't matter cause "Krakov" is proper czech way of sayning "Krak's town". On the other hand if referring to Krak's castle (Wawel), we would say Krakův hrad. 😀Isn't that fantastic? I love language play.
In Old Polish "ó" was long "o" similar to Czech, then it evolved to long "u" like Czech "ů", currently Polish "ó" and "u" are basically the same, difference is not noticeable for Polish people, for Czech people it may be noticeable as you still use long and standard "u".
Thank you for this I will send this to my friends from abroad so they'll finally be able to understand the pronunciation of slavic words (I have tried explaining it before but I got a bit too technical and they got nothing from it)
I'm from poland. I've heard some other slavic languages and lately I've started learning russian. The main dificulty of understanding other languages in written form are different letters but once you know what they mean it's easy to pronounce them, they're very similar and phonetically consistent. Also many words are the same so all things considered I think learning another slavic language is easier than people think
Русский язык jest łatwy,kolego. Mi największy problem sprawiają znaki twardy ъ i miękki ь w pisowni
I tu sie zgodze. Czasem ciężko usłyszeć różnice ale z czasem idzie sie nauczyć
So either of them aren't that bad for written or pronounce, I think, at least for me, I've been doing the Ř sound all my life and I don't even speak a slavic language ;) It's a matter of understanding what let the language to evolve that way, I think Czech is kinda practical in written but of course Polish has more speakers. Thank you for this amazing video that according to some comments you've done it really accurate and that's even better.
Im czech and honestly im surprised he could say " ř " and for foreigners, i am proud of you if u take the effort to learn this letter and also pronounce it correctly.
Ř exists in Upper Sorbian but it sounds like RZ (Polish one which is like Ž/Š).
Dude you nailed the pronunciation. And answering your question, I find it easier to understand Russian in its written form after I learned to read Cyrillic. And an interesting fact, I understand Slovak much better than Czech, even tho they are like 100% mutually intelligible. Dunno, must be some pronunciation tweks. Also posting this comment I found out that the word “pronunciation” differs a little from its root form lol
You pronounced everything this ideally I can't tell if you're Polish or Czech.
From what I undestand Polish and Czech used to have the very similar spelling back in the medieval age and then diverged over time with czechs replacing w with v and introducing crowns while poles kept diagraphs. Also apparently both were still not that much distinct until 1500s. At least that's how I understand it. If there is anyone having a proper knowledge about the topic that could veryfy what I've wrote and correct me I'd be grateful.
Slavic languages have generally separated separated in Xth and XIth centuries. With two notable exceptions, Serbo-Croatian and Polish-Czech (and Ukrianian and Belarusian, considering they were essentially extremely western Russian dialects and extremely eastern Polish dialects originally) Serbo Croatian remains and Czech got extremely bastardized and mostly lost overtime, due to dominance of German. The new Czech was built mostly on the base of Polish and Russian, which has completely separated it from Polish. If not for this event it would probably be analogous to Serbo-Croatian where the governments of respective countries swear these are different languages but nobody cares
@Dehydrated Darkness I wouldn’t say that the modern Czech language was built on the basis of Polish or Russian at all. It was built on dialect forms of Czech all over the Czech lands.
Thank you! I am German who's speaking a bit Russian and Czech.
Your video made it easier for me to read Polish. ⚒
Bitte sehr! Ich spreche auch Deutsch und ich möchte ein Video über diese wunderbare Sprache machen.
I from poland and it was very funny video but you can clearly talking in polish. Great work!
As a Czech, I naturaly the best understand Czech.
My understanding of Slovak is very good too, since they use the same system as us, but de, te, ne is read softly as dě, tě, ně and Slovaks has a lot different (from Czech PoW often funny) words for the same thing. Polish is harder. One can understand 60+% of words, but there is a lot of "false friends" - same sounding words with different meaning. Also polish reading is complicated by their digraphs (spřežky - lit. letters joined together).
That's why I think the Czech is the least difficult to read from Western Slavic language group - it is spoken as it reads, almost no digraphs and without much of need to remember grammar rules to read it. There is only one really important one when writing - a subject matches the predicate, when deciding whether to write i/y.
As a russian speaker I find it easier to read Czech but I think I understand Polish more, maybe because I had more exposure to it, since I have many Polish friends and not a single Czech :(